Read This: Garden Wonderland, plus BOOK GIVEAWAY
April 25, 2024 We were both brand-new authors at Ten Speed Press when I met Leslie Bennett during the 2013 Fling tour, a connection that immediately felt like a sisterly bond. Leslie was highly regarded as a designer, and I was intrigued by her background. A graduate of Harvard, Columbia ...
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 ...
Read This: Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley
February 29, 2024 At the Philadelphia Area Fling last September (click here for my posts about it), attendees were given a copy of new book Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley. The good folks at Longwood Gardens handed the books out as we boarded the buses after a lovely ...
Falling into ruin at Chanticleer Garden
January 13, 2024 Chanticleer’s Ruin Garden has a fairy tale quality. It’s not an actual ruin but was built in 1999 on the site of one of the original houses on the property. Plants creep up crumbling walls and emerge from cracked paving, ghostly faces appear in pools of water, ...
Birds and native thorn forest at Quinta Mazatlan
December 19, 2023 In early November, I drove 5 hours south to the Rio Grande Valley, land of citrus orchards and skinny-trunked palm trees. I was there for the final photo shoot for my upcoming book on Texas gardens (due out in 2025 with Timber Press). But I couldn’t leave ...
Homey fall garden at Brandywine Cottage
October 19, 2023 Tropical Storm Ophelia swept across the Philadelphia region during late September’s Philly Area Fling. But Flingers shall not be deterred! On we Flung in raincoats, ponchos, umbrellas, and waterproof shoes — or in sopping wet pants and socks. Our group arrived at plantsman and designer David L ...
Behind-the-scenes tour at Longwood Gardens plant-production facility
October 09, 2023 The Philadelphia Area Fling in September officially started with a behind-the-scenes tour at Longwood Gardens. I didn’t know what to expect and was astonished to learn about an army of plant-production staff working at Longwood to grow horticultural displays that wow all year, but especially during big ...
Native plants at Chihuahuan Desert Botanical Garden in West Texas
August 22, 2023 Cow’s tongue prickly pear and Mitre Peak While visiting far West Texas last month, a few people mentioned the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center and its botanical garden, located just outside of Fort Davis. So one morning my friend and I drove over from Marfa to check it ...
Hot summer survivors and new book news
August 21, 2023 This summer, y’all. Am I right, my fellow Texas gardeners? But even with two months of surface-of-the-sun temps and zero rain, at least a few plants are happy. Like this pink-flowering mammillaria cactus that burst into silken bloom a few days after I gave it a deep ...
Surviving the record-breaking heat
July 20, 2023 Heat waves are everywhere all at once right now, and Austin too is broiling in the hottest July on record, according to KXAN. That’s saying something because last summer was incredibly hot. I felt sure, after enduring Snowpocalypse, last summer’s oven-like temps, and then February’s Arbormageddon ice ...
Read This: A garden care guide for DIYers in Central Texas
July 16, 2023 A couple years ago, Austin gardening expert Colleen Dieter handed me a “DIY zine for DIYers” she’d written and published in booklet form. Titled Let’s Care for Texas Plants, the 3-part series distills Colleen’s 12+ years of experience as a professional gardener into an easy-to-digest format for ...
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 ...
Designer Nick McCullough shares American Roots at Garden Spark
January 28, 2023 Austin garden lovers and designers turned out for Garden Spark on a chilly Thursday evening to hear Columbus-based designer Nick McCullough. Nick has a huge fan following across the U.S. and shared inspiring images and the stories of the gardens from his new book American Roots. I ...
Exploring Fortlandia’s creative hideouts
December 21, 2022 Chrysaline fort Each fall through winter, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center entices kids and kids at heart to explore a handful of creative “forts” built by Austin landscape architects, architects, designers, and artists. It’s called Fortlandia, and I always go see it. This year, because the ...
Read This: American Roots
December 03, 2022 A couple of years ago British gardening TV personality Monty Don made a 3-part series about U.S. gardens to answer the question, “What is an American garden?” Turns out, it’s an impossible question to answer satisfactorily in a country that spans a continent, 13 hardiness zones, and ...
Read This: The Lost Words, a spell book to bring nature back to life
November 10, 2022 For Christmas last year, I gave a book to my grown daughter that enchanted me when I paged through it in a bookstore in Maine. I carried it home and read it cover to cover, savoring its evocative poems about plants and animals and its magical illustrations, ...
