Meadow in bloom for the birds and bees
June 15, 2023 While I was in San Antonio two weeks ago, Melody shared a friend’s meadow garden with me. The Kinder garden on Winding Way glowed that morning with tall golden sunflowers, swaths of fiery blanketflower, and my new fave, shaggy lavender American basketflower. I circled the meadow, enjoying ...
Kinder Land Bridge restores coastal prairie and unites Houston’s Memorial Park
May 04, 2023 Kinder Land Bridge as seen from Memorial Drive Houston’s Memorial Park, a 1,500-acre urban green space, has for years been sliced and diced by busy roadways, keeping people and wildlife from safe access to all parts of the park. Compounding this design flaw, the heavily wooded park ...
Shangri La Botanical Gardens, a garden fairy tale
December 15, 2022 Dancing Sisters bottle tree sculpture at Shangri La Sleeping Beauty has nothing on Shangri La Botanical Gardens & Nature Center. Located in the small town of Orange, Texas, just across the Sabine River from Louisiana, Shangri La’s very existence is in some ways as fantastical as the ...
Bandelier cliff dwellings, Valles Caldera, and epic New Mexico scenery
November 13, 2022 In early September, at the end of our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, we drove out to Bandelier National Monument. We’d last explored its ancient cliff dwellings and pueblo ruin two decades earlier, and we wanted to hike and see it again. Bandelier National Monument We ...
Meadow garden in gravel at Olbrich Botanical Gardens
August 18, 2022 A meadowy gravel garden at Olbrich I keep hearing about a new way of planting in gravel to make easy-care, low-weed, low-water gardens. The idea is, you scrape away 4-to-5 inches of soil, add a 6-inch-high barrier around the planting bed to contain the gravel at a ...
Snapshots from Olbrich Botanical Gardens’ meadow, event, and herb gardens
August 12, 2022 Coneflowers at the entrance to Olbrich While in Madison for the Fling back in June, I had time for a pre-Fling visit to Olbrich Botanical Gardens, and then of course the garden was on the official tour schedule as well. Double Olbrich! I first visited this fine ...
Green-roof prairie and fantasy gardens at Epic Systems, Part 2
July 30, 2022 The fanciful, theme-park landscaping and architectural design of Epic Systems‘ corporate campus made for a one-of-a-kind tour during the Madison Fling in June. While I’d read about Epic’s imaginative design, I had not heard about its ambitious efforts at sustainability. According to the company’s website: “Epic’s buildings ...
Native prairie garden replaces half the lawn in the Grosz Garden
July 14, 2022 A shoulder-high, prairie-style garden makes a graceful swoosh through the sunny backyard of Linda and Phil Grosz in Middleton, Wisconsin. As the second stop on the Madison Garden Bloggers Fling tour in June, it immediately grounded me in the Upper Midwest, land of the tallgrass prairie. Linda ...
At the Wildflower Center with Jennifer Jewell
June 04, 2022 When Jennifer Jewell of Cultivating Place came to Austin a month ago, we visited the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center together. I enjoy showing visitors around our state botanical garden, planted exclusively with native Texas plants. In early May, the late-spring wildflowers were in party mode. Wildflowers ...
Wildflower-palooza at Ruthie Burrus Garden, part 1
April 30, 2022 I first photographed Ruthie Burrus’s garden 8 years ago, when she emailed an invitation to come visit. I was wowed by her wildflower meadow, textural foliage garden at the front door, giant rainwater cisterns, charmingly rustic garden haus, and skyline view. Here’s her garden haus in spring ...
Piet Oudolf meadow in fall bloom at Delaware Botanic Gardens
March 15, 2022 The last public garden I visited on my road trip down the East Coast last October was newly opened Delaware Botanic Gardens in Dagsboro, Delaware. The big draw? A 2-acre meadow designed by revered Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf, who also designed the plantings of the High Line ...
Flowery meadow instead of lawn at Chanticleer’s house garden
February 26, 2022 You’d expect a garden surrounding an estate house to be formal, restrained, with neat lawns and containers that serve to frame the grand structure. The house garden at Chanticleer, a Pennsylvania “pleasure garden” I visited during my East Coast road trip last October, upends this convention through ...
Gravel garden at Chanticleer reminds me of Texas
February 21, 2022 Whether you love plants, exciting planting combos, design and gardening artistry, or overlooks and hideaways to sit and enjoy a beautiful garden, Chanticleer has it all. Located near Philadelphia, Chanticleer dubs itself “a pleasure garden,” and it’s been my favorite public garden since I first visited in ...
Autumn meadows and monarchs at Wildflower Center
February 07, 2022 The Center’s iconic lookout tower, which doubles as a water-collecting cistern When Loree of Danger Garden came to Austin last October, we visited the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on her last day. I was happy she got to see it a second time, particularly since her ...
Neighbors save 11 acres from condo development, create a public nature park
January 27, 2022 As Texas’s population soars, many communities are feeling the growing pains of rapid development. Here in booming Austin that manifests as condos, condos, condos and traffic, traffic, traffic. But smaller towns also feel the pinch, not least in terms of lost green space. In Horseshoe Bay, a ...
James Golden’s Federal Twist garden is like Fight Club, except we do talk about it
January 22, 2022 At the garden gate, towering grasses make you feel about 3 feet tall Plants duke it out for space and sunlight in every garden. But at Federal Twist, a wet-meadow garden in a clearing in the woods near Stockton, New Jersey, you witness the brawling fistfight from ...
