Read This: The Complete Kitchen Garden
February 25, 2011 After writing my Garden Designers Roundtable post about vegetable garden design, I picked up a book recently sent to me for review: The Complete Kitchen Garden: An Inspired Collection of Garden Designs & 100 Seasonal Recipes by Ellen Ecker Ogden, a Vermont gardener, author, and cofounder of ...
Book Review & Giveaway: Sugar Snaps and Strawberries
January 24, 2011 Like a rebel without a cause, I continue to resist growing edibles despite the current fad and inspiring examples of fellow gardeners and bloggers who savor their homegrown fruits and vegetables. Sure, I stick a basil plant in the ground each spring and harvest the leaves all ...
Read This: The American Meadow Garden
January 22, 2011 In this age of lawn bashing, let me say this: I am not anti-lawn. Lawn is useful for picnicking, playing sports, throwing a ball for the dog, sunbathing, and providing a restful bit of green amid a garden. A lawn of needed size, maintained without dumping chemicals ...
Garden books to curl up with: 6 mini-reviews
November 18, 2010Looking for garden books to add to your wish list for Christmas? Here are five I read this year and recommend for information and/or inspiration. New Garden Design: Inspiring Private Paradises by Zahid Sardar, photographs by Marion Brenner (2008). This is a big, coffee-table sized gardening book, full ...
Read This: So You Want to Be a Garden Designer
June 29, 2010 Garden design is often a mid-life-change, follow-your-heart career choice. At least it was for me and for a number of accomplished designers I’ve come to know. I graduated from college with a degree in English and landed my first job in publishing, as an assistant editor at ...
Read This: Succulent Container Gardens
April 13, 2010 It’s the perfect time of year to refresh your container plantings or create new ones. Here in Austin, where long, sweltering summers are the norm, I’ve learned to plant only succulents or cacti in my containers in order to avoid being a slave to the hose all ...
Book Review: Fearless Color Gardens
January 27, 2010 San Francisco Bay-area artist and garden designer Keeyla Meadows offers playful, step-by-step guidelines to making colorful gardens in her new book Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener’s Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel. Illustrating her ideas with dozens of images from her own vibrant garden, Meadows ...
Read This: The New Low-Maintenance Garden
November 12, 2009 The New Low-Maintenance Garden: How to Have a Beautiful, Productive Garden and the Time to Enjoy It, by Valerie Easton, photography by Jacqueline M. Koch (2009) Plant lovers may reject Valerie Easton’s very premise: that you can have a low-maintenance garden by making a “non-plant-centered garden,” one ...
Book review & giveaway: The Perennial Care Manual
August 24, 2009 New gardeners will find The Perennial Care Manual, Nancy Ondra’s latest collaboration with photographer Rob Cardillo, to be an essential reference. Everything you need to know about planning, planting, and caring for a perennial garden is here. In Part 1, titled “Perennial Care Basics,” Ondra explains in ...
Read This: Designing with Succulents
August 08, 2009 When the Death Star trains its energy-sapping, plant-frying beam on central Texas each summer, I find inspiration in succulent gardens, which use heat-loving, water-thrifty agaves, aloes, cacti, and groundcover succulents to create a tapestry of colorful foliage. This summer I’ve been devouring the images and design ideas ...
Read This: The Hot Garden
April 14, 2009 “Get your desert eyes on,” Scott Calhoun urges in his new book The Hot Garden. In other words, see and appreciate the natural beauty of a country that is not lush, leafy, or green and that relies on rock and open space as much as plants for ...
Read This: Home Outside and Sunset Design Guides
April 06, 2009 As springtime sends you racing out into your yard, eager to create the garden you’ve been dreaming of all winter, publishers are releasing new design books seemingly daily to inspire, to educate, and to demystify the process. One of these is Julie Moir Messervy’s Home Outside: Creating ...
Native and Adapted Landscape Plants: An Austin gardening resource
February 20, 2009 For everyone who has moved to central Texas from more-hospitable gardening climates, who has tried (as I did) to plant azaleas, hostas, or dogwoods because that’s what reminds them of home, and who thinks, “Hey, look! This Austin nursery sells this plant, so it must grow well ...
Read This: Designer Plant Combinations
January 19, 2009 Soon enough daffodils, bluebonnets, and columbines will brighten our awakening gardens. Awakened ourselves to the joy of spring, we’ll throng to the nursery and snap up bedding plants and newly introduced perennials willy-nilly, bringing them home and plopping them in wherever we can find an open spot ...
Book review: Plant-Driven Design
November 29, 2008 In a garden-design class I attended not long after moving to Austin, the speaker showed slide after slide of lush English gardens to illustrate design principles. I understood the value of studying these magnificent gardens, but I questioned whether the style could be truly reinterpreted here in ...
Dirty hands & a passion for gardening
July 28, 2008 My hands (and feet) are often dirty, and I definitely have a “passion for gardening,” the subtitle of this month’s Garden Bloggers Book Club selection. So I got my grubby mitts on a copy of fellow Austinite Robin Chotzinoff‘s 1996 book People with Dirty Hands and read ...
