Deer me! Whitetail buck torments yucca
December 15, 2010 Argh! A small herd of deer moved through the front garden this morning, as they do nearly every day, and I caught this buck in the act of shredding one of my softleaf yuccas with his antlers. I’d wondered why this yucca seemed a little beaten up ...
Wildlife garden instead of lawn
September 09, 2010 On Labor Day we spent the afternoon with my husband’s family in southwest Austin. My in-laws have a lovely native-plant garden designed to attract wildlife by providing food for butterfly larvae (i.e. caterpillars), nectaring plants for butterflies and bees, berrying plants for birds, and sheltering layers of ...
Deer resistant Bloom Day & Foliage Follow Up
June 15, 2010 The new island bed out front, where deer make daily foraging rounds, is holding up well thanks to fuzzy and spiky leaves and strong-smelling foliage. While foliage is the backbone of that bed, flowering perennials are going strong too. It seems natural, then, to combine Bloom Day ...
Deer resistant Bloom Day & Foliage Follow Up
June 15, 2010 The new island bed out front, where deer make daily foraging rounds, is holding up well thanks to fuzzy and spiky leaves and strong-smelling foliage. While foliage is the backbone of that bed, flowering perennials are going strong too. It seems natural, then, to combine Bloom Day ...
Deer-resistant Foliage Follow-Up
April 16, 2010 For April’s Foliage Follow-Up (a celebration of foliage on the day after Bloom Day), let’s see how the one-month-old garden in the deer-infested front yard is holding up. It’s mostly a foliage garden, after all. In case you’re wondering, by “deer-infested” I mean that a half-dozen to ...
Armadillo invasion!
June 07, 2009 So I was talking on the phone with my mom yesterday afternoon, telling her how something had been digging up my new beds for four nights in a row. “New plants pushed out of the ground, the mulch thrown aside, the soil torn up like someone dragged ...
Wizzie’s a whiz with bugs
July 25, 2008 Wizzie also knows lizards, butterflies, ants, and other garden critters, as well as the down and dirty with plant diseases. Sharing her knowledge of integrated pest management on her new blog, Urban IPM, entomologist Wizzie (short for Elizabeth) Brown joins the ranks of Austin bloggers with her ...
Wizzie's a whiz with bugs
July 25, 2008 Wizzie also knows lizards, butterflies, ants, and other garden critters, as well as the down and dirty with plant diseases. Sharing her knowledge of integrated pest management on her new blog, Urban IPM, entomologist Wizzie (short for Elizabeth) Brown joins the ranks of Austin bloggers with her ...
Evil weevils! Agaves under attack in Austin
May 20, 2008 My mangave, the beautiful, sculptural, lusciously named and, let’s not forget, expensive Manfreda ‘Macho Mocha’ has been murdered by the agave snout-nosed weevil. I bought it to fill a new glazed pot last winter. It looked great for about a month, as shown above, and then it ...
