Fall at Denver Botanic Gardens: PlantAsia and Birds and Bees Walk
January 08, 2025 Pines with fragrant needles and cool shade welcome you into June’s PlantAsia garden (who’s June, I wonder?) at Denver Botanic Gardens. This is Part 3 of my tour from my visit in late September. June’s PlantAsia A Chinese pavilion offers a cool spot to rest under the ...
Taming a hillside with terraces and sculpture in Bonnie Berk’s garden
September 03, 2024 Steep lots make gardening — or even just mowing — a challenge unless you figure out a way to create safe, usable spaces. Seattle gardener Bonnie Berk installed terracing to tame her intimidatingly steep front yard, adding large sculptures to entice visitors uphill. I visited her garden ...
A woodland art collector’s garden on Vashon Island
August 02, 2024 While touring the Carhart Garden at the Puget Sound Fling last month, I met one of the owners, Mary Carhart, who upon learning I was from Texas enthusiastically told me that she is from Texas too. Decades ago, she and husband Whit moved to Washington for work ...
Gardens for adventure, art, and games at Paxson Hill Farm
November 22, 2023 Picking up my tour of Paxson Hill Farm — from the Philadelphia Area Fling in September — where I left off yesterday, let’s keep exploring! After emerging from the hobbit house hideaway, I followed the path uphill through another weeping-tree arch. The romance! Am I right? The ...
Moon gate and woodland garden at Boulder Haven
October 15, 2023 Have you ever seen a moon gate as beautiful as this one? I don’t think I have. It appears like a portal to another world around a back corner at Boulder Haven, the home garden of designer Carol Verhake in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Carol’s garden was on the ...
Gardens galore at Paxson Hill Farm, part 1
February 09, 2022 Paxson Hill Farm’s crossroads, where inviting paths branch in every direction A friend asked me how I find gardens to see when traveling. Aside from online research a lot comes down to asking gardeners who live in the area. And it pays to build in time for ...
Home gardening inspiration, plus a boxwood garden and Chinese garden: Missouri Botanical Garden, part 4
June 27, 2021 Visiting Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) earlier this month for the first time, I expected to breeze through the Center for Home Gardening and get on to more interesting parts of the garden. Instead I found myself poking around this space for close to an hour. I was ...
Chinoiserie enchantment at Chandor Gardens, part 2
October 31, 2019 Given 3-1/2 acres of cow pasture in North Texas, it turns out you can do quite a lot with it. Continuing with my mid-October visit to Weatherford’s Chandor Gardens (click for part 1 of my visit), here’s more of the romantic English-Chinese garden that portraitist Douglas Chandor ...
Lan Su Chinese Garden, a downtown Portland oasis
September 23, 2017 While vacationing in Portland last month, we visited Lan Su Chinese Garden in downtown Portland. It was my third visit, and I find I enjoy it more each time I see it. Chinese gardens have had to grow on me, so different do they seem from the ...
Edibles, outdoor living, and more at Sunset Gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma
August 21, 2017 While touring the Cornerstone Sonoma gardens in Sonoma, California, a couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed a two-fer. Sunset’s Test Gardens relocated to Cornerstone in 2016, and after a year of growth they’re already looking amazing. A glowing vertical garden of sempervivums, planted in the orange Sunset ...
Evening photo shoot at The Huntington Gardens: GWA Pasadena
October 29, 2015 The Huntington gardens near Los Angeles have, for years, been on my wish list of botanical gardens to visit. So I was thrilled to see an afternoon visit and after-hours photoshoot offered on the itinerary of the Garden Writers Association symposium on September 20. Unfortunately, it was ...
Lan Su Chinese Garden: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling
July 17, 2014 Austin and Portland, Oregon, are soul-sister cities, sharing a love of “weirdness,” food carts/trucks, huge independent bookstores, and tattoos, as I can attest from my recent visit. Austin and Portland also share a vibrant gardening culture and even the same hardiness zone (8b), although our climates couldn’t ...