Hanging on in the late summer garden
August 28, 2024 August can’t end soon enough for my crispy Texas garden and my own crispy self. But we had a little reprieve in the form of a cloudburst that dropped a quarter inch of rain a couple days ago. Temps have dropped below 100 F too. What is ...
Drive-By Gardens: Contemporary, lawn-gone front yard
June 12, 2024 I walked by this home in my northwest Austin ‘hood the other day and — bam! — the landscaping stopped me in my tracks. A silver-green planting of whale’s tongue agave, woolly stemodia, and grassy Lindheimer nolina (I think) makes a textural, deer-resistant welcome to this 1970s ...
The eclectic, welcoming garden of Suzy Renz
June 02, 2024 I road-tripped up to Dallas in mid-May because…more garden tours! Dallas master gardener Suzy Renz had alerted me to the Dallas County Master Gardener Association Tour on May 18th, on which her garden was featured, and Michael McDowell had clued me into the White Rock East Garden ...
Christy Ten Eyck-led tour of San Antonio garden
October 16, 2023 On Saturday I headed down San Antonio way for a Garden Dialogues event led by Christy Ten Eyck, principal of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects in Austin, at a private garden she designed in San Antonio’s Hill Country Village. Christy has long been an inspiration for her design ...
October blooms brighten my garden
October 12, 2023 October! It’s the best month of the year, providing sweet relief from a Texas summer with cooler weather and rain and bringing the garden back to life. Let’s take a stroll ALL around the garden and see what there is to see. It’s oxblood lily season! These ...
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 ...
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 ...
Spotlight around the garden
November 09, 2022 Before Halloween I took a few photos of whatever caught my eye, starting with the whale’s tongue agave in the tractor-rim planter. Hello, gorgeous! Somebody is watching me from the far end of the Berkeley sedge lawn. Hello, deer. Oh, and the Wheeler’s sotol that replaced the ...
East meets Midwest in the garden of Linda Brazill and Mark Golbach, Part 1
July 06, 2022 Back in 2010, my husband traveled to Madison for the IRONMAN Wisconsin race (which he finished!), and I tagged along as cheerleader. Oh and also to see gardens. I was a big fan of the design-focused blog Each Little World by Linda Brazill and Mark Golbach and ...
Twin fawns hiding in the garden
June 16, 2021 Opening the front door, I spotted four oversized ears and two white-spotted bodies — twin fawns hidden by their mother in the raised bed by the driveway. Framed against shiny, blue ceramic balls, they made an irresistible photo op. I quietly staked out a spot on the ...
My succulents, vines, and groundcovers: Alive, dead or in-between? Evaluating plants 2 months after Texas freeze
May 01, 2021 Foxtail ferns regrowing quickly from the roots Today I’m taking a look at all the remaining plants in my garden: my small succulents and cacti, vines, and groundcovers, as well as bulbs and rhizomes and a few annuals. I grow some of my small succulents in pots, ...
Plant trials with style at Redenta’s Landscape Design office garden
October 07, 2020 With beautiful fall weather on tap and the first of the Mexico-bound monarch butterflies reaching North Texas, last weekend seemed like the perfect time for a trip to Dallas-Fort Worth. So I reached out to a few gardeners there and mapped out a 2-day itinerary, and my ...
Water, water everywhere in Cat’s wildlife-friendly garden
September 22, 2020 Every time I visit my friend Cat Jones‘s garden, it’s lovelier than the time before. Over the past 4 to 5 years she’s been busily making her Steiner Ranch garden, which overlooks a wildflower meadow and a wooded canyon, into a retreat for her and her family ...
Oxblood and rain lilies bloom after late-summer rains
September 08, 2020 Oxblood lilies add a dash of hot color in the raised bed behind the house. It’s oxblood lily time, baby! That excitement you hear is my delight over the early and unexpected end to break from Texas’s interminable summer. Late last week, two inches of rain and ...
Drive-By Gardens: Lushly spiky gardens of Tarrytown
August 13, 2020 Forgetting about the closure of city parks in Austin due to Covid-19, my daughter and I tried to visit Mayfield Park in west Austin a couple of weeks ago. Finding the gates locked, we decided to make the best of it and drove around tony Tarrytown neighborhood ...
Midsummer garden walkabout
August 08, 2020 Whale’s tongue agave (Agave ovatifolia) Midsummer has never been my favorite season in the garden. It’s hot and humid. Mosquitoes are fierce. And yet this summer, perhaps because I’m spending more time at home and in my own garden than usual, I’m also appreciating it more. Here’s ...
