Waterwise drama in Lakemoore Drive Garden: Austin Open Days Tour 2017
November 20, 2017 Continuing my coverage of the November 4th Open Days tour, today I give you the Lakemoore Drive Garden. Regular readers may recognize this garden as one I blogged about, rapturously, in 2013. The outer garden, a sun-loving gravel garden with evergreen xeric plants like agave, yucca, prickly ...
Easy outdoor living in garden of designer B. Jane: Austin Open Days Tour 2017
November 15, 2017 For a refreshing contemporary design with fun colors and a restrained palette of tough-as-nails native plants, designer B. Jane‘s garden is the place to hang out. Her personal garden in Austin’s Brentwood neighborhood was featured on the Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tour a couple of weeks ago ...
Garden rooms and green roof at Cloverleaf Drive Garden: Austin Open Days Tour 2017
November 13, 2017 This year’s Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tour in Austin featured gardens in a variety of styles and a variety of neighborhoods (not just West Austin). I especially enjoyed exploring the Cloverleaf Drive garden, which, along with Jackson Broussard’s, is located east of I-35 in a “regular-folks” neighborhood ...
Garden of Jackson Broussard: Austin Open Days Tour 2017
November 10, 2017 For landscape architect Jackson Broussard, you really can go home again. He was raised in this modest ranch house in east-central Austin, and after he took ownership he freshened up the house and leased it out and built himself a detached, two-story addition in the back yard ...
New foundation bed, sedge lawn update, and fall color
September 29, 2017 The front garden by the house has undergone some major changes since we lost a tree last winter. But after some summer angst as formerly shaded foundation shrubs burned up, and some fixes, I’m feeling good about it again. Here’s how it looked before, with the live ...
Two must-read books for succulent lovers: Succulents and Designing with Succulents
September 20, 2017 All you succulent junkies, listen up. If you love succulents or want to learn how to grow them, two newly released books by succulent-gardening trailblazers Debra Lee Baldwin and Robin Stockwell need to be at the top of your must-read list. Let’s start with Designing with Succulents ...
A narrow side yard lives large in the garden of Rebecca Sams and Buell Steelman
September 08, 2017 I don’t think I planned a family road trip from San Francisco to Portland just to have an opportunity to swing through Eugene, Oregon, to visit the garden of Buell Steelman and Rebecca Sams, the husband-and-wife design-and-build team at Mosaic Gardens, whose work I greatly admire and ...
Edibles, outdoor living, and more at Sunset Gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma
August 21, 2017 While touring the Cornerstone Sonoma gardens in Sonoma, California, a couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed a two-fer. Sunset’s Test Gardens relocated to Cornerstone in 2016, and after a year of growth they’re already looking amazing. A glowing vertical garden of sempervivums, planted in the orange Sunset ...
Cornerstone Sonoma showcases conceptual gardens in scenic wine country
August 20, 2017 It wasn’t easy, but I finally visited the gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma in Northern California, which have been on my bucket list for years. Due to my own poor planning, I first missed them after the San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling, when I rented a car to ...
Garden Spark talk with Karen Chapman is an early sell-out
July 17, 2017 When I launched the Garden Spark talk series six months ago, I was sure there was an unmet need in Austin for people who wanted to hear top-notch designers and authors speak about garden design. So far I’ve brought in landscape architect James deGrey David and designer/author ...
Long views and classic garden rooms in Brinitzer Garden: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling
July 03, 2017 Much as I love my contemporary-naturalistic garden, and enjoyed puttering in my flowery cottage garden before that, my next garden — whenever and wherever that turns out to be — is going to be more like this one: smaller, with formal garden rooms laid out along axis ...
Look for my articles in Garden Design on Mosaic Gardens and Steve Martino desert garden
June 20, 2017 Do you take Garden Design magazine? I’m pleased to be a contributing writer, and in the Summer 2017 issue you’ll find two articles I wrote about gardens in Arizona and Oregon that couldn’t be more different. “Into the Arroyo” tells the story of an unlikely desert garden ...
Read This: Gardening with Foliage First
June 16, 2017 Today is Foliage Follow-Up, my monthly meme that encourages us to focus on often-underappreciated foliage plants, rather than spotlight-hogging flowers. That means it’s the perfect day to review a new book by two foliage-loving design experts, Karen Chapman and Christina Salwitz. Gardening with Foliage First: 127 Dazzling ...
Modern, easy-care garden of Austin designer B. Jane
May 22, 2017 I’ve long admired designer B. Jane‘s contemporary-style gardens here in Austin, including one I wrote about for Austin Home last year. Last week I visited B.’s personal garden in Central Austin’s Brentwood neighborhood and fell hard for her lawn-free, block-planted front yard. A straight walk of Lueders ...
Read This: 101 Organic Gardening Hacks, The Spirit of Stone, and The Cocktail Hour Garden
May 15, 2017 A raft of gardening books has piled up on my desk this spring. I’m tempted to lash the whole stack into a raft and paddle to a deserted island, where I’ll have time to read them all (if only that wouldn’t make them soggily unreadable). If you’re ...
Garden Dialogues with John Fairey at Peckerwood
May 08, 2017 Heading east through pine country toward Hempstead, Texas, I arrived after a couple of hours on the road at Peckerwood Garden last Saturday. The draw, aside from a chance to see this beautiful 45-year-old garden again, was to hear its creator, John Fairey, talk about it in ...
