Final fall foliage as winter’s icy breath freezes Austin
December 18, 2016 Austin plummeted from a high of 80 F (26.6 C) yesterday afternoon to 26 F (-3.3 C) this morning, and today the Japanese maple is clinging shiveringly to far fewer leaves than yesterday, when I took this photo. That’s Texas winter weather for you. In preparation for ...
Mellow fall garden for November Foliage Follow-Up
November 16, 2016 Today is Foliage Follow-Up, a day to celebrate great foliage after the flower celebration of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Let’s take a spin around the back garden for my foliage faves this month, starting with the stock-tank pond garden. No flowers here since the water lilies slowed ...
Roses, butterflies & garden goodness at Antique Rose Emporium
November 08, 2016 On Saturday my mom and I drove out to Brenham, Texas, for the Antique Rose Emporium‘s Fall Festival of Roses, where I was one of the day’s speakers. A gray sky spit rain on us during the 2-hour drive, but it held off as we strolled around ...
Roses, butterflies & garden goodness at Antique Rose Emporium
November 08, 2016 On Saturday my mom and I drove out to Brenham, Texas, for the Antique Rose Emporium‘s Fall Festival of Roses, where I was one of the day’s speakers. A gray sky spit rain on us during the 2-hour drive, but it held off as we strolled around ...
Catch me on CTG, at Wildflower Center book-signing & more!
October 13, 2016 It’s back-to-the-garden time in Texas, and it’s also garden-talk season! I’m making a few appearances around Texas this fall (see below), and you can also catch me this weekend on Austin’s own Central Texas Gardener TV show. Last fall, right before my garden was on tour, CTG ...
Catch me on CTG, at Wildflower Center book-signing & more!
October 13, 2016 It’s back-to-the-garden time in Texas, and it’s also garden-talk season! I’m making a few appearances around Texas this fall (see below), and you can also catch me this weekend on Austin’s own Central Texas Gardener TV show. Last fall, right before my garden was on tour, CTG ...
Around the stock-tank pond
September 23, 2016 Despite the heat (which may be coming to an end this weekend — yay!), I’ve been working in the garden nearly every day this week, doing the usual end-of-summer tidying plus cleaning up Moby’s old bed and potting up all his bulbils. It’s given me plenty of ...
Magical mosaics in the garden of Wouterina De Raad, Part 2: Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling
August 05, 2016 Yesterday I shared Part 1 of my visit to Wisconsin artist Wouterina De Raad’s mosaic sculpture garden, which was the final garden — and my favorite — on the recent Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling. Today I’ll end my Fling series with Part 2 about Wouterina‘s delightful, exploratory ...
Garden artistry at Wouterina De Raad’s Mosaic Sculpture Park, Part 1: Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling
August 04, 2016 Each year at Garden Bloggers Fling, there’s at least one garden that moves me deeply, that creates a lasting mood and feels like an extension of the gardener him- or herself. At this year’s Fling in Minneapolis, that garden was the creation of Wouterina De Raad. (As ...
I went to the woods and saw Walden Road Garden: Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling
July 28, 2016 When you live on Walden Road and you’re creating a garden, you can do a lot worse than take inspiration from Thoreau. This woodsy, serene garden was on the Master Gardeners tour that we saw on day two of the Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling, held earlier this ...
Visiting Layanee’s ledge and garden in Rhode Island
July 21, 2016 Wherever I travel these days, I seem to know a garden blogger who lives there. That’s partly because I’ve been blogging and reading blogs for a decade and partly because I’ve gotten to know lots of bloggers in person through years of attending the annual Garden Bloggers ...
Touring Linden Hill Gardens with Nan Ondra
July 20, 2016 I’ve been reading author and plantswoman Nancy Ondra’s blog, Hayefield, for nearly a decade. Although we’d never met, we’ve been friendly online. After all, she donated one of her books as a door prize for the first Garden Bloggers Fling in Austin in 2008, I’ve written about ...
Chanticleer’s Flower and Vegetable Garden and magical Bell’s Woodland
July 12, 2016 During our full day at Chanticleer Garden in the Philadelphia area last month, Diana and I left for lunch around 1:30 pm and returned two hours later with full bellies plus a picnic dinner stashed in our bags. On Friday nights in the summer, the garden stays ...
Garden marries home at destination nursery/garden shop Terrain
June 20, 2016 Anthropologie meets Flora Grubb Gardens? Yes, please! While in the Brandywine Valley outside of Philadelphia earlier this month, I was eager to visit Terrain, a nursery, home and garden shop, and restaurant located in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. (There’s a second location in Westport, Connecticut.) Founded by the ...
May flowers from A (agave) to V (vitex)
May 27, 2016 As the days fly toward summer, the daylilies are showing off their lovely throats… …and blushing, ruffled petals. Here’s ‘Best of Friends’. The first ‘Apple Tart’ smolders among the white-striped flax lilies. Stretching on long stems like giraffe necks, ‘Wilson’s Yellow’ daylily stands tall amid grasses and ...
Where there’s a whale, there’s a way
April 29, 2016 Moby, my 10-year-old whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia), which for 22 days has been sending a bloom stalk skyward, seems to be in transition. The stalk is now about 10 or 11 feet tall and holding. Meanwhile, clusters of yellow flowers are emerging along the asparagus-shaped stalk ...
