Pink cuphea still blooming in December
December 14, 2014 After our early freeze in mid-November, we’ve had a splendid spell of mild weather. There’s been no dragging of cold-tender potted plants inside to clutter the house. Fingers crossed, we’ll get through Christmas without another freeze. Somehow the pink cuphea escaped cold damage in November and is ...
Plant This: Chile pequin will spice up your garden
December 11, 2014 Native perennial chile pequin (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum) adds hot color to the fall garden with a profusion of tiny, red peppers held upright on rambling green stems adorned with chartreuse, spade-shaped leaves. And if you taste one, you’ll find it heats up your tongue as well! ...
Festive orange and red berries adorn evergreen sumac
December 08, 2014 Every year I renew my fan-club membership for evergreen sumac (Rhus virens), a fine native shrub or small tree. What’s not to love? It sports handsome, shiny, nearly evergreen leaves, grows in sun or shade, attracts bees in late summer with sprays of tiny, white flowers, and ...
Golden pomegranate is pretty wonderful for fall color
December 05, 2014 I know many of you have mentally moved on to Christmas. But Austin’s fall color comes late, and the golden leaves of my ‘Wonderful’ pomegranate keep catching my eye through the window while I try to work. So naturally, instead of closing the blind so as to ...
Flowering maple keeps blooming after freeze
November 21, 2014 I’ll soon be posting pictures of my Japanese maple, as its leaves are starting to redden. But for now the flowering maples, aka abutilons, are stealing the show. A few light freezes don’t slow them down. Cool weather is their time to shine. This unnamed pink abutilon ...
Summer never ends thanks to flower and hummingbird sculpture
November 19, 2014 At a recent garden blogger get-together, metal craftsman Bob Pool of Gardening at Draco (who made my ocotillo bottle tree) brought this lovely flower-and-hummingbird piece he’d made as a random giveaway for our group. And I won it! Thanks, Bob, for the generous gift! It looks right ...
Still musing on wall color
November 17, 2014 The color saga continues, with no progress but lots of reader suggestions and various inspiration since my first attempt at choosing colors for my new stucco walls. (Click and read the comments on that post if you’re into color discussion!) My first stab at a red was ...
Evergreen foundation garden for Foliage Follow-Up
November 16, 2014 What won’t block the windows and grows no taller than 3 feet? What remains evergreen? What can live in shade? What won’t the deer eat? These are the foundation-planting questions that haunt generations of gardeners (or me anyway), especially those in the South, where we expect the ...
Blazing red wall
November 12, 2014 I threw a coat of paint on two of my new stucco walls before the cold blew in on Tuesday, and holy smokes — the Dunn-Edwards ‘Hot Jazz’ red on the curved wall sizzles my eyeballs. It definitely picks up every bit of red in my garden, ...
New orange Hover Dish is sedged up
November 07, 2014 I planted up my birthday-present orange Hover Dish, but not with succulents. I went with a grassy mix of Texas sedge (Carex texensis) and yellow columbine (Aquilegia hinckleyana), with pink rain lilies (Zephryanthes ‘Labuffarosea’), divided from elsewhere in my garden, mixed in for good measure. All should ...
Black beautyberry is a dark beauty
October 05, 2014 American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is one of my favorite native shrubs for fall color, and I have two under the live oaks in my back garden that are loaded with bright purple berries. But sometimes you just need a little more drama, and black beautyberry (Callicarpa acuminata), ...
Spider lily fireworks
October 04, 2014 This is the best show of spider lilies (Lycoris radiata) I’ve had in years. You have to be patient with these bulbs, which resent being moved and may not bloom for a couple of years after planting. But then one fall they pop up and surprise you, ...
Why don’t we see more colored walls in Austin?
October 03, 2014 In 2008 I read an article in Wildflower magazine by Tucson designer Scott Calhoun in which he makes the case for colored walls in the garden. (Here’s my original post about it, in which I fantasize about adding colored walls to my own garden.) It was a ...
Stuck on my stucco walls
October 01, 2014 I’m in love with the new walls. They’re not even painted yet (the stucco has to cure for a few weeks first), and I love them. I love their sturdy form and embracing curves. Swoop! The culvert-pipe yucca is being moved, by the way. Man, it’s heavy ...
A tiger in the salvia
September 28, 2014 A butterfly as big as my hand fluttered along the streetside border, which is ablaze with the hot-pink flowers of autumn sage (Salvia greggii). The yellow-and-black stripes are the distinctive markings of the eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly. Beating her wings nearly constantly as she fed, she flapped ...
Walls going up and paths going down
September 26, 2014 As with all landscaping projects, the stucco wall construction is taking longer than I expected, partly for the happy reason that we’ve had some rain, so no complaints about that. I am delighted with the work so far. The cinderblock walls have been mortared in place on ...
