Fences

May 19, 2018 This is the bloom-spikiest spring I can remember in Austin. All over town, agaves, sotols, aloes, hesperaloes, mangaves, manfredas, and yuccas are sending up flowering wands or blooming candelabras. My own garden is no exception, but the spikes I’m most excited by are towering over two Texas ...

May 16, 2018 I’ve been after my friend Curt Arnette, landscape-architect owner of Sitio Design, to open his personal garden on tour for years. But because he likes to change things up at home (plus being busy with his work projects), he’s always said it wasn’t ready. Persistence pays off, ...

April 16, 2018 Today is Foliage Follow-Up, a celebration of great foliage plants on the day after Bloom Day, and I’m celebrating the return to nurseries all over Austin of one of my favorite foliage plants for dry shade or morning sun: ‘Sparkler’ sedge (Carex phyllocephala ‘Sparkler’). For the past ...

March 16, 2018 Spring looks a lot like fall in my garden, as this photo shows: fresh green leaves surrounded by brown live oak leaves. Live oaks stay green all winter, like an evergreen tree, but come spring they do actually drop their leaves and swiftly leaf out again. Casting ...

March 02, 2018 ‘Sizzling Pink’ loropetalum is still sizzling in the lower garden and knocking my socks off every time I look at it. Yesterday the sun was lighting up those fuchsia blooms like a stained-glass window. The fringey flowers look like the pom-poms of a thousand cheerleaders. So colorful! ...

February 27, 2018 Just when I’d begun to stomp around, impatient for a little spring color in my shady garden (no daffodils, no quince, no plums, darn it!), Chinese fringeflower (Loropetalum chinense) burst into fuchsia bloom and saved the day. Hallelujah! Throughout my garden (even out front; deer don’t eat ...

February 22, 2018 A balmy breeze smelling of spring convinced me to move my cold-tender potted succulents back out into the garden over the weekend. It’s so nice to see them gracing a plant table on the deck again, after several months in which they sat packed in a wagon ...

December 06, 2017 For one West Austin homeowner, this is the view from her front door: an undulating, rhythmic front walk of poured-concrete pavers wending through a meadowy swath of Berkeley sedge, soap aloes, and purple heart, with a scrim of yaupon hollies shielding the view of the street. A ...

November 28, 2017 Exciting developments around here. For one, we had our old, hail-beaten roof replaced, and not only does the new roof completely freshen up our home, but the workers took great care not to damage the garden in the process. If you’re in the Austin area and need ...

November 27, 2017 A month ago I visited a Rollingwood garden designed by landscape architect Curt Arnette of Sitio Design. It’s owned by the architect of the contemporary Hill Country-style home, Duke Garwood, whom I also had the pleasure of meeting. Let’s start in back, where a limestone patio bordered ...

November 25, 2017 The final garden from the Austin Open Days Tour earlier this month is landscape architect Tait Moring‘s personal garden, which perches on a canyon’s rim just off Bee Caves Road. His entry garden is an appealing mix of formality (boxwood hedging, geometric raised pond, fig ivy neatly ...

November 22, 2017 The talented Annie Gillespie of Botanical Concerns designed the water-saving garden at Ridgewood Road, the next garden in my recap of Austin’s recent Open Days Tour. From the street you’re invited to stroll through a low-water garden of oaks, grasses, agave, and yucca to reach the house ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

October 27, 2017 Autumn is my favorite season in the garden, when the Death Star abates and cool breezes blow in from the north, pushing that Gulf Coast humidity back to Houston where it belongs. The sky goes china blue, fall perennials burst into bloom, and fall-blooming grasses incandesce in ...