Native plants at Chihuahuan Desert Botanical Garden in West Texas
August 22, 2023 Cow’s tongue prickly pear and Mitre Peak While visiting far West Texas last month, a few people mentioned the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center and its botanical garden, located just outside of Fort Davis. So one morning my friend and I drove over from Marfa to check it ...
Michael Eason’s desert garden retreat
August 14, 2023 While in West Texas a couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting designer and author Michael Eason‘s garden in Alpine. Michael had lined up some wonderful gardens for me to visit there, ones that he’d designed, but it was nice to see his own personal ...
Summer garden moments
June 26, 2023 Texas summers always test me as a gardener. I dislike the heat and humidity and generally view summer as a holing-up season, a downtime to wait out, the way gardeners up north view winter. Except of course the weeds don’t stop growing during my downtime. But this ...
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 ...
Last of the bluebonnets in Ruthie’s garden
April 14, 2023 Whenever there’s a chance to show more bluebonnets, before they’re gone, show more bluebonnets. I spotted these in Ruthie Burrus’s garden last week. Her spring garden is always a vision, but the last of the bluebonnets, mingling here with pink evening primrose, are what I’m thinking of ...
Fields awash in Texas bluebonnets and other wildflowers
March 25, 2023 Galvanized by swaths of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) coloring Austin’s urban roadsides, I drove east on Thursday morning to wander the dirt roads of Industry, a town of around 273 people. There I found farmsteads in rolling fields of denim blue. The bluebonnets are showing off this spring, ...
Spikes and springtime
March 22, 2023 Spiderwort (Tradescantia occidentalis), a self-sowing native and a springtime beauty, continues to color my shady spaces purple. Its bee-feeding flowers open at dawn and close in the early afternoon, except on cool, cloudy days, when they may stay open all day. More flower spikes line the raised ...
Juliet Whitsett reimagines native plants and animals and co-curates Really Small Museum ATX
March 20, 2023 Browsing the well-curated garden shop at Barton Springs Nursery recently, I stopped to admire a dozen framed graphic prints of cacti, butterflies, snakes, salamanders, and other Texas flora and fauna. The artist behind these joyful works is Austinite Juliet Whitsett, and they are part of her “Threatened ...
Crossvine trumpeting spring’s arrival
March 12, 2023 Of all the vines that grow well with little care in Central Texas, ‘Tangerine Beauty’ crossvine (Bignonia capreolata ‘Tangerine Beauty’) may be my favorite. This spring-flowering beauty blushes with abundant orange blossoms with golden centers, and the vine is semi-evergreen in winter too. It has always bloomed, even ...
Flowering trees and more unfurling
March 02, 2023 Yesterday the Mexican plum (Prunus mexicana) burst into full bloom, transforming itself from bare twigs to fluffy white flowers seemingly overnight. And early! Last year, according to this blog post, the Mexican plum bloomed 2 weeks later than usual, in late March. This year it bloomed on ...
Native plant landscaping at ACC Highland Campus, the new home of Central Texas Gardener
October 26, 2022 Teri Speight doing a Central Texas Gardener studio taping Last week, when author Teri Speight was in Austin to give a Garden Spark talk, I accompanied her to a taping at the new Central Texas Gardener studio at Austin PBS. Producer Linda Lehmusvirta had announced CTG’s move ...
Native plants and Hill Country style at Paula Stone’s Fredericksburg garden
October 25, 2022 Two Fridays ago a couple of friends and I drove out to Fredericksburg, a charming town in the Texas Hill Country, founded in the mid-1800s by German immigrants and built out of native limestone block, pressed-tin ceilings, and galvanized roofs. We’d been invited to visit by Paula ...
Hotel Magdalena courtyard evokes Hill Country canyon
October 06, 2022 After an all-day meeting on South Congress recently, I strolled down Music Lane to Hotel Magdalena, a boutique hotel that opened in 2020. I’d been wanting to see the place since learning that Ten Eyck Landscape Architects did the landscaping and Lake|Flato Architects designed the hotel itself ...
Have we outlasted the heat-wave summer?
August 31, 2022 What a summer this has been for Austin. Hot as Hades, rainless and parched for months and months. And then, finally, flooding rains in mid-August drenched parts of the city — I got 4.75 inches over a few days, although friends in South and West Austin got ...
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 ...
Plant This: Eve’s necklace for spring flowers that bees love
May 12, 2022 Eve’s necklace may not be widely known among gardeners. But bees and other nectaring insects sure know it and love it. Formerly called Sophora affinis, now Styphnolobium affine, this small deciduous tree with lacy foliage occurs naturally in well-drained limestone (i.e., alkaline) soils in North and Central ...
