Drive-By Gardens

November 19, 2015 Bravo to my neighbors, who’ve ripped out their front lawn and replaced it with native groundcovers woolly stemodia (Stemodia lanata) and sedge (probably Carex texensis), accented with xeric specimen plants like Agave parryi var. truncata, gopher plant (Euphorbia rigida), Wheeler sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri), squid agave (Agave bracteosa), ...

April 12, 2015 Central Austin’s front-yard gardens, free of any homeowners’ association rules, vary wildly depending on the owners’ tastes, energy level, and budget. Here are three that caught my eye over the past week, starting with Deborah Hornickel’s subversive formal garden in the Bryker Woods neighborhood. Why subversive? It ...

March 27, 2015 Can you detect a scent of grape Kool-Aid through your screen? I wouldn’t be surprised if you could. Austin’s enjoying a banner year for the fragrant, wisteria-like blooms of our native Texas mountain laurel (Sophora secundiflora). This is the tree that helped sell me on Austin, as ...

December 07, 2014 Driving through Austin’s North University neighborhood yesterday I spotted this charming Spanish-style bungalow. Instead of lawn, its postage stamp-sized front garden is filled with drought-tolerant ornamental grasses, golden barrel cactus, silver ponyfoot, and agave. A few red roses add pops of vivid color. Most eye-catching of all, ...

November 24, 2014 This drive-by is really a walk-by. I was on South Congress Avenue on Sunday afternoon, the center of the funky-hip Austin universe, enjoying a blue-sky, 80-degree day with my family. Fall, winter, and spring days like this are what sustain me through Austin’s broiling summers. When my ...

June 27, 2014 Driving through the north-central Austin neighborhoods of Allandale, Brentwood, and Crestview yesterday, I noticed a number of face-lifted ranches and bungalows, freshened up with paint and/or reasonably sized additions and eye-catching, lawn-reducing landscaping. Let’s start this Drive-By with a charming, painted-brick ranch with a lime-green screen and ...

May 12, 2014 Coming home from a garden tour last Saturday, I traded the backed-up traffic on MoPac for a meandering drive through the charming central Austin neighborhoods of Pemberton, Rosedale, and Allandale. I had my camera with me, and for your enjoyment I furtively snapped photos of front-yard gardens ...

May 04, 2014 I spotted this lawn-gone front garden in West Austin’s Tarrytown neighborhood in early April and have been eager to share it with you. Tufty sedges — Berkeley sedge (Carex divulsa), perhaps? — grow in place of traditional lawn grass for a meadowy look that softens the angular ...

April 22, 2014 I made a quick visit to Tucson while in Arizona earlier this month, and one of my stops included the green, master-planned community of Civano on the southeast side of town. One of my favorite garden authors, Scott Calhoun, wrote about building his home and garden there ...

April 06, 2014 I’m squeezing in one more drive-by garden from my Houston trip last week — the grande dame of them all, a circa 1895 Victorian known as the Mansfield House, located at 1802 Harvard Street in the Heights neighborhood. Although I’m not usually a fan of all-white houses, ...

April 03, 2014 ‘Blue Elf’ aloes, purple prickly pear, gold sedum, and smooth sotol and silver ponyfoot in the steel ring, with an Opuntia “tree” behind I’m hearing from many of you how much you enjoy my Drive-By Gardens posts, and so I’m pleased to offer a third this week ...

March 31, 2014 We’d cruised down Peddie Street in the Houston Heights neighborhood to find the riotously colorful house and garden that locals had urged us to see. But Peddie offers a two-for-one special, and when we spotted this pretty garden across the street from the first one, we got ...

March 31, 2014 Go see the flower garden on Peddie Street, my sister urged when I told her I’d be in Houston for a garden tour. It was the same advice I’d recently gotten from a Digging reader, who told me the garden on Peddie was not to be missed, ...

January 25, 2014 On a cold, blustery Thursday, while driving through Austin’s Clarksville neighborhood, I spotted this intriguing, lawn-gone garden at a contemporary-style house. The mix of spiky and feathery plants caught my eye first. When I slowed down to rubberneck, I noticed that much of the garden is planted ...

November 27, 2013 Two of my design clients in Austin’s Northwest Hills neighborhood have recently mentioned this front garden to me as one that inspires them, so I thought I’d feature it for a Drive-By post. Blessed (cursed?) with an enormous, corner-lot expanse of thirsty St. Augustine lawn and a ...

October 16, 2013 Billowy, chartreuse clouds of bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa), shimmering balls of Yucca rostrata, Mickey Mouse-eared prickly pears, feathery firecracker fern (Russelia equisetiformis), and a silver carpet of ponyfoot (Dichondra argentea): could you ask for a more striking, drought-tolerant garden for a full-sun, fast-draining site in central Texas? ...