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 ...
Drive-By Gardens: No-lawn front yard with sedge groundcover
December 07, 2014 Driving through Austin’s North University neighborhood yesterday I spotted this charming Spanish-style bungalow. Instead of lawn, its postage stamp-sized front garden is filled with drought-tolerant ornamental grasses, golden barrel cactus, silver ponyfoot, and agave. A few red roses add pops of vivid color. Most eye-catching of all, ...
Drive-By Gardens: South Congress Avenue in Austin
November 24, 2014 This drive-by is really a walk-by. I was on South Congress Avenue on Sunday afternoon, the center of the funky-hip Austin universe, enjoying a blue-sky, 80-degree day with my family. Fall, winter, and spring days like this are what sustain me through Austin’s broiling summers. When my ...
Steel walls and soft grasses in travel-influenced Mirador Garden
November 04, 2014 A week ago I had the opportunity to photograph another of landscape architect Curt Arnette‘s gardens. Frothy, rose-colored clouds of Gulf muhly, tawny spikes of Lindheimer muhly, and a chartreuse Habiturf lawn wrap the large front garden in a cozy quilt of softness that counterbalances the flat ...
Heather’s Xericstyle garden in San Antonio
October 27, 2014 Last week I roadtripped south with a few friends to see the gardens of our San Antonio blogger friends, Heather Ginsburg of Xericstyle and Shirley Fox of Rock-Oak-Deer, plus Shirley’s neighbor and gardening friend Melody. I posted about Shirley’s garden here. Today I’ll show you Heather’s garden ...
Nonirrigated native plant garden of Lee Clippard is a foliage lover’s dream
October 16, 2014 Earlier this month I visited the East Austin garden of Lee Clippard, blogger at The Grackle, and his partner, John. The first fall rains had just arrived, following a relatively mild summer, so their foliage-centric garden of native plants was looking lush and green. I’d never have ...
Fall blooms in front, construction in back
September 23, 2014 Kicking summer to the curb always feels satisfying in central Texas, especially when fall’s arrival is not just a date on the calendar but marked by cooler, drier air and rain. Between Wednesday night and Friday morning of last week, my garden received at least 8 inches ...
Mid-century house inspires Palm Springs-style garden in Austin
September 01, 2014 Charlotte Warren, a photographer and former co-chair of the local Garden Conservancy tour, inherited a steeply sloping, west-facing zoysia lawn when she moved into her home in the hills of West Austin. Aside from requiring lots of water and regular mowing, the lawn offered zero privacy for ...
The artful Fuller Garden: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
August 08, 2014 We were treated to two gardens for the price of one on the 3rd day of the Portland Garden Bloggers Fling last month. Friends, gardeners, and art collectors Joanne Fuller and Linda Ernst live next door to each other in a charming older neighborhood, with a friendly ...
Checking out Chickadee Gardens: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
August 03, 2014 The Garden Bloggers Fling takes you to so many wonderful gardens that it would be understandable if you simply overloaded by the end of the day, unable to appreciate one more. Thankfully I find new gardens energizing, and when our bus pulled up at Portland blogger Tamara’s ...
JJ De Sousa’s bold garden digs: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
July 31, 2014 What’s black and white and red-orange all over? The stylishly mod yet playful garden of JJ De Sousa, that’s what. Owner of Digs Inside & Out home-and-garden shop, which I visited pre-Fling, JJ has an enviable talent for creating inviting, colorful garden rooms, perfect for entertaining, which ...
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, ...
Old Germantown Gardens: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
July 20, 2014 The first private garden on the Portland Garden Bloggers Fling tour last weekend was, at 2 acres, large enough to accommodate our entire group of approximately 80 bloggers. Old Germantown Gardens, created over 23 years by Bruce Wakefield and Jerry Grossnickle, is a masterpiece of a garden ...
Joy Creek and Cistus Nurseries: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
July 19, 2014 After touring Lan Su Chinese Garden in downtown Portland, the two Fling buses headed out to scenic, agricultural Sauvie Island for our visits to two premier nurseries: Cistus and Joy Creek. Cistus is a plant lover’s mecca, with rare and interesting plants from all over the world, ...
Drive-By Gardens: Lawn-gone curb appeal in Crestview, Brentwood and Allandale
June 27, 2014 Driving through the north-central Austin neighborhoods of Allandale, Brentwood, and Crestview yesterday, I noticed a number of face-lifted ranches and bungalows, freshened up with paint and/or reasonably sized additions and eye-catching, lawn-reducing landscaping. Let’s start this Drive-By with a charming, painted-brick ranch with a lime-green screen and ...
Sedge lawn update, 1 year later
June 13, 2014 It’s time for an update and assessment on the Berkeley sedge (Carex divulsa) “lawn” I installed in my front garden a year ago, in March 2013. (Click the link for my how-to.) Seven months after planting I posted an update, noting that certain areas had filled in ...
