Modern ranch garden embraces water collection and wildflowers in New Braunfels
May 17, 2021 Last spring Cody and Michelle Koehler finished their garden installation at their home in New Braunfels, Texas. Less than a year later, February’s epic freeze killed most of their large specimen plants, including Weber agaves, olive and palo verde trees, and toothless sotol. Like everyone else in ...
Bluebonnet safari in Round Top and Brenham
April 16, 2021 I kept hearing that bluebonnets were a bit of a no-show in Central Texas this year due to a dry fall and winter, not because of the February freeze. Friends who’d gone west into the Hill Country looking for denim-blue fields came back disappointed, and my own ...
Texas wildflowers in Easter egg colors
April 04, 2021 Happy Easter to all who celebrate! In lieu of bunnies or lilies, allow me to regale you with Easter egg-colored wildflowers from a recent drive southeast of San Antonio, about 2 hours south of Austin. While this isn’t a banner year for Texas wildflowers — perhaps due ...
Early spring blooms and Athena the owl at Wildflower Center
March 20, 2021 When they’re offered, I take advantage of late-admission hours to gardens. The light is better for photography in the early evening, and you have a better chance of seeing wildlife. On Thursday our local native-plant botanical garden, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, stayed open late, and ...
Bigtooth maples and more fall foliage at the Wildflower Center, part 2
November 19, 2020 Did a few bigtooth maples from Lost Maples Park lose their way and end up at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center? It sure looked that way last week, when I spotted pumpkin-spice trees in the Family Garden. This is part 2 of my tour. Big, colorful ...
Colorful fall foliage at the Wildflower Center, part 1
November 17, 2020 Fall pounced on Austin quickly this year, then retreated for nearly a month, and then dashed back in, ushering in a brief flare of color. We’d planned to visit Lost Maples this month in hopes of seeing the bigtooth maples flaming red and orange, but we missed ...
Native Texas Park: Rediscovering a lost prairie at George W. Bush Presidential Library
October 23, 2020 Blackland prairie, a sash of Texas grassland across the center of the state, running southwest from the Oklahoma border to San Antonio, is the most endangered ecosystem in the U.S., with less than 1% remaining, according to Austin environmental designer John Hart Asher in a Wildflower article ...
Michael McDowell’s front-yard prairie garden
October 16, 2020 How can it have been 9 years since I first visited Michael McDowell’s front-yard prairie garden? Michael’s garden lives large in my memory, alight with morning sunlight and festive fall color (click for my 2011 tour), and it inspires daily via his blog Plano Prairie Garden and ...
Wildflowers and wildlife in Yosemite meadow
July 21, 2020 Milkweed and a monarch butterfly in Cook’s Meadow While the sheer cliffs and towering waterfalls of Yosemite National Park tend to get all the attention, Cook’s Meadow in the valley is also beautiful. During our June visit (click here for how we pulled off our socially distanced ...
Earthshaking thrills at Yosemite’s Half Dome
July 17, 2020 Half Dome as seen from Cook’s Meadow On Day 2 of our June Yosemite visit (click here for part 1 and here for how we pulled off the trip), we rose well before dawn, drove the 40 minutes into the park, and dropped David off at the ...
Yosemite National Park, grand temple of nature
July 14, 2020 An epic vista, including El Capitan on the left and Half Dome in the distance, greets you at the Tunnel View pullout. Half Dome. El Capitan. Tuolumne Meadows. Yosemite Falls. The names of Yosemite’s majestic granite walls, grassy leas, and thundering waterfalls are more familiar to many ...
Wildflowers and waterfalls at Kings Canyon National Park
July 12, 2020 Eriodictyon parryi, or poodle dog bush When you visit Sequoia National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, you get two parks for the price of one. Kings Canyon National Park abuts Sequoia’s northern edge, and the parks are managed together; one admission gets you into both. It’s ...
Wildflower fiesta at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
May 11, 2020 Bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, and other early wildflowers bloomed in solitude this spring at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, which closed in mid-March due to the pandemic and Austin’s shelter-in-place order. Happily, the gardens reopened last weekend to members, who must reserve in advance a specific arrival ...
Supersized sculpture at Mueller’s Southwest Greenway trail
January 14, 2020 The only place I’m happy to see a supersized spider is on the walking trail at Mueller neighborhood’s Southwest Greenway. Arachnophillia by Dixie Friend Gay strides along the native-prairie trail, one steel leg extended as if to feel the way… …or wave hello. With a belly full of blue ...
Autumn hike at Hamilton Pool grotto
December 14, 2019 Hamilton Pool called my name last month, and I answered by scheduling a visit through the state’s reservation page. Yes, Hamilton Pool Preserve is so heavily visited nowadays that the county park system requires a reservation to visit on weekends, and every day in warmer months. Is ...
Steppe garden evangelist Panayoti Kelaidis’s garden: Denver Garden Bloggers Fling
July 18, 2019 Despite its Mile High City moniker, Denver is not a mountain town. True, the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies loom on its western horizon, but Denver sits on a relatively flat, semi-arid, grassy plain — aka a steppe, one of the 4 vast steppe ecosystems in the ...
