Tait Moring’s garden with a view
November 29, 2012 You’ve all been very good this year, and Santa says there’s time for one more garden tour before Christmas, so here you go. I visited this garden in late October, at the invitation of owner/designer Tait Moring, who had it all spruced up for a busload of ...
Mark Word landscape design at El Monumento in Georgetown
November 20, 2012 Last month I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Word, a highly regarded residential and commercial designer here in Austin. Thanks to his work designing unique and memorable gardens for Liz Lambert’s boutique hotels, including uber-hip Hotel San Jose and the more luxurious Hotel Saint Cecilia, Mark’s ...
Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Garden of Jeff Pavlat and Ray Clayton
November 15, 2012 My sixth and final stop on November 3rd’s Open Days tour was the garden of my friend Jeff Pavlat, located in the Westlake area. Jeff is vice president of the Austin Cactus and Succulent Society, and he’s kindly invited me to visit his garden before (click for ...
Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Rockcliff Road Garden
November 10, 2012 My fifth stop on last Saturday’s Open Days tour, the Rockcliff Road Garden, was really more of a sculpture garden. Lots of open space on this lakeside property, graced with a home designed by Lake Flato Architects, gives prominence to many large works of art placed on ...
Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Bonnell Drive Garden
November 08, 2012 My fourth stop on Saturday’s Open Days tour was the Bonnell Drive Garden in hilly West Austin, created by my friend Curt Arnette of Sitio Design. (For a post about Curt’s fascinating personal garden, click here.) The contemporary front garden complements the Texas-modern style of the wood-and-limestone ...
Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Garden of Christine Ten Eyck
November 06, 2012 My third stop on Saturday’s Open Days tour was probably the best known of the bunch, and one I’ve visited previously on the Wildflower Center’s 2010 Gardens on Tour. It’s the personal garden of landscape architect Christine Ten Eyck, which has appeared in the book Tomorrow’s Garden ...
Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Garden of Yvonne Tocquigny
November 05, 2012 My second stop on Saturday’s Garden Conservancy’s Open Days tour was the courtyard garden of Yvonne Tocquigny and Tom Fornoff, located in West Austin’s tony Tarrytown neighborhood. Elegant but relaxed and beautifully designed, this garden has a secret-garden aspect, with green walls erected in front and in ...
Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Garden of Jennifer and Fred Myers
November 04, 2012 On Saturday I joined several garden-blogging friends for the biennial Open Days tour, sponsored by the Garden Conservancy. I consider Open Days to be the best garden tour in Austin. You often see high-design gardens mingled with a gardener’s sensibility and creative, personal touches. This year’s Open ...
An evening visit to Scott Calhoun’s Zona Gardens studio
October 31, 2012 I don’t remember how I acquired Yard Full of Sun, Scott Calhoun’s 2005 memoir about making a garden that honors its desert setting. As soon as I read the first pages, his story, told with humor, crisp writing, and enticing photos, hooked me. Since then I’ve read ...
Visit to Tucson Botanical Gardens, part 2
October 30, 2012 Tucson Botanical Gardens, which I visited as part of the recent Garden Writers Association symposium, is a surprisingly eclectic place. As I wrote in part 1 of my visit to TBG, the gardens house a wonderful collection of desert plants from all over the world, are home ...
Visit to Tucson Botanical Gardens, part 1
October 29, 2012 An early morning photo shoot at Tucson Botanical Gardens, one of the events at the recent Garden Writers Association symposium, gave me (and about 60 other garden writers and photographers) a chance to see the gardens relatively uncrowded and illuminated by the rising sun. I expected a ...
Artful desert garden of Keith and Helga Zwickl
October 28, 2012Morning light gilds the cactus and succulent garden Keith and Helga Zwickl welcomed us to their Tucson, Arizona, garden during the Garden Writers Association symposium a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed this garden, not only for its stunning collection of cacti and succulents, but also for ...
The DreamFlower desert garden of Lorien Tersey
October 26, 2012Arizona adobe When you have to jackhammer the “soil” to plant anything, when your garden gets only 12 inches of rainfall a year, when you live in a desert, you just know gardening isn’t going to be easy. And yet, despite these conditions in Tucson, Arizona, which I ...
Colored walls in a desert oasis: Garden of Alan Richards
October 25, 2012Rhapsody in blue What do you expect to see when you visit a desert garden? Cactus, of course, in all its architectural, spiny splendor. I recently attended the annual Garden Writers Association Symposium, held this year in Tucson, Arizona. We were bused to three private gardens, along with ...
Inside Austin Gardens Tour 2012: Carolyn and Michael Williams Garden
October 14, 2012 The final garden I’ll show you on this sneak preview of the upcoming Inside Austin Gardens Tour, hosted by the Travis County Master Gardeners, is an inviting, lovely garden with a picture-perfect garden house, set in the hills above Lake Austin. This flagstone-and-gravel path leads along the ...
Inside Austin Gardens Tour 2012: Jennifer and David Phillips Garden
October 13, 2012 One of the gardens on our sneak preview of the upcoming Inside Austin Gardens Tour, hosted by the Travis County Master Gardeners, was a newly constructed 5-star green home on a caliche-rugged property in West Austin. The design of the house was appealing (one blogger pointed out ...
