Epic Systems campus, a fantasyland of gardens and architecture, Part 1
July 29, 2022 One of the zaniest, most eye-popping destinations on the Madison Fling tour in June was the corporate headquarters of medical-software giant Epic Systems, located in the rolling farm country of Verona, Wisconsin. Soulless lawns, sprawling junipers, boxwood hedges, and other ubiquitous ground-fillers of corporate landscaping are banished ...
Constellations of clematis at Janet Aaberg Garden
July 17, 2022 Glorious clematis vines greeted us at nearly every garden we visited during the Madison Fling last month, but Janet Aaberg’s garden stepped it up a notch. Thirty-two different varieties of these starry-flowered vines grow in her garden, and every one appeared to be in full bloom. This ...
Back to the garden of good and evil
May 25, 2022 My friend Lori of The Gardener of Good and Evil is always in the middle of a project. I don’t know how she finds the time and energy after working on other people’s gardens all day, but Lori leaps into projects in all seasons, never shying away ...
Wisteria-scented Garden Spark at Barton Springs Nursery
April 16, 2022 Last week I hosted one of my Garden Spark talks at Barton Springs Nursery, and their beautiful outdoor classroom was made even more beautiful by a wisteria in full bloom. If you know anything about Chinese wisteria, you know it’s a monster of a vine. But its ...
Yucca and palm fantasyland at John Fairey Garden
December 17, 2021 I’d been to The John Fairey Garden (formerly Peckerwood Garden) a half-dozen times before my late-October visit with Loree Bohl of Danger Garden, who was in town to give a Garden Spark talk. Frustratingly, I’d never toured the dry garden, though I’d glimpse its bristling yuccas and ...
The Joy of Nature: David Hockney exhibit at Houston Museum of Fine Arts
June 02, 2021 “How can you be bored with nature? Landscape is infinite, isn’t it?” reads a quote by British landscape artist David Hockney at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and I couldn’t agree more. Influenced by Vincent Van Gogh’s use of color and focus on agricultural landscapes, Hockney ...
Bigtooth maples and more fall foliage at the Wildflower Center, part 2
November 19, 2020 Did a few bigtooth maples from Lost Maples Park lose their way and end up at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center? It sure looked that way last week, when I spotted pumpkin-spice trees in the Family Garden. This is part 2 of my tour. Big, colorful ...
Colorful fall foliage at the Wildflower Center, part 1
November 17, 2020 Fall pounced on Austin quickly this year, then retreated for nearly a month, and then dashed back in, ushering in a brief flare of color. We’d planned to visit Lost Maples this month in hopes of seeing the bigtooth maples flaming red and orange, but we missed ...
Garden Seventeen, a new nursery in north-central Austin
July 31, 2020 It’s a happy day when a new nursery opens north of the river, especially if within a quick 10- or 15-minute drive from my house. So my head snapped up with interest when I heard about a new nursery opening — during a pandemic, no less — ...
Postcards from COVID-era Austin
May 28, 2020 “You’re not in traffic. You are traffic,” I heard on the radio last year, and it resonated with me. Here we Austinites were, almost a million of us, sitting in traffic jams all day long, insanely frustrated by the wasted time and by our fellow drivers. And ...
Kempelen’s Owls and more public art in downtown Austin
December 27, 2019 Looking for free family fun over the holidays? Why not burn a few calories on a self-guided walking tour of public art in downtown Austin? My daughter and I did just that a few days before Christmas. I was eager to see Kempelen’s Owls, a pair of ...
Celebrating life at Dia de los Muertos parade
November 01, 2019 For more than a decade I’ve attended Austin’s annual Day of the Dead parade, Viva la Vida, which this year took place on October 26. For newcomers, Day of the Dead is easily confused with Halloween because of all the skull imagery and skeleton face paint. But ...
Wildflower mural energizes wall on Wood Hollow Drive
October 07, 2019 Blanketflowers tower over you with electric energy along a stretch of Wood Hollow Drive in northwest Austin. Local artist Bill Tavis recently completed a zigzagging,Texas-evoking mural of our native wildflower on a large wall — actually two walls, an upper and lower spaced a few yards apart. If ...
Sightseeing in Austin with our exchange student
September 16, 2019 We have a young exchange student from Italy living with us this school year, and part of the fun of that for us (and hopefully for her) is dragging her around Austin to see, well, everything. The pink granite dome of the Texas Capitol beckoned us one ...
TatTopia garden embraces stonework and sustainability: Denver Garden Bloggers Fling
July 09, 2019 When the construction dust settled at Tatiana Maxwell’s new energy-wise home, studio, and guest house in Boulder, Colorado, in 2010, the yard was just an expanse of bare dirt. Her first thought was to build an English-style cottage garden. But after brainstorming with stonemason artist Thea Alvin ...
Tau Ceti mural in downtown Austin
June 09, 2019 Austin’s excellent mural scene just got a big boost with the addition of Josef Kristofoletti‘s Tau Ceti. The spectacular, spectrum-based mural by the Austin muralist fills a formerly blank corner of a bland parking garage at Brazos and 2nd Street, creating a new hotspot for selfie snapping ...
