Mementoes and memories in the garden of Rebecca Sweet: San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling
July 24, 2013 Our 4th stop on the 2nd day of the San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling was the Los Altos garden of designer, author, and blogger Rebecca Sweet. I’ve admired her garden not only on her blog, Gossip in the Garden, but in magazines like Sunset, so I already ...
Gardens on Tour 2013: Highland Terrace West Garden
May 15, 2013 I used to walk by this house every day while picking up my son from kindergarten, and each time I’d gape at the lush, shade garden fronting the charming cottage with the welcoming front porch, wondering what the rest of the place looked like. Twelve years later, ...
Whimsical Westview Road garden on Austin’s Funky Chicken Coop Tour
March 31, 2013 No, I’m not looking for a Mildred or Louise to eat bugs and lay eggs in my garden. But I couldn’t resist buying a ticket to Austin’s 5th annual Funky Chicken Coop Tour after watching a recent Central Texas Gardener episode (below) about Dani and Gary Moss’s ...
How to green up your winter garden in central Texas
January 17, 2013 Texas dwarf palmetto (Sabal minor), foxtail fern (Asparagus densiflorus ‘Meyersii’), heartleaf skullcap (Scutellaria ovata), sparkler sedge (Carex phyllocephala ‘Sparkler’), and bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa) add plenty of greenery to the winter garden. Audrey, a regular reader of Digging, recently asked me how to plant for winter greenery, ...
Yummy yuccas for Foliage Follow Up
January 16, 2013 A big agave will suck up all the attention in the room, so to speak, but I say don’t overlook the more demure but equally beautiful yucca. Just look at this blue Koosh-ball of a plant, for example. Yucca rostrata ‘Sapphire Skies’ is elegant, architectural, and colorful, ...
Seeing the garden anew through a photograph
January 01, 2013 I included this photo in my upcoming book, Lawn Gone!, to illustrate how a simple water feature like a stock-tank pond can be used in place of lawn. This is the main focal point of my back garden, formerly a nondescript swath of St. Augustine. My 16-year-old ...
Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Garden of Jennifer and Fred Myers
November 04, 2012 On Saturday I joined several garden-blogging friends for the biennial Open Days tour, sponsored by the Garden Conservancy. I consider Open Days to be the best garden tour in Austin. You often see high-design gardens mingled with a gardener’s sensibility and creative, personal touches. This year’s Open ...
Inside Austin Gardens Tour 2012: Carolyn and Michael Williams Garden
October 14, 2012 The final garden I’ll show you on this sneak preview of the upcoming Inside Austin Gardens Tour, hosted by the Travis County Master Gardeners, is an inviting, lovely garden with a picture-perfect garden house, set in the hills above Lake Austin. This flagstone-and-gravel path leads along the ...
Support Your Independent Nursery: The Natural Gardener GIVEAWAY
October 01, 2012Buddha says, Support your local nurseries. Each week in October, which is Support Your Independent Nursery Month, I am featuring one of my favorite Austin-area nurseries here at Digging. To make things even more interesting, I’m also hosting a giveaway every week—one from each nursery! This week I’m ...
Oreo cows, goats & gardens at Fearrington Village, Pittsboro, NC
August 21, 2012 My dad lives in Fearrington Village, a planned community of mostly retirees outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It’s a lovely community of 2,000, built on wooded, rolling hills, anchored by an English-style village square with a few shops, an independent bookstore (sadly lacking in garden titles, ...
Ponds and patios are made for lazy summer days
August 09, 2012 OK, so my days haven’t been too lazy. I have been working on my book, after all. But as summer winds down (by the school calendar, not by any actual cooling from the 100sF), I’ve given myself the gift of some unscheduled leisure time so that I ...
Garden Designers Roundtable: Contrast textures to make a good garden better
June 26, 2012 Even the smallest vignettes benefit from strong contrasts of texture. Take this tabletop display, for example. The slick zinc tabletop contrasts with a nubby lace doily, and the spiny cactus contrasts with the smooth, ceramic pot. If you use design techniques to bring greater interest to your ...
Plumbing pipe fountain adds life to stock-tank pond
June 05, 2012 A big shout-out and thank you to my handy husband, who created this plumbing-pipe-and-spigot fountain for me for Mother’s Day. I’d come home from a visit to my friend Cat’s garden in love with the look after seeing one that she and her husband made for their ...
Asheville Garden Bloggers Fling: Gentling Garden, a mountainside eden
May 23, 2012 The first thing you learn about gardens in Asheville, North Carolina, on the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is that they have a lot of stairs. We’re talking serious elevation changes. What does this mean for the gardeners who live here? Well, for one thing they ...
Garden Designers Roundtable: Our Home Gardens
May 21, 2012 Regular readers know that I often post about my own garden projects and my garden’s evolution. Heck, when I started blogging 6 years ago, that was the whole point. Today I have a good excuse for posting home-garden pics because it’s this month’s topic for Garden Designers ...
Margaritaville yucca in culvert pipe planter & my winter garden
January 21, 2012 Doesn’t everyone want to go to Margaritaville in the winter? I do, so I planted a Yucca recurvifolia ‘Margaritaville’ in a tall culvert pipe I’ve been hoarding for several months, waiting for inspiration to hit. Now it adds height to the drop-off bed behind the pool, next ...
