Garden magic and whimsy at Floramagoria: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
August 13, 2014 As we entered the intriguingly named Floramagoria garden on the recent Portland Garden Bloggers Fling, thunder rumbled and raindrops pelted our group of 40 or so bloggers. The reasonable — and hungry — among us ran for the two covered pavilions with box lunches in hand. The ...
Splendor in the grass at Rhone Street Gardens: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
August 07, 2014 The 3rd and final day of touring on the recent Garden Bloggers Fling in Portland, Oregon, dawned cool and misty — exactly what Portland should be, at least according to heat-shunning me. After two days of unusual heat, I was thrilled, even when it started to thunder ...
Portland Japanese Garden: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
July 25, 2014 The second day of the 7th annual Garden Bloggers Fling, held in Portland in mid-July, began in the renowned Portland Japanese Garden, often described as the most authentic of its kind outside of Japan. I had visited a few days earlier with my husband on a hot, ...
Lan Su Chinese Garden: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
July 17, 2014 Austin and Portland, Oregon, are soul-sister cities, sharing a love of “weirdness,” food carts/trucks, huge independent bookstores, and tattoos, as I can attest from my recent visit. Austin and Portland also share a vibrant gardening culture and even the same hardiness zone (8b), although our climates couldn’t ...
Houston Open Days Tour 2014: Jungle safari at Del Monte Drive Garden
April 09, 2014 Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! On March 29, my friend Diana and I traveled to Houston for the Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tour. Del Monte Drive in the posh River Oaks neighborhood was home to two of the gardens, starting with a surprising “safari garden” ...
Drive-By Gardens: Aloes abloom in modern dry garden of Karen Lantz
April 03, 2014 ‘Blue Elf’ aloes, purple prickly pear, gold sedum, and smooth sotol and silver ponyfoot in the steel ring, with an Opuntia “tree” behind I’m hearing from many of you how much you enjoy my Drive-By Gardens posts, and so I’m pleased to offer a third this week ...
Zoom out, zoom in for Foliage Follow-Up
March 16, 2014 Hey, all you leaf lovers! Today is Foliage Follow-Up, and I had fun with my zoom lens in two foliage-driven sections of my garden. Oh, who am I kidding? All of my garden is foliage-driven. Sometimes I regret not having a big, seasonal flower display, but I’m ...
First screech owl of the season
February 21, 2014 While planting in the back garden yesterday, I looked up into the trees above the back fence, as I always do, to see if I could spot an owl. What a surprise to see this little screech staring right back at me. He or she was probably ...
Gorgeous gravel garden outshines former lawn in Lakewood garden
October 29, 2013 Whenever landscape architect Curt Arnette of Sitio Design invites me to see one of his gardens, I say, “I’ll be right there!” Last Saturday we toured a 1-year-old garden in the Lakewood neighborhood of West Austin that he designed and that his cousin John Gibson (of Gibson ...
Drive-By Gardens: Woodsy cottage garden with no lawn
October 08, 2013 This tomato-red home in central Austin’s Bryker Woods neighborhood has the fairy-tale charm of a woodcutter’s cottage, tucked amid a veritable forest of small trees. Whether these were saved from the previous landscaping or planted by a tree-collecting owner, the effect is that the house appears to ...
Seeing red: It’s oxblood lily time!
September 26, 2013 Yesterday morning I saw that the oxblood lilies (Rhodophiala bifida) in the back garden were going to be in full bloom once the sun rose. But I was out all day long with client meetings, after-school driving to a volleyball game, and dinner. Finally at 7:15 pm, ...
Wide Shot of the front garden, September 2013
September 05, 2013 Jumping on board a few days late with Heather’s new meme at Xericstyle — “Wide Shot,” for posting on the first of the month — I went out at high noon to take a few wide-angle snaps of the front garden. Although midday is not the best ...
Sculpture and found objects mingle in Marcia Donahue’s garden
August 13, 2013 Peering from the shadows of an exuberant, densely planted front yard, artist Marcia Donahue’s turbaned and hooded figures — exotic wood sprites? — give a sense of mystery to her Berkeley, California, garden. On July 1st, the day after the San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling ended, I ...
The vertical hillside garden of Matt Gil: San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling
July 14, 2013 As the Garden Bloggers Fling in San Francisco officially kicked off on June 28, two buses full of about 75 bloggers split up, navigating the city’s challenging hills separately so that the small gardens we visited could better accommodate us. My bus headed for sculptor Matt Gil‘s ...
Water-saving, no-lawn garden of Cyndi Kohfield
June 21, 2013 When Cyndi Kohfield and her husband bought their northwest Austin home in late 2010, they inherited a tidy front yard of lawn accented by swaths of Asian jasmine and a couple of large sago palms. As she noted in a before-and-after post on her garden blog, Growing ...
Potted plants and stripey leaves for Foliage Follow-Up
June 16, 2013 It’s so simple, but I really enjoy this collection of potted plants on my back steps. I can see them from my bedroom and living room windows, and they’re a focal point when sitting outside on the upper patio. I just chose single plants to pot up ...
