Dry Climate Gardening book wins award!
March 13, 2024 Congrats to my friend Noelle Johnson, a horticulturist and landscape consultant in Phoenix, whose book Dry Climate Gardening has been named winner of a 2024 American Horticultural Society Award! Photo by Noelle Johnson from Dry Climate Gardening I reviewed Dry Climate Gardening last year and know what a ...
Rocking a dry garden at Chanticleer’s Gravel Garden
January 09, 2024 Every time I visit Chanticleer’s Gravel Garden, I get a familiar feeling. Many plants we grow in Central Texas appear in this Pennsylvania dry garden, and it’s fun to see them in a new context. Although the garden bristles with yuccas, agaves, and cactus and sways with ...
Orchids, silver garden, and living walls at Longwood Gardens conservatory
September 30, 2023 Feathery Acacia leprosa climbing the walls The first time I experienced the over-the-top plant showmanship that is Longwood Gardens was in 2016. I returned last week during the Philadelphia Area Fling, a 3.5-day garden tour hosted by Longwood’s conservatory manager, Karl Gercens. In honor of Karl, I ...
A healing garden in West Texas
August 08, 2023 A week ago I had the pleasure of visiting a lovely garden in Alpine, located in far West Texas, 400 miles west of Austin. Owner Susan Wallens showed me around and told me how the garden came to be. Susan’s husband, Mike, is the vicar of St ...
Drive-By Gardens: Waterwise front yard on Castle Hill
July 11, 2023 Cruising through the Castle Hill area of Old West Austin recently, I spotted this beautiful 1910 home with a sky-blue door and modern landscaping. I hit the brakes for a closer look. The house sits atop a front yard terraced with Corten steel and board-formed concrete walls ...
Drive-By Garden: Waterwise front yard and patio
June 30, 2023 Driving around the Delwood neighborhood in East Austin last week I spotted this attractive waterwise front yard. A huge crape myrtle shades one side of the midcentury-style home, sheltering a small patio beneath its branches. On the sunny side, Mexican feathergrass, giant hesperaloe, firecracker fern, and fall ...
Springtime at Red Hills Desert Garden, part 2
June 29, 2023 I squeezed in a visit to St. George, Utah’s Red Hills Desert Garden during our big RV trip, and this is part 2 of my coverage. (Click here for part 1.) In late April, the waterwise public garden dazzled with colorful desert flowers, and I wandered for ...
Desert in bloom at Red Hills Desert Garden, part 1
June 27, 2023 Utah. Red rock desert. Cactus and yuccas. When we set out in April in a rented RV to visit national parks out west, I expected hundred-mile vistas, arches, and canyons. What I didn’t expect was a flowery, beautifully designed garden of desert-appropriate plants. But thanks to a ...
Read This: Dry Climate Gardening
February 14, 2023 I’ve been following Noelle Johnson’s informative and entertaining garden blog, AZ Plant Lady: Ramblings From a Desert Garden, for more than a decade. As a horticulturist and landscape consultant in Phoenix, Noelle is an authority on native and desert-adapted plants suited to her hot, arid climate. Her ...
Native plants and Hill Country style at Paula Stone’s Fredericksburg garden
October 25, 2022 Two Fridays ago a couple of friends and I drove out to Fredericksburg, a charming town in the Texas Hill Country, founded in the mid-1800s by German immigrants and built out of native limestone block, pressed-tin ceilings, and galvanized roofs. We’d been invited to visit by Paula ...
Beautiful flora and fauna at Santa Fe Botanical Garden
September 19, 2022 During our stay in Santa Fe at the end of August, I spent one morning at Santa Fe Botanical Garden. I first visited in 2016, three years after it opened and right before the opening of Phase 2, Ojos y Manos: Eyes and Hands. My 6-year absence ...
James David and Gary Peese’s new garden in New Mexico
September 09, 2022 Landscape architect James David and Gary Peese departed Austin about 5 years ago, leaving behind a 36-year-old, swoon-worthy garden that regularly starred on Open Days Tours and was covered by Martha Stewart, Architectural Digest, and, ahem, yours truly (click for my final visit). Looking for cooler weather, ...
Have we outlasted the heat-wave summer?
August 31, 2022 What a summer this has been for Austin. Hot as Hades, rainless and parched for months and months. And then, finally, flooding rains in mid-August drenched parts of the city — I got 4.75 inches over a few days, although friends in South and West Austin got ...
Allen Centennial Garden on UW–Madison campus
July 16, 2022 Allen Centennial Garden, a free public garden at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, offers a pleasant garden stroll around a Queen Anne mansion. The garden was our final stop on the recent Madison Garden Bloggers Fling tour. I also made a quick visit with friends before the Fling ...
Low-water natives in front, party in the back
May 21, 2022 The southwest Austin home my friend Laura Wills and her husband, Eric, share isn’t in the country, but it feels semi-rural thanks to a 2-acre yard and out-of-sight neighbors. The front yard alone is enormous, and most people would sod it with turf grass and spend hours ...
Coleson Bruce’s crevice garden in spring flower
May 04, 2022 Two weeks ago Coleson Bruce invited me back to his garden to see it in spring flower. I’d first visited Coleson’s garden last fall — a garden unlike any other I’ve seen in Austin or even Texas. Colorado-style crevice gardens are unusual here, and Coleson’s is not ...
