A fall hike at Eldorado Canyon
November 15, 2024 I’d last hiked at Eldorado Canyon State Park, on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, 6 years ago during a mother-daughter trip up to Wyoming. My husband had never seen it. So late one afternoon, at the end of a day trip to Boulder from our Denver VRBO, ...
Gillian Mathews’ garden for outdoor lounging and dining
September 18, 2024 I’ve wanted to visit the Seattle garden of Gillian Mathews, former owner of Ravenna Gardens, since reading about it at Danger Garden and in the Seattle Times. Designed by Richard Hartlage of Land Morphology (whose personal garden I recently visited), its modern style, lush plantings, and original ...
Tiki-style pond and lush courtyard at the Galicic Garden
September 12, 2024 If you feel you’ve seen a lot of coverage of Washington gardens lately, it’s true. This is my 26th post about the Puget Sound Fling tour in July. While I have a few more posts about places I saw on my own, including Gillian Mathews’ garden, Seattle ...
The elegant Pepper Garden with a water view
September 07, 2024 By lunchtime, we’d already visited four gardens on the bonus Seattle day of the Puget Sound Fling. Three more to go! Our next stop was an elegant home right on Lake Washington, with welcoming owners Vangie and Daniel Pepper. Let’s start in the back garden and work ...
Playfulness and planters in the garden of Richard Hartlage
September 06, 2024 One garden I was eager to see during the Puget Sound Fling (on the bonus day in Seattle) was that of Richard Hartlage, head of design firm Land Morphology. I interviewed Richard years ago for an article in Garden Design and follow his work. To my delight, ...
Floating on an evergreen cloud in the garden of Tanya Bednarski
September 04, 2024 When two neighbors go all-in on their gardens, it makes for great street energy. Such is the case with two of the gardens on the Puget Sound Fling‘s bonus day in Seattle. Last time I showed you Bonnie Berk’s terraced hillside garden. Today let’s explore the garden ...
More exuberance at the Sparler-Schouten Garden, part 2
September 01, 2024 There was too much garden goodness and exuberance to contain in one post about Daniel Sparler and Jeff Schouten’s Garden of Exuberant Refuge, which I visited on the Puget Sound Fling. Here’s Part 1, if you missed it. Today, Part 2 starts on the back patio of ...
Heronswood’s shady woodland and tribe-influenced Renaissance Garden
August 22, 2024 The colorful house garden and potager stole most of my attention at Heronswood during last month’s Puget Sound Fling. Click for that post and the garden’s tumultuous backstory. Today I’m sharing other parts of Heronswood, starting with the woodland garden. Woodland garden One of the best features ...
Heronswood pilgrimage: House garden and formal garden
August 20, 2024 Two acclaimed gardens made by plantsman, plant explorer, and author Dan Hinkley (and his partner, Robert Jones) were two of the biggest attractions at the Puget Sound Fling in July. While I’d read about Windcliff and Heronswood, I’d never visited either. Day 3 of the Fling was ...
Nancy Heckler’s hydrangea-colorful woodland garden
August 15, 2024 The acclaimed gardens Heronswood and Windcliff were on the agenda for Day 3 of the Puget Sound Fling, and I was excited to see them. But first we split up onto smaller buses that could manage the narrow road to Windcliff, and my bus headed to Nancy ...
Garden and beach views at Point Defiance Park
August 04, 2024 After taking the ferry back to Tacoma, the Puget Sound Fling buses stopped in Point Defiance Park for a quick look at the public gardens there. Point Defiance is a jewel for Tacoma: a 760-acre park that includes a zoo and aquarium, gardens, beaches, bluffs, trails, a ...
Hopping around Froggsong Gardens
August 03, 2024 Lunch on the first day of the Puget Sound Fling was held on beautiful Vashon Island at Froggsong Gardens, a private home with a 5-acre estate garden that can be rented out as a wedding/event venue. Needless to say, they were well set up to host 100 ...
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 ...
Love letter to Puget Sound Fling, starting with Halstead-Robinson Garden
July 28, 2024 Every year since 2008, I’ve been lucky enough to attend the annual Garden Fling, a gathering of bloggers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, and other gardeners on social media, held in a different city each year, where for 3-1/2 days we tour gardens, socialize, get a flavor for a new ...
Early summer garden scenes in Austin
June 17, 2024 On my walks around the neighborhood, I’m admiring Pride of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), the star of Austin’s summer gardens. It’s so beautiful, both leaves and flowers. For whatever reason, I haven’t been able to get it established in my own garden, darn it. It loves heat and ...
Deborah Hornickel’s modern-formal garden invites outdoor lounging
May 28, 2024 Deborah Hornickel credits her garden’s timeless good looks and livability to her good friend James David, a hugely influential designer formerly of Austin with a showpiece personal garden and a revered boutique/nursery called Gardens. (He and partner Gary Peese now call Santa Fe home.) Thanks to James’s ...
