Foliage in full spring swing: May Foliage Follow-Up
May 16, 2016 The day after Bloom Day is Foliage Follow-Up, a day to give foliage plants their due. This month I’m leading with the fresh spring greens of ornamental grasses, like shade-loving inland sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium). Their “oats” are just forming, and by mid-summer will turn from apple ...
Dry-garden lushness: Linda Peterson’s San Antonio garden
April 18, 2016 Rooftop view of the walled courtyard and front garden. Not a blade of lawn grass anywhere, nor is it missed. Seeing one of my new favorite gardens requires an hour-and-a-half road trip to San Antonio, but it’s worth every trafficky mile. Linda Peterson, whose dreamy garden I ...
Palms and dinosaurs at McKee Botanical Garden
April 06, 2016 Two weeks ago, in mid-March, the family and I drove to Orlando for spring break. Before heading home, we stopped in Vero Beach, Florida, for a day at the shore and to visit McKee Botanical Garden. Yes, those are dinosaurs in the garden. Roar of the Dinosaur, ...
Orange you glad it’s spring?
March 08, 2016 The weather’s not yet hot, but the flowers are. I’m embracing orange and reveling in the saturation. Thanks to an unusual, freeze-free winter, the garden has a jump-start on lush growth. Mexican honeysuckle (Justicia spicigera) is smothered in pumpkin-colored blossoms, framed by Mexican weeping bamboo (Otatea acuminata ...
Drive-By Gardens: Xeriscapes taking off at Mueller neighborhood
January 08, 2016 On New Year’s Day, we took a stroll through Mueller neighborhood, a New Urban community in east-central Austin. Built on the site of the old airport, where acres of runways and parking lots once sprawled, attractive homes and row houses in a mix of different styles (no ...
Evening photo shoot at The Huntington Gardens: GWA Pasadena
October 29, 2015 The Huntington gardens near Los Angeles have, for years, been on my wish list of botanical gardens to visit. So I was thrilled to see an afternoon visit and after-hours photoshoot offered on the itinerary of the Garden Writers Association symposium on September 20. Unfortunately, it was ...
Colorful LA garden of Potted maven Annette Gutierrez
September 25, 2015 I was in Los Angeles/Pasadena last weekend for the annual Garden Writers Association symposium, and boy oh boy, do I have some cool gardens to show you! Not all were on the GWA tours, which were limited to 3 private gardens and one public garden (the fabulous ...
Sedgey evergreen garden of Pat Mozersky for Foliage Follow-Up
September 16, 2015 Austin designer Mark Word (see my profile about him) designed this serene, green San Antonio garden that you can see on the upcoming Watersaver Landscape Tour on October 24. I got a preview last Friday thanks to Shirley of Rock-Oak-Deer. The garden belongs to Pat Mozersky, the ...
Tough August survivors for Foliage Follow-Up
August 16, 2015 Mexican honeysuckle adds leafy lushness in the dappled shade of live oaks and is flowering to boot. Its companions include Mexican weeping bamboo, Agave colorata, foxtail fern, and Pennisetum purpureum ‘Vertigo’. These are “the bitter days in the garden,” according to West Texan Susan Tomlinson, who blogs ...
Lively formality in the garden of Deborah Hornickel
July 06, 2015 If you admired the beautiful details of James David’s grand Rollingwood garden, which I had the privilege of visiting last spring, you may have wondered what a smaller, more economically built garden of his might look like. And I’m here to show you, thanks to James’s longtime ...
Garden is But-A-Dream on Algonquin Island: Toronto Garden Blogger Fling
June 24, 2015 While exploring the Toronto Islands (click for an overview tour) during Toronto Garden Bloggers Fling, I happened upon a cheery yellow cottage near the Algonquin Island harbor. Adorned with a black unicorn and a sign proclaiming the garden’s name — But-a-Dream — it was irresistibly charming. You ...
Before and after: 6 years making a garden
May 25, 2015 Bluesy garden: our upper patio, just off the living room and master bedroom It’s always eye-opening to see how much a garden has evolved by comparing before and after images. We moved into our current home in October 2008, and I started tinkering with a few beds ...
Evergreens, color, and hardscape carry garden through winter into spring
March 11, 2015 A recent conversation on Linda Lehmusvirta‘s Facebook page got a few Austin gardeners talking about winter interest. Tracie, a local gardener, wrote that her mostly native garden looks great spring through fall but is “asleep” in winter, and she wanted ideas. Lori at The Gardener of Good ...
New year in green and gold: January Foliage Follow-Up
January 16, 2015 It’s a new year in the garden, and I haven’t really been out in it for a while. An unusually long stretch of cold, gray days had me feeling like I was in Seattle, and let me tell you, it made me feel pretty gray myself. But ...
Trying Duranta ‘Sapphire Showers’ for end-of-summer color
September 14, 2014 My late-summer garden was feeling kind of puny to me last week — before we got the November-worthy cold front yesterday that dropped Austin’s high temperature to 65 incredible-freaking degrees and brought 1-1/4 inches of rain to my garden!! Sorry, I digress. Before that blessed weather event ...
Succulent and cactus container garden thrives under Death Star: August Foliage Follow-Up
August 16, 2014 Two months ago I acquired another steel pipe remnant and set it in the gravel garden by the front door. There it sat empty for nearly 8 weeks as I traveled and debated what to plant in it. Finally, taking my own advice not to plant anything ...
