Japanese Garden and garden art at Hillwood Estate: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling
July 18, 2017 I almost missed the Japanese Garden, my favorite part of Washington, D.C.’s Hillwood Estate. It was hot and muggy on the first full day of touring during last month’s Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling, and after exploring for about 45 minutes I retreated to the gift shop ...
Casa Mariposa, Virginia winery, & Merrifield Garden Center: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling
July 02, 2017 Casa Mariposa With a garden called Casa Mariposa, you know it’s going to be welcoming to butterflies — and, as it turns out, all pollinators. Tammy Schmitt, head planner of this year’s Garden Bloggers Fling, bravely included her suburban D.C.-area garden on the tour. I say bravely ...
Bald cypress creek, beer patios, & other comforts in Comfort, Texas
May 31, 2017 For our 27th wedding anniversary last weekend, my husband and I enjoyed a weekend away in Comfort, Texas, a tiny Hill Country town two hours southwest of Austin. After reading about the stylishly rustic charms of Camp Comfort in seemingly every regional magazine (Tribeza, Southern Living, Texas ...
Tropical cottage style in Diane and Tom Peace’s garden
April 22, 2017 Diane and Tom Peace of Lockhart, 30 miles south of Austin, live and garden in two very different regions: south-central Texas from winter through early spring, and Denver, Colorado, from late spring through fall. Tom, a grower and nurseryman, owns Texas Mountain Flora in Lockhart, operates a ...
Tony Thompson+Hanson garden shop comes to Austin
April 08, 2017 Seven years after the shuttering of Gardens, a boutique nursery and home-and-garden shop on W. 35th Street, Central Austin has a new contender for the high-end gardening market: Thompson+Hanson, an Austin branch of the longtime T+H in Houston’s River Oaks. Austin’s Thompson+Hanson is located just off W ...
Wildflower fields abloom at Wildseed Farms
March 24, 2017 A wildflower photo safari is my springtime ritual, and I especially like to drive out to the Texas Hill Country to photograph wildflowers against the rugged hills, rocks, and prickly pear. This spring, thanks to a mild winter, Texas bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) are carpeting roadsides a few ...
New galvanized wall planters hold succulent cuttings
March 03, 2017 Spring fever has hit! For me, that manifests as refreshing my many pots of succulents, some of which have been inside all winter, others huddled against the house, and others (too big to move) left to weather as they will. If they took a winter hit, I’m ...
Pre-spring nursery shopping
February 12, 2017 Stacked pots of pansies, ornamental cabbage, and other annuals at The Natural Gardener Even though the weather’s been terrific for gardening, I’ve been under the weather for about a week, keeping me from my annual late-winter cut-back of the garden. I really need to get that done ...
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 ...
Lucinda’s Dia de los Muertos garden
November 01, 2016 My friend Lucinda Hutson celebrates Dia de los Muertos like no one else I know. Her colorful, Mexican-inspired home and garden in the Rosedale neighborhood of central Austin grows even more vibrant for Day of the Dead, and inside she stages elaborate table displays and beautiful altars ...
Silobration at Magnolia Market and Fixer Upper fandom
October 12, 2016 Uninitiated into the world of Chip and Joanna Gaines and their HGTV show Fixer Upper because we don’t have cable TV, I’d nevertheless picked up an inkling of their popularity from fellow bloggers and multiple magazine features. So when we were in Waco last Saturday for one ...
Chasing Georgia O’Keeffe’s ghost at Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch
August 25, 2016 The day after gazing at Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscapes and monumental flower paintings at the museum in Santa Fe, we drove north through the monsoon-greened high desert of northern New Mexico, the landscape the artist adopted as her own. As soon as I saw it, that was my ...
Adobe walls, secret gardens, history & art in Santa Fe
August 24, 2016 Our western road trip earlier this month took us through Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the oldest cities in the U.S. and the oldest capital city in the country (dating to 1607). The compact historic district is a walkable several blocks of terracotta-colored adobe and adobe-style ...
Inspired at Squire House Gardens: Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling
July 31, 2016 Our tour buses took us out of Minneapolis on the last day of the recent Garden Bloggers Fling — an annual event with 60+ garden bloggers touring Minneapolis this year — through St. Paul and on into charming Afton, Minnesota, where we visited nursery and gift shop ...
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 ...
