Screech owlets ready to fly away
May 24, 2025 Aw, they grow up so fast! All three screech owlets have left the nesting box and are roosting in a nearby live oak. One owlet hangs out on a low branch, next to its parent. When it’s tired, it rests its head on the branch, splayed out ...
Diana’s hilly new garden
May 13, 2025 My friend Diana Kirby moved across town 6 years ago and has been making her new garden in very different conditions from her old one. Before, she had a large, level, suburban yard in southwest Austin, where she made extensive gardens in sun and shade. She often ...
Cottage garden charm in Tom’s Tarrytown garden, Part 1
April 25, 2025 Spring is when I get invited — or invite myself — into gardens all around Austin. It’s a rush to see as many as I can before summer and the Death Star arrive. Right now though, it’s sweetness and light! Especially in the charming cottage garden of ...
Wildflowers, donkeys, and old-sign magic at Katie Bird Farm
April 22, 2025 Last week I invited myself to Kay Angermann and Julie Nelson’s utterly charming Katie Bird Farm, their home garden on 3 acres in southwest Austin. I love everything about their country garden, starting with this eye-catching vignette along the driveway: an upturned stock tank displaying a succulent ...
Hopping over to Ruthie’s hilltop garden
April 14, 2025 Last week, I hopped over to Ruthie Burrus’s garden in the Rollingwood neighborhood for a spring visit. Ruthie kindly opened her garden to me and my out-of-town guest Lisa Negri of SummerHome Garden. As always, the gardens surrounding Ruthie’s hilltop home enchant with a textural mix of ...
Wildflower safari east to Independence
April 13, 2025 The wildflower reporters I follow — and my own eyes — say this is a poor year for Texas bluebonnets and other spring wildflowers, especially from Austin west into the Hill Country. Our ongoing drought kept seedlings from germinating last fall, and there hasn’t been much rain ...
Not feeling cross about crossvine in bloom, and more!
March 31, 2025 When it goes, it goes. Ka-boom! An explosion of orange trailing along the coyote fence. ‘Tangerine Beauty’ crossvine is one of my favorite vines for spring color. It’s native, semi-evergreen, attractive to pollinators, vigorous but not invasive (unlike similar-looking trumpet vine — avoid!), and tough as nails ...
Spring swinging into the Wildflower Center
March 27, 2025 Two weekends in a row I spent a few hours at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, first to see what was in bloom and then to support the launch of horticulture director Andrea DeLong-Amaya’s new book, The Texas Native Plant Primer. Redbuds were in bloom two ...
Spring flowers and fab foliage a-popping
March 16, 2025 Late last week, while I was under the weather and holed up on the couch watching Wicked, winter turned into spring. Yesterday I woke up feeling like myself again and noticed a text from my neighbor, thanking me for the beauty of my Mexican plum, which stretches ...
Spring is coming around
February 26, 2025 What a change from a week or two ago. It was a sunny 82 F today in Austin — fully spring-like and more like late March than late February. I wouldn’t say the garden is leaping into spring though. After all, we just experienced a deep freeze ...
Exposed limestone and winter foliage in my garden
February 11, 2025 The exposed limestone slabs in the lower garden have always been one of the most remarked on features of my garden. New visitors often ask me if I brought them in. After all, moving limestone boulders around is a big part of landscape design here. We love ...
Late-winter mosey around the garden
January 31, 2025 The side garden — not the side with trash bins and potting bench but the far side, with a tree-hung chair half-hidden from the street — is a favorite destination of mine in winter. Tentacle-limbed live oaks gain even greater presence when the rest of the garden ...
Wildflowers and waterfalls at Mount Rainier National Park
January 20, 2025 We saved Mount Rainier National Park for last during our national parks tour in Washington last July. Technically, it was just me saving it for last, as David had flown in early from Texas, met up with a climbing group, and ice-axed his way to the summit ...
Turquoise lakes, waterfalls in North Cascades National Park
January 18, 2025 After two days last July at Olympic National Park, we drove back through Tacoma, headed north through Seattle, and kept cruising northeast. Just 20 miles from the Canadian border we entered North Cascades National Park, the only one of Washington’s three national parks we had never visited ...
Chasing waterfalls and sunsets (and vampires) in Olympic National Park and Forks
January 17, 2025 Last July, I flew from Austin to Seattle the week before the Puget Sound Fling. With well-planned timing, my husband was descending from the summit of Mount Rainier the same day my plane soared over its snow-capped peak. That evening we met up to begin a national ...
Fall at Denver Botanic Gardens: Monet Pool, Japanese teahouse, and bonsai
January 11, 2025 The Monet Pool at Denver Botanic Gardens is the largest of several ponds at the garden. Dark-dyed water makes a mirrored surface, reflecting orange canna blossoms, reedy papyrus, and cloven waterlily pads. This is Part 6 of my tour from my visit in late September. Monet Pool ...
