How to pack plants in your suitcase for the flight home
November 02, 2012 Do you ever visit nurseries when you travel, or the garden of a friend who offers to dig up a few plants for you to take home? Or maybe you fly across the country to the Garden Bloggers Fling, the Garden Writers Association symposium, or one of ...
Plant This: Pink Flamingos muhly grass
October 17, 2012 Do you love our native Lindheimer muhly and Gulf muhly grasses? Then you’ll adore their love child, ‘Pink Flamingos’ muhly (Muhlenbergia ‘Pink Flamingos’). It has the overall size and the long inflorescence of the Lindheimer muhly, with the pink flower coloring of Gulf muhly. Its blue-green foliage ...
Teeth, seeds, and stripes for Foliage Follow-Up
October 16, 2012 To celebrate foliage on the day after Bloom Day, I’m leading with one of my favorite agaves, ‘Whale’s Tongue’ (Agave ovatifolia). This is a small, new one I planted in the garden I share with my neighbor. Its red teeth echo the red of the Autumn sage ...
Drab fall? Not in this colorful streetside garden
October 09, 2012 Cool weather might make some people think of brown leaves and shriveling plants, but not me. October is, I think, the best garden season—both for planting and photographing—in central Texas. Certainly my streetside garden is fuller and more flowery than at any other time of year. The ...
Winner of the Natural Gardener Giveaway
October 07, 2012The Natural Gardener is a wonderful local nursery.Last week I posted about the Natural Gardener, one of my favorite Austin-area nurseries, as part of Support Your Independent Nursery Month, and I ran a giveaway for a $25 gift certificate donated by the good folks at the Natural Gardener ...
Front yard garden in full fall bloom
October 02, 2012 Every time I arrive at home, slowing to pull into my driveway, I get to enjoy this. Yep, this is my neighbor Donna’s streetside garden that she let me design for her earlier this year. And now it’s all filled in and blooming like crazy. Here’s how ...
Digging redesign in the works
September 24, 2012‘Margaritaville’ yucca Digging is getting a makeover this week! I’ve been working on a new look with the help of the crack design team at Freckled Nest, and I’m excited that the big reveal is at hand. The site should be up while the changes are being made, ...
Rocking a no-lawn gravel garden
September 19, 2012 Every time I pull into my driveway I feel happy looking at the new gravel garden that’s replaced the old foundation-hugging bed and lawn. BEFORE: A fairly traditional foundation strip and lawn edged with dwarf mondo grass. The shrubs were planted too close to the foundation, but ...
Plant This: Awash in blazing red oxblood lilies
September 18, 2012 Their little, green noses were just beginning to poke up last week, and a few early birds had already bloomed and faded. And then three and a half inches of rain soaked into the soil last weekend, and yesterday—like magic!—the oxblood lilies (Rhodophiala bifida) were standing at ...
September Foliage Follow-Up
September 16, 2012 Thanks to our first two cool fronts of the season, I’ve spent much of the past two weekends cleaning up the garden, ripping out plants that proved not tough enough and adding plants that I’ve been wanting to try, like little bluestem and a couple of new ...
Plant This: ‘Dark Knight’ caryopteris
September 15, 2012 I’m growing bluebeard for the first time, convinced to try it by a fellow shopper at Barton Springs Nursery last spring who said how great ‘Dark Knight’ Caryopteris x clandonensis had performed for her in a hot, sunny bed. Of course I don’t have too many sunny ...
New fish in the stock-tank pond
September 13, 2012 Splish-splash! All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited ...
Plant This: Leavenworth’s eryngo spikes the fall garden
September 12, 2012 Michael of Plano Prairie Garden, this is for you. Now that purple pineapples in spiky ballerina skirts and crowns are dancing in my garden, I have Michael to thank. During my visit to his garden last October, he gave me some seedheads from Eryngium leavenworthii, the native ...
Stripes and spikes jazz up the late-summer garden
September 02, 2012 I’m so grateful for my stripes and spikes at this time of year. The evergreen (or ever-blue, ever-silver, even ever-yellow) leaves of agaves and yuccas carry my garden through the doldrums of droughty August and September until the fall rains arrive and entice the garden into its ...
Plant This: Datura shuns the day, shines at dusk
August 31, 2012 If you brave the West Nile-carrying mosquitoes at dusk, you can enjoy the unfurling of datura’s lightly scented trumpets. Under a full moon last evening, I took these images of one of my datura (Datura wrightii) in full, moon-like bloom. I like the curved “hooks” on the ...
Oxblood lilies rise again
August 30, 2012 To the tune of the Thin Lizzy song, let’s sing: The bulbs are back in town! Which bulbs? Those velvety red heralds of fall—oxblood lilies, also known as schoolhouse lilies (Rhodophiala bifida), a name that’s particularly apt this year since school just started. These bulbs have a ...
