This time around, I knew to reserve tickets months in advance for a guided tour of Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiú, New Mexico, about an hour northwest of Santa Fe. I arrived at midday on August 30th, curious to know what I might learn about the iconic artist. But first, clouds and an adobe wall.

Not the same wall, and not the same clouds. And yet seeing her home causes a rush of recognition when viewing her paintings again.

O’Keeffe’s house at Abiquiú was her winter home. In summers she relocated to Ghost Ranch, 12 miles away. “Though breathtakingly situated,” explains the O’Keeffe Museum, “O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch home was not suitable for her to live in year-round. O’Keeffe purchased a larger home, in the village of Abiquiú, for its well-irrigated garden and the comfort it offered in winter.” A well-irrigated garden — a worthy dream! She lived here from 1949 until 1984.

Our guide led us first into the backyard, where bleached antlers on an old stump recall O’Keeffe’s antler and bone paintings.

We viewed the large garden, where rows of vegetables and fruit trees once supplied the majority of the food for her kitchen.

An acequia supplies water to the garden still.

A big picture window offers a peek into O’Keeffe’s modernist living room, complete with a healthy jade plant enjoying the light. Her collection of rocks lines a deep windowsill. We’d tour the interior later, but this room is off-limits to visitors to protect its fragile adobe floor.

A narrow passage leads from the garden into an inner courtyard, or the patio as O’Keeffe called it.

Bundled corn adorns a wall.

That passageway as seen from inside the courtyard

Straight ahead, other doors offer entry into the rambling adobe house. “The oldest rooms of the house were probably built in 1744. The house was expanded in the 19th century into a pueblo-style adobe (mud brick) hacienda, with rows of rooms organized around a common open space, or plazuela,” the museum website explains. The place lay in ruin when O’Keeffe purchased it, and she spent several years restoring it from the ground up.

In the patio courtyard, a dark doorway (at left) mesmerized the artist — a doorway she would end up painting again and again. “As I climbed and walked about in the ruin,” O’Keeffe recalled, according to the website, “I found a patio with a very pretty well house and bucket to draw up water. It was a good-sized patio with a long wall with a door on one side. That wall with a door in it was something I had to have.’”

Our guide pulled out a laminated reproduction of O’Keeffe’s In the Patio II to show us how the artist had abstracted the door and wall.

From this…

…to this, hanging in Santa Fe’s New Mexico Museum of Art, where we’d see it the next day.

Just past the wall with the door, a portal decorated with a deer skull and antlers, pottery, and more of O’Keeffe’s rocks leads from the courtyard to the exterior via a wooden door.

Collections

A partial bighorn sheep skull balances on a rock atop a post.

Mudded into an adobe wall, a little face peeps out.

We entered another courtyard, with a gated opening to the drive.

If you exit through that gate, this is the view back in.

Now we were invited inside, into the kitchen. Storage niches had been carved out of the adobe walls.

My gaze was drawn out a kitchen window toward a low wall and a view-blocking juniper and small tree. I asked if the garden remained as it was in O’Keeffe’s time and was told yes. Times change, don’t they? I am somehow surprised that O’Keeffe would not have preferred elegant and compact native plants to such over-pruned, out-of-place shrubs.

From the kitchen we could view two off-limits rooms, both with adobe earthen floors. I can’t recall what this room was used for. Perhaps herb-drying and storage?

The other off-limits space begins with a simple dining room with a paper Isamu Noguchi light that he gifted to O’Keeffe.

Beyond the dining room you can see into the modernist living room, with its big picture window and skylight. Adobe floors run throughout.

A cascading fern and copper kettle in the light of a window

The living room, with its view of an ancient tamarisk tree — how I wanted to step into this space and look around.

Back outside, where potted plants casually lean atop tree stump pedestals

Next we saw O’Keeffe’s winter studio, a large, white room with an enormous picture window that immediately draws the eye.

The window makes you feel a part of the northern New Mexico landscape.

Cattle horns rest gracefully on a deep windowsill.

In a corner by the window, a studio bed with a spartan coverlet overlooks the epic view.

Another window, curtained, offers a narrower slice of the chaparral.

Bundled feathers on the wall

Outside, more of O’Keeffe’s rock collection adorns a flat rock pointing like an arrow at a distant mountain.

A corner window into O’Keeffe’s nun-like bedroom (not open to visitors) offers a ghostly view of her white bed and lamp with reflected red cliffs and green chaparral.

Tree rings

O’Keeffe’s house crouches at the edge of a steep mesa, overlooking a green valley below.

Just below the house, a curving, two-lane road slices through the trees before tapering around another hill. O’Keeffe wrote about this road and painted it:

“Two walls of my room in the Abiquiú house are glass and from one window I see the road toward Espanola, Santa Fe, and the world. The road fascinates me with its ups and downs and finally its wide sweep as it speeds toward the wall of my hilltop to go past me. I had made two or three snaps of it with a camera. For one of them I turned the camera at a sharp angle to get all the road. It was accidental that I made the road seem to stand up in the air, but it amused me, and I began drawing and painting it as a new shape. The trees and mesa beside it were unimportant for that painting—it was just the road.”

https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/blog/10-quotes-georgia-okeeffe

Seeing the places that O’Keeffe saw on a daily basis, that she studied and tried to capture again and again in her paintings, gave me new insight into her work. Now I was seeing her paintings everywhere, even in the parking lot behind the visitor center, where this massive, furrowed cottonwood stretches its limbs skyward.

Up next: The Taos adobe church that O’Keeffe painted and the vertigo-inducing Rio Grande Gorge Bridge just north of Taos. For a look back at Santa Fe’s colorful gallery and museum art and architecture, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

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The Oct. 20th Garden Spark talk “Black Flora” by author Teresa Speight is on sale now, and you’re invited! Teri will be sharing stories of pioneering Black florists, floral activists, and flower farmers doing incredible work across the U.S. Her profiles of these unstoppable creatives in Black Flora are uplifting and inspiring; check out my book review for more info. Come join us and meet Teri at her talk and book signing. Seating is limited, and tickets must be purchased in advance.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Adobe, sky, and bones at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu home appeared first on Digging.

Lorie and Michael Kinler of Kinler Landscape Architecture in Fort Worth brought their ideas for reimagining what a front yard can be to Austin for my Garden Spark series last Thursday, kicking off Season 6. They shared a number of design tips that I’ll be keeping in mind for future projects. My favorite suggestion, richly illustrated by their photos (check out their portfolio), is to flip the usual layout of the front yard. Instead of foundation hedges and a lawn, keep the foundation and entry area open by paving it with crushed gravel (perfect for a patio and/or extra parking) and pushing plants into the middle of the yard for privacy and enclosure.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the talk — it’s wonderful to gather with you all! — and to Barton Springs Nursery for sponsoring the talks via their beautiful outdoor classroom and their staff’s warm hospitality.

And a big thank-you to Lorie and Michael for coming to speak and sharing their knowledge, experience, and lighthearted he-said/she-said banter with us!

Get tix for the next talk today!

The next Garden Spark talk is coming up in just a few weeks, on October 20th, and tickets are on sale now. Author Teresa Speight will inspire us with stories of barrier-busting Black creatives in flower farming and floristry, and she’ll share images from her gorgeous new book, Black Flora. Check out my book review for more info.

I’ve known Teri since we hit it off at the Capital Region Fling in 2017. She’s passionate about gardening and connecting with gardeners from all parts of the country. I have no doubt she’ll bring her humor and storytelling talent to her Garden Spark talk, and she’ll also be selling and signing copies of her book. If you’re in the Austin area, get your ticket today and come join us under the tree lights on October 20th.

Black Flora: Seeds of Our Ancestors

Teresa Speight, author of Black Flora, a new book about African Americans in the world of floriculture, tells the stories of farmers, florists, and other floral creatives who answered the call of the flowers, tapped into their passion, and listened to their hearts. There is a rich, beautiful, complex, and diverse narrative being told by African Americans and other persons of color in the floral marketplace. It is long past time to recognize their excellence and contributions to cut-flower farming and floristry, as they sow the seeds for the next generation.

Speaker Bio

Author, podcaster, and garden writer Teresa J. Speight is a proud native of Washington, DC, as well as a mother, grandmother, garden writer, and history lover. With ancestral sharecropping roots originating in North and South Carolina, she feels deeply connected with the earth. She’s honored those roots through her work as head gardener for the City of Fredericksburg, Virginia; as a founding farmer of an organic CSA farm; as founder and president of Jabali Amani Garden Collective, an online African American garden club focusing on “beautifying urban areas in our communities”; and as an estate gardener. Teresa also works to reconnect people with the soil through one-on-one garden coaching and by offering curated garden experiences for small groups.

Teresa is the author of Black Flora: Profiles of Inspiring Black Flower Farmers + Florists and co-author of The Urban Garden: 101 Ways to Grow Food and Beauty in the City. On her podcast Cottage in the Court (available on Anchor or Apple Podcasts), Teresa introduces interesting people, discovers unique places, and adds a little poetry to remind everyone to embrace the garden, as it is here for us.

Register today and be part of this fun event!

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

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Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Great turnout for Kinlers’ Garden Spark talk; next talk on sale now appeared first on Digging.

Santa Fe tops my list as one of the most beautiful cities in America. I love the warm adobe walls that blend with the earth and glow against a bright blue sky; an abundance of public art that speaks to nature and Indigenous culture found all around town; and the human, walkable scale of the city. You can easily stroll from your Airbnb or hotel to the plaza and find plenty of things to do, yet be back at your own place for an afternoon rest before dinner. And the temps at the end of August, when it’s the Endurance Phase of summer back in Austin, are joy-renewing, with highs around 80F, low humidity, and lows in the 50s. Ahhh.

Today I’ll share pics from our explorations around town, plus a couple of art exhibits we particularly enjoyed while we were there last month. Above is the vibrantly painted arcade along the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

A Bill Worrell sculpture outside Worrell Gallery, with Scotch broom in flower

An epic rider seems to leap over pink hollyhocks.

Let’s have another look at those frilly beauties.

Chris Roberts-Antieau at Antieau Gallery

Exploring off the main plaza, a gray satin dress hanging in a gallery window stopped us in our tracks. Lavishly embroidered with detailed scenes of wildlife (and death), it had us wondering — is this a work of art or a fashion piece?

Maybe both! We stepped inside for a closer look.

The embroidery is the work of Michigan-based textile artist Chris Roberts-Antieau at Antieau Gallery.

Most of her works for sale at her namesake gallery (there’s another in New Orleans) are “fabric paintings,” a combination of embroidery and appliqué.

Jazz artists feature prominently in some of her works.

In others, animals, plants, and a solitary woman dominate the dream-like, sometimes dark, sometimes whimsical imagery.

Up close you see the thread textures and designs. I found them fascinating.

Her work is very popular and fetches high prices. Larger pieces like this one (a limited series) are listed for $35K to $45K. We admired them and left with a new appreciation for fabric painting.

Street scenes

Paper flowers and ceramic peppers make a picturesque scene outside The Rainbow Man shop, where we picked up a few small souvenirs.

Dried chiles hang outside another shop. Ristras are popular decorations for garden gates, doors, and walls in Santa Fe.

Gustave Baumann at The Owings Gallery

At The Owings Gallery on E. Marcy Street, I fell in love with Gustave Baumann‘s color woodblock prints. This one goes for $35,000, otherwise it would surely be mine.

“Born in 1881 in Germany, Baumann immigrated to the US by the early 1900’s. After a brief time in Chicago, Baumann moved to Brown County, Indiana in 1910. Baumann first visited New Mexico in 1918 and moved to New Mexico full time in 1919. Baumann’s images of New Mexico have become iconic scenes of Santa Fe and are highly sought after by collectors. The images shown here represent our current inventory of Baumann prints and drawings.”

https://www.owingsgallery.com/artists/gustave-baumann/biography

I settled for a pack of notecards with Baumann’s images, but if you have a chance, go and see his actual work.

New Mexico Museum of Art

One day we visited the New Mexico Museum of Art, housed in a century-old adobe structure off the main plaza. A central courtyard with flowering perennials and grasses, a small lawn, and a stone pillar fountain made a wonderful resting spot.

Everything seems to glow in Santa Fe. The light there really is beautiful.

Four Will Shuster frescoes — where paint pigment is mixed with wet plaster, becoming part of the wall itself — adorn the courtyard walls. My favorite is The Voice of the Water.

Among the collections inside the museum, several paintings portraying traditional Hopi snake dances caught my eye. This is Snake Dance, Oraibi by Joseph Imhof.

And here’s Snake Dancers by Tom Lea.

While we didn’t make it to The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum this time, we did enjoy one of O’Keeffe’s works, In the Patio II, at the NMMA. We’d just seen the actual patio door represented here at her home in Abiquiu during a tour the previous day. I’ll be sharing about that soon.

R.C. Gorman’s Seated Najavo Woman rests against an adobe wall in a small courtyard.

A natural work of art — an agave spotted on the walk back to our Airbnb.

One late afternoon we drove 30 minutes up the winding Santa Fe National Forest Scenic Byway for a sunset view from the Vista Grande Overlook Observation Site. Santa Fe glittered below us in the Rio Grande Valley like the jewel box it is.

Up next: A tour of Georgia O’Keeffe’s home, studio, and garden at Abiquiu. For a look back at Part 2 of my visit to Santa Fe Botanical Garden, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

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Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Sampling Santa Fe’s colorful art and architecture appeared first on Digging.

The Ojos y Manos: Eyes and Hands Garden hadn’t opened the first time I visited Santa Fe Botanical Garden. So during my return visit last month, I was happy to be able to explore it. (Here’s Part 1 of my recent visit.)

Ojos y Manos, an educational and culinary garden with an amphitheater, is accessed via the picturesque red Kearny’s Gap Bridge, which was moved here from a New Mexico ranch.

It spans a scrubby arroyo at the botanical garden.

Brassy inflorescences of Indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans) glow against green hills and blue sky.

According to the garden’s website, “Ojos y Manos: Eyes and Hands Garden is a place to explore ethnobotany – the shared history of humans and plants in northern New Mexico – through hands-on experiences and observation…[It has] three dedicated outdoor classrooms, two exploration places, and a learning pavilion with a seating capacity of 100.”

Twin towers of flat stone, improbably balanced to about 8 feet tall, mark the entrance to the garden. This is the view back toward the bridge.

Tiered beds of crops arc around the amphitheater, with grassy berms of blue grama also enclosing the space.

The shaded amphitheater is inviting as a place to sit and take it all in, and I can imagine how nice it would be to watch a performance here, or attend a class. A colorful mosaic at the back of the space features…

…corn, beans, and squash, the “three sisters” crops grown by indigenous peoples of the Americas. This piece, Sisters of the Sun and Moon, was designed by landscape architect W. Gary Smith, who also did the overall design for Santa Fe Botanical Garden — as well as the Family Garden at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Detail of Sisters of the Sun and Moon

Chard, peppers, squash, and tomatoes growing in the tiered beds — and datura. The garden’s website says datura has long been used medicinally. That particular datura, all parts of which are toxic, is a little close to the leafy vegetables for my comfort level though.

Tomatoes soaking up the heat

An upright plant with burgundy leaves marches up the amphitheater steps, glowing in the sun.

Anyone know what this is?

The view from the top

And from the side

At the rear of the amphitheater, a pine-adorned gate allows access to the garden’s largely undeveloped Piñon-Juniper Woodland and its trails. I didn’t explore those this time.

More late-summer yellows

Narrow-leaved soapweed yucca (Yucca glauca) and its interesting seedpods

And I can’t resist — more Apache plume

Flowers and seed heads of Apache plume

So pretty

Light-catching filaments

Sown alongside vegetables in the raised beds, pink cosmos adds bright color.

One more look

Indiangrass

Clusters of blue berries on New Mexico privet, aka elbow bush (Forestiera pubescens), stand out against bright-green leaves.

This pretty shrub or small tree is native to both New Mexico and Texas, among other Southwestern states.

Adjacent to the culinary garden, two adobe-clay ovens called hornos are used to demonstrate traditional cooking methods.

Their earthy domes echo the rounded hills in the distance.

Straw and mud covering

Apache plume looks great with the terracotta horno and curvy wall.

And with the red bridge. Really, what doesn’t Apache plume go with?

Up next: Gallery art and more Santa Fe scenery. For a look back at Part 1 of my visit to Santa Fe Botanical Garden, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

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Austin readers, come get ideas for designing a welcoming and USEFUL front yard at Garden Spark tomorrow. There are 3 open seats for Lorie Kinler and Michael Kinler’s Garden Spark talk on 9/22. I’ve seen a sneak peek of their presentation — inspiring photos of front yard designs! — and you won’t want to miss this one. Here’s the ticket page link: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/5538359

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Ojos y Manos at Santa Fe Botanical Garden appeared first on Digging.

During our stay in Santa Fe at the end of August, I spent one morning at Santa Fe Botanical Garden. I first visited in 2016, three years after it opened and right before the opening of Phase 2, Ojos y Manos: Eyes and Hands. My 6-year absence meant I noticed significant growth among the garden’s trees and perennials, plus this time I got to see the newest section of the garden. But let’s start at the welcome ramada, a stylized version of the traditional shade structure of the Desert Southwest.

Late-summer perennials were blooming in pots on the patio…

…their sunny yellow flowers glowing against a bright blue sky.

Bees were enjoying them too.

Big-headed Yucca rostrata and ‘Indian Magic’ crabapple make interesting bedfellows.

Red crabapple berries contrast with blue-green foliage.

My favorite of the blue-greens — powder blue, really — is bluestem joint fir (Ephedra equisetina).

That upright, blue, needle-like foliage attracts me every time.

I expected to see new sculptures on display in the gardens. After all this is Santa Fe, an art-lover’s mecca. Here’s Wind Song, a steel-and-colored-glass sculpture by Greg Reiche.

Another Reiche work hangs from a substantial steel-pipe pergola shading a walled patio.

This one is called Pollinator.

The sculpture acts as focal point for a long view through an orchard of apple and peach trees framed by lavender and roses.

Along the cross axis, a bench and umbrella offer another place to sit and enjoy the view.

But let’s go straight on to the pergola patio.

Pollinator plays with light via colored squares of glass.

The center square entices you to peep through it.

Grapevines climb rusty steel posts, filtering the light in their own way.

This scene reminds me of Austin in October, thanks to asters, salvias, and grasses.

A fragrant planting of lavender and roses

Agastache, a plant I wish I could grow better in humid, subtropical Austin

While I crouched down to photograph it, a hummingbird zoomed in and started sipping from its flowers.

There’s a reason agastache is called hummingbird mint.

He or she wasn’t shy at all, and we communed (well, I did) for several minutes.

A sparkling grass in bloom

Harebell, a lamp-like glass sculpture by Elodie Holmes, towers over a mounding lavender.

More blushing roses

And a cute lounging lizard

Harvard’s agave, one of the most cold-tolerant agaves, adds heft to a mass of light-catching grasses.

A closer view to enjoy those handsome black spines and teeth

Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa), one of my favorite arid-climate shrubs for its white flowers and pink, feather-duster seed heads that catch the light

Here it is with the plumes of a tall ornamental grass.

Really, it’s hard to choose favorite desert plants when you see a combo like this: Yucca rostrata, Mojave sage (Salvia pachyphylla), and Harvard’s agave.

Harvard’s agave and Mojave sage

Sunburst shadow

Nearby, delicate glass bulbs — Crocus Installation by Elodie Holmes — sprout from the gravel around a Yucca rostrata.

They remind me a little of Marcia Donahue’s bulbs, in glass rather than clay.

They’re arranged in tight, colorful clusters, like real bulbs.

More Mojave sage, with bear grass or something in the middle

Looking along the rose and lavender walk, you see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance.

A beautiful backdrop for the garden

Reflection, a silver bee sculpture by Elodie Holmes in collaboration with blacksmith Caleb Smith, is posed upright like a human torso.

We’re meant to see ourselves in the bee, literally and figuratively.

I’ll end Part 1 of my SFBG visit here. Come back for Part 2 tomorrow!

Up next: Part 2 of my visit to Santa Fe Botanical Garden, including an amphitheater and culinary garden. For a look back at the doors, gardens, and art along Santa Fe’s Canyon Road, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

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Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Beautiful flora and fauna at Santa Fe Botanical Garden appeared first on Digging.

Santa Fe’s adobe structures seem an extension of the earth itself. Curvy walls in warm, desert hues — tan, soft rose, terracotta — rear up from the gravelly soil to enclose courtyards and residences. Wooden doors, some with slatted windows for a glimpse inside, add mystery and perhaps a dash of color, often shades of blue. Dried chile ristras hang from many doorways, a sign of good luck and welcome.

We visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, in late August and stayed in an Airbnb within walking distance of the main plaza and famed Canyon Road, a half-mile ramble packed with art galleries in historic adobe residences.

One morning we walked over to Canyon Road via E. Palace Avenue, and I kept stopping to admire the beautiful doors and walls of homes that we passed.

We found more charmers in the historic neighborhood just off Canyon Road.

Here’s a sampling of my favorites from that pleasant walk.

Agave, adobe, and Corten steel, a match made in heaven

Canyon Road

At one of the galleries along Canyon Road, I spotted a stunning metal tree with silver-chain foliage.

Acacia is the work of Travis Seeger and Foster Talge — who happen to be Austin-area (Elgin?) artists! This is part of their collaborative Tree Series.

A smaller one is available too. I LOVE it. As it happens, 11 years ago I posted about another metal tree created by Foster Talge, which wowed me on the East Austin Studio Tour.

A different sort of sculpture, based on desert flora, made my heart skip a beat when I saw it. These botanical ceramic totems are the work of my friend Dustin Gimble, a visionary Los Angeles garden designer and artist.

Just wow. Aren’t they great?

I wrote about Dustin’s work last spring, so click for more info and pics.

Other soaring sculptural pieces rise amid tawny grasses on Canyon Road, where bigger seems to be better.

A glowing terracotta wall with arching sprays of pyracantha called out for a photo op too.

The orange berries against the salmon wall is so pretty.

Sunflowers too

And nearby, yellow dahlias with near-black leaves

Back to the art and architecture of Canyon Road, and those blue New Mexico skies

This head sculpture wears a red stripe that echoes a painted window frame.

A Rubenesque nude’s voluptuous curves remind me of the city’s curvy adobe architecture.

Metal origami sheep by Kevin Box touch noses at another gallery.

One of Kevin Box’s classics: a sculptural rendition of the rock-paper-scissors game, with an origami crane for the paper element. I’ve photographed a lot of Box’s charming work over the years, especially since he’s now exhibiting at botanical gardens around the country.

Glowing, white trunks and welcome shade from a grove of aspens

I love the paper-bag texture of this long adobe structure with a seafoam-green picket fence and sunflowers.

Swags of plastic marigolds and felted balls adorn this cobblestone house. A neon corazon light is ready to glow after dark.

Doorway decor

A golden hand door knocker. Don’t you want one now?

A pumpkin-hued adobe wall and rustic gate — gorgeous!

And a newer, more polished version — also good

The classic Santa Fe color scheme

Shadow play and fallen pears

Nedra Matteucci Galleries garden

An expansive sculpture garden at Nedra Matteucci Galleries on Paseo De Peralta was recommended to us, so we headed over when we reached the end of Canyon Road.

The gallery itself has an astonishing collection of art for sale. Outdoors, I was also amazed by the size of the garden, a shady oasis encircling a large koi pond, with many bronze sculptures of animals and human figures.

I immediately recognized some of the animal sculptures, like this drinking baby elephant by Dan Ostermiller, from an over-the-top River Oaks estate in Houston that I toured in 2014.

That River Oaks garden had this upright, prancing elephant too — he was spouting water into a round swimming pool encircled by palm trees. I never thought to encounter him again, but there you go.

And it can be yours for the low, low price of $195,000.

I’d read that Matteucci Galleries has been sold, and the owner will be relocating to a downsized gallery on Canyon Road. The property — which includes the 10,000 square foot gallery plus guest houses (where Val Kilmer, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie O, and President Gerald Ford have stayed, according to a Santa Fe New Mexican article) and the garden — will be turned into condos. I wonder if the garden and pond will survive. I hope so. But change comes to every garden. In fact it’s the only constant.

As we left the gallery and headed back to our Airbnb, I paused to admire pink hollyhocks glowing against buff-pink adobe.

I love these simple cottage flowers. Add a dusky wall and a bright blue sky, and maybe it’s all you need.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

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Digging Deeper

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Doors, gardens, art along Santa Fe’s Canyon Road appeared first on Digging.

Last week I came home from a trip to Santa Fe to find the oxblood lilies up and blazing in the back garden. Yesterday, after a weekend trip to Houston, I found a second round in fiery flower. Bonus!

Oxblood lilies (Rhodophiala bifida) are a passalong — but also purchasable — late-summer bulb from Argentina, which resettling German immigrants in the late 1800s brought to Central Texas. They love our hot, humid subtropical climate.

Aren’t they dreamy? These heralds of autumn have me dreaming of 80-degree fall weather to come.

My bulbs are elevated in the raised bed along the back of the house, which makes it easy to appreciate those red trumpets atop short stems.

Nearby,  ‘Peppy Le Pom’ dwarf pomegranate is adding hot color of its own. Notice too the hot-pink of fallen crape myrtle flowers. That crape has flushed out happily after the recent rains, and a shower of tissue-petaled pink flowers falls constantly.

But back to the star of the late-summer garden, the oxbloods.

They will soon fade, and other fall-flowering plants will take their place in the spotlight. But for now that blaze of red makes my heart sing.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post More red trumpets! appeared first on Digging.

Landscape architect James David and Gary Peese departed Austin about 5 years ago, leaving behind a 36-year-old, swoon-worthy garden that regularly starred on Open Days Tours and was covered by Martha Stewart, Architectural Digest, and, ahem, yours truly (click for my final visit). Looking for cooler weather, a smaller garden, and new adventures, the couple headed west to Santa Fe, New Mexico, buying a fixer-upper adobe home and then expanding onto the lot next door as soon as it became available, to preserve their views.

While vacationing in Santa Fe last week, I reached out to James, who generously invited me and my husband to visit his new garden on a sunny mid-morning. Knowing what a foliage-focused plantsman James is, paired with Gary’s enthusiasm for growing fruits, vegetables, and flowers, I expected their garden to be lush by high-desert standards. And it is. Narrow conifers and other trees strategically positioned for privacy point toward Santa Fe’s famously blue skies, with grasses, perennials, and curated clusters of potted plants thriving below.

Let’s start at the gravel driveway, which sits below the house (right) and guest-house casita (center). An angular wall and stairs wrapped with plants lead up to house level.

Along the driveway, a large gravelly berm with rounded boulders is James and Gary’s latest garden — a crevice/rock garden with bulbs, iris, and flowering Mojave sage (Salvia pachyphylla).

Here’s James pulling seedlings that came from a neighboring nemesis tree (I forget which one). We all have a nemesis plant, don’t we?

And here’s Betty, Gary and James’s beloved labradoodle, who accompanied us throughout the garden visit.

Mojave sage

James led us up the stairs to the casita and gave us a look inside. If you know James and Gary’s style, you know how exquisite it is: warm contemporary style with clean lines and simple, honest materials like steel and wood. Their house and casita are actually featured in the recent book Santa Fe Modern by Helen Thompson (another Austin expat in Santa Fe), which I highly recommend if you like architecture and design.

Morning glory climbing a steel-mesh railing

Behind the casita James lets loose with a mass of plants, including a surprising number of trees, which serves to visually expand the space and make the main house seem farther away. They also provide privacy from the road below.

Everything looks great against a colored wall, including the maroon flowers and blue-green stems of an ornamental grass.

More blue-greens appear in upright conifers and on a fruiting tree at left.

Pink Japanese anemones grow closer to the house, reminding me of Jenny Stocker’s former garden in Austin.

A bumblebee at work on one flower

James had an impressive collection of potted plants at his old garden, and he does here too. Beautiful terracotta pots from Italy mix with rough stone troughs and modern concrete or steel, many filled with succulents and alpines. Notice too that pretty paver path in mauve and purple hues.

Entering the back garden, I felt at home seeing their coyote fence, which are as common in Santa Fe as they are here in Austin. A coyote fence is made of straight posts of juniper/cedar with shaggy bark left on, wired together palisade-style. An almost monumental steel-beam arbor spans the length of the space, and James and Gary are training an apple tree and roses to grow along it. Vegetables and herbs grow in a raised bed along the fence.

Ripening red apples harmonize with the rusty steel beam.

I saw such a bounty of fruit trees throughout Santa Fe in late August.

Red roses reaching for the light

The steel arbor wraps around the patio, where a long mahogany table and burnt-orange chairs offer a place for outdoor dining…

…conveniently located near the door to the kitchen.

Gary wanted to show me something — a reminder of Austin and its revered BBQ master Aaron Franklin.

Yep, they have a Franklin BBQ smoker — bringing Austin BBQ to Santa Fe.

The garden continues wrapping around the house, and I admired pink roses…

…golden brugmansia…

…and nearly black tomatoes on the vine.

Gary plucked one and offered a taste.

Gary is nuts about his tomatoes and his dahlias, and he’s crammed in as many as he can. I’m dahlia-crazed myself, so I got hung up here taking pics of ‘Chocolate Sundae’ dahlia and others as James bided his time, occasionally trying to move us along to plants he is crazy about.

But I mean, these are so good, especially as they harmonize with the brugmansia in the background.

More!

OK, last one, I promise. (But if you need a dahlia fix, visit my post from last fall at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.)

A couple of James’s favorites, displayed with elegant restraint on glazed blocks along the path.

Under a long, skinny shade pergola, James displays dozens more of his potted plants.

They live here in the warm months…

…and in late fall move into the greenhouse.

The doorway view reveals more pots and plants atop a low gabion wall.

Inside the greenhouse, Gary is hanging tomatoes to finish ripening out of reach of fruit-stealing critters.

A blue spruce contrasts with sunny yellow flowers.

Black cohosh, I think

A rectangular formal lawn is a familiar element to those who knew James and Gary’s Austin garden. This small lawn is a place to rest the eye amid the densely planted garden, plus it can double as an outdoor entertaining space.

Sweet peas (in late August!) clamber over a rustic fence.

A starkly modern wall of stacked cinderblocks, with one narrow window offering a peek inside, hides the greenhouse from view as it runs the length of the lawn.

Stone trough planters, some sunk into the ground, hold James’s cacti in a gravel garden with sempervivum and other alpine plants.

And another sunken-planter-and-stone vignette, this one less desert-like.

A flagstone path with maroon and purplish rocks echoes the more formal pavers of the dining patio.

Heading back uphill we came to an elevated, steel-framed koi pond, with a trickling trough balanced at one end on wooden poles.

The koi were eager to be fed, and Gary obliged.

A closer look at the suspended stone trough

More of James’s beautiful pots, with Gary’s dahlias above

A young tree is being trained to arch over the path in a charming touch.

Another look at James’s potted collection under the pergola

And here’s that sweet girl and garden companion Betty.

Framing a door, terracotta pots with trailing creeping Jenny are spotlit by the clear New Mexico light.

James invited us to see the interior of their home, which is gorgeous with handmade furniture, lovely art, and an incredible steel “origami” staircase (see Santa Fe Modern for pics). A balcony yields a bird’s-eye view of the back garden, including the shade pergola, greenhouse, dahlias, and formal lawn.

I believe this upper deck is off the primary bedroom. Check out those mint-green mesh chairs. I wish I’d tried one out.

A view of the Jemez Mountains in the distance

A mesh screen offers a windowed view of the front garden.

James and Gary couldn’t be more generous about sharing their homes and gardens, and I’m so happy to have had the chance to see them again, meet Betty, and tour their Santa Fe digs. Thanks, James and Gary!

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post James David and Gary Peese’s new garden in New Mexico appeared first on Digging.

I vamoosed from the Texas heat last week for the drier, cooler, high-desert climate of Santa Fe. It was a great trip, but the whole time I was away I fretted that I was missing one of my late-summer favorites at home: the eruption of oxblood lilies that pop up virtually overnight following a late-summer rain. I dashed outside as soon as we returned and saw dozens of blazing red trumpets clustered amid the soap aloes. Perfect timing!

Oxblood lily (Rhodophiala bifida) is an Argentine bulb that thrives in Austin’s hot, humid subtropical climate. It lies dormant all summer until the days grow shorter and a triggering rain arrives, and then boom! — there they are.

Like the Texas bluebonnet, they are small in stature but pack a punch when massed together.

You can increase your bulb count by digging them up and dividing them in late fall or winter, after they’ve bloomed but before the green leaves (which sprout later) disappear. I never think to divide mine, however. They’re now growing under spiny aloe arms, so that also dissuades me. They don’t seem to mind. The trumpets blaze on, year after year. I’m happy to have seen them, these heralds of fall.

Datura has also responded to the rain with its gigantic white trumpets, which unfurl at night to scent the garden in sweetness.

After exploring Georgia O’Keeffe country in New Mexico, the datura, which she painted, reconnects me to that glorious landscape. I’ll have pictures for you soon.

For now I’m luxuriating — as is the garden — in the gradual relenting of summer. It ain’t over ’til it’s over. But it’s a start.

The hummingbirds that visit my garden daily surely appreciate the bounty of reawakened flowers too. We made it through.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Explosion of oxblood lilies and datura appeared first on Digging.

This week I’m on the acclaimed podcast Cultivating Place: Natural History & the Human Impulse to Garden, talking with host Jennifer Jewell about building a gardening community, how I got into gardening, my Garden Spark speaker series, gardening in the challenging conditions of Central Texas, coping with climate change, meeting Lady Bird Johnson one time, and my top 5 plants for Austin gardens. I hope you’ll take a listen!

Here’s the link to my interview at Cultivating Place, which runs approximately 50 minutes.

My thanks to Jennifer for her interest in my work and for having me on her show! Check out Jennifer’s terrific books, if you don’t know them: The Earth in Her Hands and Under Western Skies. Next week, Jennifer will be back in Austin (virtually) to air her interview with Barton Springs Nursery owners Amy Hovis and Willy Glenn. Barton Springs Nursery has long been my go-to nursery, especially for native plants, and it’s also the generous sponsor of my Garden Spark talks, so I’m eager to hear Amy and Willy’s interview with Jennifer.

Thanks for taking the time to listen to my thoughts about gardening, my friends!

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

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Digging Deeper

It’s succulent time at Austin Cactus & Succulent Society’s Fall Show & Sale on September 3rd and 4th at Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden. Includes a plant show, plant and pottery sales, silent auction, and plant raffles. Open 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with paid admission to the garden.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post I’m on Cultivating Place talking about growing community, coping with climate change, and my fave plants appeared first on Digging.

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 much less — bringing fallish relief. Let this be the end of the summer from hell! Temps in the low to mid-90s I can deal with.

But before summer flies away (haha, it’ll stick around until October), I’ll share a handful of images from July and August that I’ve been hanging onto. I didn’t spend much time in the garden this summer, but when I did I always found moments of beauty and interest, despite my reluctance to get sweaty. Like this bumblebee zooming around in the purple skullcap and Mexican feathergrass (top image).

If I zoom out you can see a mound of purple skullcap (Scutellaria wrightii) growing at the edge of the hellstrip, sandwiched between two driveways and the street. This tough little native was unfazed by the brutal summer and provided nectar for the bumbles every day.

In the island bed, the ‘Old Mexico’ prickly pear has finally arisen from the dead — i.e., the 2021 Snowpocalypse, which killed it back to its dinosaur-bone stump. It’s almost back to its mature size and will soon resume its plan for world domination.

‘Vanzie’ whale’s tongue agave is looking a little peaked after the summer’s blistering heat, with yellowing, sun-scalded leaves. My other whale’s tongues didn’t react this way, even in more sun. Weird.

Succulents enjoying the bright shade of the front porch, and color-coordinating with the Wasabi paint color of the front door.

Mexican honeysuckle (Justicia spicigera) is finally back, having died to the roots last winter. The welcome mat is back out for hummingbirds.

But man oh man, did this understory planting suffer this summer. Despite some extra watering across its root zone, the big Japanese maple is showing curled, crispy leaves, and a few large branches have gone entirely brown. Ugh. Under its canopy, the giant ligularia is shrunken and sad, although I think it will bounce back this fall. Some of the ‘Everillo’ sedges in more sun have gone brown. This is a tricky space because the roof dumps tons of water here when it rains, and water runs off from the driveway into a dry creek, so in normal summers these thirstier plants do well. But this was not a normal summer.

Happily, on the other side of the front walk (in the background), the supremely dry-loving plants in the gravel garden are doing great with no more attention than usual: Agave ovatifolia, red yucca, toothless sotol, dwarf myrtle, and Anacacho orchid tree.

I’ve hardly ventured into the side garden, I’m sorry to say. Last I looked, it was doing fine with no attention from me whatsoever, with a once-a-week automatic watering.

In the back garden, plumbago loves the heat and is blooming its head off.

Moby Jr, a bulbil-clone from my original whale’s tongue agave, contentedly floats in a sea of silver ponyfoot in one of my old stock-tank planters.

Lanceleaf blanketflower (Gaillardia aestivalis) has gone to seed, but the white puffs on tan stems are pretty too.

Bat-face cuphea (Cuphea llavea) is blooming and happy, and representing for Austin’s bat obsession.

‘Moonglow’ mangave survived last winter’s deep freeze even in a container I left outside. The original plant died to the roots (no surprise), but I found a few pups under the dead leaves this spring. I kept weeding out pups as they grew until this solitary specimen was left. Will I make the effort to protect it this winter? Probably not. It’s heavy and there’s nowhere to put it, and it’s easier to just replace certain plants as necessary. Or maybe I’ll find more pups!

Soap aloe (Aloe maculata) has been hardy along a south-facing wall for over a decade. It just keeps pumping out the flowers too.

The speckled leaves are pretty even when not in bloom.

‘Quadricolor’ agave is another sun-or-bright-shade beauty. I grow it in a container and left it out last winter too. I can’t remember if it survived or if this is a pup replacement.

Native datura (Datura wrightii) returns each spring, either from the roots or volunteer seedlings. It can get droopy during drought, but it recovers quickly with a little watering or rain. Yes, it’s deadly poisonous, but only if you eat it. The deer don’t, so I can grow it out front too. I love its salad-plate-sized, night-blooming, fragrant flowers.

Hawk moths love to nectar in them too.

I’m looking forward to cooler, patio-sitting days ahead. Will September be the new October this year? That would be a nice break after this summer. Am I counting on it? Hah!

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

It’s succulent time at Austin Cactus & Succulent Society’s Fall Show & Sale on September 3rd and 4th at Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden. Includes a plant show, plant and pottery sales, silent auction, and plant raffles. Open 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with paid admission to the garden.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Have we outlasted the heat-wave summer? appeared first on Digging.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a Texas-swing Field to Vase dinner at a flower farm in Blanco as the guest of Debra Prinzing, founder of Slow Flowers, which advocates for using American-grown flowers in the U.S. floral industry. Debra is also co-founder, with Robin Avni, of a boutique publishing company called BLOOM Imprint, which showcases floral personalities, creatives, farmers, and artisans.

Their latest publication is the beautiful book Black Flora: Profiles of Inspiring Black Flower Farmers + Florists by Teresa J. Speight. Teri is a garden-writer friend of mine — her website is Cottage in the Court — and she’ll be speaking at my Garden Spark speaker series in October. So I was excited to read her new book!

I’m not familiar with the floral-design or flower-farming industries, but that’s not a prerequisite for enjoying the book, which is really about people, specifically Black people in the U.S. who grow and/or work with flowers. Teri shares the inspiring stories of 23 floral creatives and growers, highlighting the work of Black entrepreneurs in an industry that can seem very White.

Black Flora shows just how diverse floristry actually is, not only in terms of numbers of Black business owners but also through the variety of work they do. Teri profiles botanical artists, floral designers, floral activists, flower farmers, creative directors, and horticultural therapists from across the U.S.

Along with the stories of each person’s journey into the floral industry, the book showcases gorgeous examples of their work. It’s sure to inspire young people of color — or anyone considering jumping into floristry from another career path — to think of floral design or flower farming as something they can do too.

Black Flora is a beautiful book about people and the flowers and work they love, who have long been overlooked as Black creatives in a largely White industry. Their stories are uplifting and inspiring. As Teri writes, “[Y]ounger generations of Black plant-lovers are seeking inspiring examples of successful floral artists and entrepreneurs. When they see their potential — through the representation of people who look like them in farming and floristry — possibilities for the future enable their dreams.”

Disclosure: I bought a copy of Black Flora and reviewed it at my own discretion and without any compensation. This post, as with everything at Digging, is my personal opinion. Photos from Black Flora courtesy of BLOOM Imprint.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

It’s succulent time at Austin Cactus & Succulent Society’s Fall Show & Sale on September 3rd and 4th at Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden. Includes a plant show, plant and pottery sales, silent auction, and plant raffles. Open 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with paid admission to the garden.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Read This: Black Flora appeared first on Digging.

If you need a moment of Zen, or for gratitude and joy to lift your spirit, get yourself to Houston to visit…a hamburger place. Not just any hamburger place. At Becks Prime at 2615 Augusta Drive, near the intersection with Westheimer Road, you’ll find two absolutely enormous, tentacle-limbed live oaks behind the restaurant. Even if you know they’re back there, it’s a jolt to see them in their long-armed, horizontal glory. And if you come across them by surprise, as I did, you may just walk around these stunning trees exclaiming Wow! and taking dozens of photos while other diners noshing on hamburgers and fries indulgently smile at you.

Becks does these trees proud by serving up one of the best hamburgers I’ve ever tasted, cooked to order and grilled over mesquite wood coals. Get the fries too. Then settle in under the trees to enjoy them. No matter how hot it is outside, or how cold (haha, this is Houston), you have zero excuse to sit indoors and miss communing with these trees.

Becks has protected the trees — and obliged tree worshippers and outdoor lovers — with three large decks that float over the live oaks’ root zones. Water-permeable gravel paths and expanses of low-maintenance Asian jasmine instead of lawn (or paving!) mean there’s no need for mowing, weed-whacking, chemicals, and all the things giant live oaks would rather avoid.

Becks claims the trees are more than 400 years old, and I believe them. That means the seedlings were growing in the early 1600s, when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. When the Taj Mahal was built.

By the time Houston was founded in 1837, these trees had matured into 200-year-old specimens. Houston boomed and went bust multiple times over the next 200 years, and the trees kept on growing, eventually snaking their giant limbs across the ground like really big live oaks do. Meanwhile the city grew all around them — a city that famously eschews zoning laws for development. Hurricanes and flooding wreaked havoc on the city many times. Droughts came and went. Somehow the trees dodged all those bullets.

When Becks Prime purchased the property in 1988, according to The Buzz Magazines, “the tree limbs were all resting on the ground. [Becks] had a 210-ton crane come in and move the limbs up on the wooden stilts you see today. It was quite a delicate process. ‘They had a stethoscope, like from a doctor’s office,’ said Alice [Sarmiento, Becks Prime marketing manager]. ‘Someone was listening to the tree [with the stethoscope]….If they heard a crack they said, Stop!’”

According to an informational sign, the restaurant itself was built to float 18 inches above ground, so as not to disturb the tree roots. A drive-through lane, which meanders under the expansive tree canopy, is paved with hand-laid pavers rather than concrete or asphalt.

The trees are astonishing, and it’s even more amazing that they’ve thrived in the middle of a bustling city, with tall buildings and busy streets all around.

Becks has made it easy and accessible to enjoy them, and they should be commended for being such good stewards of the trees.

My daughter recently moved to Houston for an internship, so I’ll have even more reason to go back soon and commune with the Becks trees.

Next time maybe I’ll go in the evening, to see the light-wrapped grapevine balls hanging from the branches all lit up.

But a daytime visit is awfully good too, when you can relax under the trees’ light-filtering canopy.

Good food. A vibrant city. And magnificent trees. It’s time to go to Houston again.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

It’s succulent time at Austin Cactus & Succulent Society’s Fall Show & Sale on September 3rd and 4th at Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden. Includes a plant show, plant and pottery sales, silent auction, and plant raffles. Open 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with paid admission to the garden.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Enormous live oaks wow at Becks Prime in Houston appeared first on Digging.

I like to share interesting art that I’ve found in my wanderings around Austin. This art excursion occurred back in March, when I explored a few East Austin galleries and public art pieces. Here’s an exhibit I really enjoyed at Cloud Tree Studios & Gallery: Austin artist Valerie Fowler‘s swirling, vivid, almost trippy paintings of the natural world.

Landscapes by Valerie Fowler

The exhibit of her covid-times paintings was called Earthshift: She Will Have Her Way With You.

This one may have been my favorite.

I love this one too.

And check out the big folding panels. Check out Valerie’s interview on Central Texas Gardener for more info about her.

Hola Friend mural by Will Hatch Crosby

Afterward, driving around East Austin, I spotted this creature-feature, ode-to-friendship mural at the southwest corner of Cesar Chavez and Robert T Martinez Jr Street. Will Hatch Crosby painted Hola Friend, he says, “to celebrate the cultural diversity of East Austin, and [it’s] also a tribute to Daniel Johnston’s iconic ‘Hi, How Are You’ mural.”

It’s irresistible, with a scaly, octopus-like creature popping up to say hello to a broken-horned, scaly, long-tailed bull.

This is all of us, re-emerging after the challenging last few years.

Hi, Amigo!

Bison Heart by Chris Levack

Turning onto E. Cesar Chavez Street, I spotted a large metal heart with a buffalo framed out in metal and filled with cedar logs. OK, gotta stop and take a closer look. It turns out this is a piece by artist and builder Chris Levack, whose organic-inspired work I’ve photographed in various gardens.

Chris writes:

“This is one of the 11 Hearts on East Cesar Chavez. [Eleven] of us artists took large, metal hearts crafted by @magicalt73 and built our own vision onto them. My idea was based on the transitory nature of this street. Before it was 1st Street it was the main horse trail into town. Way before that it was a bluff overlooking the Colorado River where tens of thousands of bison would traverse the riverbed between the Blackland Prairie and the Hill Country. The juniper branches were culled from just upstream.”

@Levack_Outdoors

In other words, it’s a ghost bison, evoking Austin’s natural history.

Tire planters at Lou’s

It wouldn’t be an art crawl without a drive-by of some funky Austin plantings. At a stoplight I spotted these stacked-tire planters of cactus and yuccas at Lou’s, a restaurant located where a tire shop used to be.

These plants are road warriors, in planters to match.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

It’s succulent time at Austin Cactus & Succulent Society’s Fall Show & Sale on September 3rd and 4th at Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden. Includes a plant show, plant and pottery sales, silent auction, and plant raffles. Open 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with paid admission to the garden.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post East Austin art safari appeared first on Digging.

If you’re a member of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, you’ll soon find the Fall 2022 magazine Wildflower in your mailbox. I hope you’ll take the time to read two articles I wrote, including the cover story celebrating the Wildflower Center’s 40th anniversary and telling its inspiring story. For that article I had the honor of interviewing founder Lady Bird Johnson’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson, and she was every bit as gracious with her time and interest as I remember Lady Bird was when I ran into her at the Wildflower Center long ago, with my young children in tow. Luci is also a terrific storyteller about her famous mother, and I shared a few of her anecdotes in the article.

I also had the pleasure of interviewing executive director Lee Clippard for the article, which is called “A Place and a Promise” from a quote that Lee gave me. I first met Lee as a fellow garden blogger many years ago. His blog The Grackle, while no longer updated, is still online, and I’ve learned a lot from it. When he rose to directorship of the Wildflower Center, I was delighted and not at all surprised. The Center is lucky to have him.

My second article, “Homeland,” tells the history of the land that the Wildflower Center sits on and draws its power from. It begins with the Center’s official land acknowledgement, which recognizes the Indigenous peoples who originally lived here, and it follows the history of the land up to the present day.

I moved to Austin in 1994, the year before the Wildflower Center moved to its current location, and I’ve been a regular visitor ever since. The Wildflower Center helped shape me as a gardener and as a Texan who loves this state’s rugged natural beauty. I’m inspired by the example of Mrs. Johnson and those working at the Wildflower Center today to protect our native plants and help us see the treasures we have in our own backyards — plants that make Texas look like Texas, that create the habitats needed by wild creatures, that can help restore land and bring springs back to life, and that are likely to adapt better to the extremes of climate change than exotic plants that require more coddling.

There’s a lot dividing us right now, in Texas and across the U.S. But as Lady Bird Johnson knew from her advocacy for the preservation of native plants, “The nature we are concerned with ultimately is human nature.” A love of plants and the land we steward together has a way of uniting us. Let’s lean into that and remember we’re all in this together.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

It’s succulent time at Austin Cactus & Succulent Society’s Fall Show & Sale on September 3rd and 4th at Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden. Includes a plant show, plant and pottery sales, silent auction, and plant raffles. Open 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with paid admission to the garden.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post I’m writing for Wildflower on 40th anniversary of Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center appeared first on Digging.

For my final post about the Madison Fling back in June, I’ll share the Thai Garden, a surprisingly exotic-looking space at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. First, that glimmering golden pavilion!

Called a sala, such a pavilion “is a common structure in Thailand generally used as a shelter from rain and heat. Olbrich’s pavilion is more ornate than most roadside salas in Thailand and represents those found at a temple or on a palace grounds. However, Olbrich’s pavilion is not a religious structure.”

As Olbrich’s website further explains, “The pavilion was a gift to the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the Thai Government and the Thai Chapter of the Wisconsin Alumni Association….[It] was built in Thailand, then disassembled and packed in shipping crates. The pavilion traveled seven weeks by sea, then by rail to Chicago, and to Madison by truck. Nine Thai artisans traveled to Madison to reassemble the pavilion after building it in Thailand. It took three weeks to reconstruct.”

The yellow roof tiles and gold-leaf adornments glow against a bright blue sky.

A stone patio extends around it, as does a black, mirror-like pool. Dark pots display vividly colored bromeliads, sedges, bananas, and other tropical plants.

A view across the raised pool

Another pool, a contemporary rectangle of river rock under a sheet of clear water, with a pyramidal fountain at one end, draws your eye out to the surrounding garden.

What a beautiful garden structure.

The surrounding garden relies on plants that are hardy in Wisconsin’s cold winters, but that still create a tropical vibe. “The Thai Garden surrounding the Pavilion,” the garden’s website explains, “emulates a lush, tropical garden with Wisconsin-hardy plants. Ornamental grasses, some reaching up to 12 feet tall, and several hardy bamboos are essential in creating a tropical look. Large-leafed shrubs and trees are pruned to give them the look of plants in a typical Thai garden.”

Lilies add rich color among pieces of Thai art and sculpture.

Iris in bloom with a chartreuse grass or sedge

A potted banana is backed by a large-leaved hardy tree and alliums.

Hot-colored plants hold their own alongside the golden sala.

A study in yellow-green, accented with a simple vessel of water

What little bird is this, I wonder?

A sculpture of Naga, a snake deity, guards a creek-spanning bridge that delivers you into the Thai garden. That water crossing makes the tropicalesque Thai garden feel appropriately a world away from its Midwestern setting.

This ends my coverage of the Madison Fling! For a look back at a meadowy gravel garden and ponds at Olbrich, click here. At the end of that post and subsequent ones, you’ll find links to my other Madison Fling posts. Happy virtual garden visiting!

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Thai sala and tropicalesque garden at Olbrich Botanical Gardens appeared first on Digging.

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 consistent depth, spread 4-to-5 inches of clean, washed gravel, and plant directly into the gravel, teasing off much of the soil from the root ball to encourage roots to grow down into the soil, and to prevent weed seeds from finding bare soil that gives them a foothold.

Jeff Epping, director of horticulture at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin, has been leading the gravel-garden movement in the Midwest (along with Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennial Farm). His personal garden is gravel-planted, and he’s created multiple gravel-planted gardens at Olbrich. According to Margaret Roach, who interviewed Epping for a recent New York Times article, gravel-planted gardens “may require 80 percent less work.”

I’m curious to know if anyone is planting this way in Central Texas, and how it’s working out in our much hotter, drier climate. Here in Austin I see a lot of desert-style gardens mulched with a layer of decomposed granite (DG), and they quickly fail unless somebody’s out there diligently weeding Bermudagrass, spurge, nutgrass, purslane, and other weed seedlings. What we’re talking about here is different. The gravel is 3/16″ to 1/2″ and angular — and, crucially, not DG, a medium that weed seeds love.

I will just add that I use DG for a low-cost path material in my own garden, and it’s useful. Just be sure to tamp it tightly several inches deep to discourage weeds and remove weed seedlings as soon as they appear.

I had the opportunity to see one of Olbrich’s gravel gardens firsthand during the Madison Fling in June. I found it lovely even out of peak bloom season, when the predominant color was green. (See the NYT article for a photo of it in peak bloom.) Gravel paths meander through dense tufts of prairie dropseed, coneflowers, and alliums in this sunny space.

A flowering, golden-leaved yucca accents a pair of Adirondacks nestled against a hedge.

The long view — an inviting path through tightly knitted plants, with a vertical hedge of trees screening the way ahead.

I can’t remember now if this is the same garden or a similar one. A mound of chartreuse plants attracts your eye…

…to a hidden seating area for two — so inviting!

A few coneflowers were blooming.

A young red-winged blackbird hopped along the path and perched on path-edging hoops, waiting, I expect, for mom or dad to show up with a meal.

Could this be Papa red-winged blackbird?

The Perennial Garden with a boulder-strewn pond was alive with birdsong. I spotted a Baltimore oriole here too.

And another young red-winged blackbird

There’s nothing like water to draw the birds.

A toothy silver sculpture — or maybe the backbone of a subterranean creature? — appears in a green meadow.

Another meadowy seating area

Prairie dropseed grass makes a billowy but peaceful setting for a couple of chairs.

Wouldn’t this make a lovely small patio for a residential backyard — or front yard — too?

Up next: The golden Thai sala and tropical garden at Olbrich. For a look back at Olbrich’s planted plaza, fountains, and rose garden, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

It’s succulent time at Austin Cactus & Succulent Society’s Fall Show & Sale on September 3rd and 4th at Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden. Includes a plant show, plant and pottery sales, silent auction, and plant raffles. Open 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with paid admission to the garden.

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Meadow garden in gravel at Olbrich Botanical Gardens appeared first on Digging.

For Part 2 of my visit to Olbrich Botanical Gardens during June’s Madison Fling, I’ll show you the Rose Garden. I confess the words “rose garden” never perk up my ears. Sure, I like roses OK, but so many rose gardens are really rose ghettos, planted in a jelly-bean assortment of colors, with few companion plants and leggy, thorny stems fully visible. No thanks. Happily, Olbrich’s 2-acre rose garden embraces companion plants as well as interesting tropical and subtropical plants. There’s also an observation tower and another cool feature: island beds in the plaza paving, which soften all that hardscape and add pocket-garden interest.

The 2-story tower with its tall, triangular roof overlooks the plaza garden…

…and a long fountain, which directs your eye across a circular event lawn to a blue lake in the distance.

Zooming in on those pocket gardens in the plaza paving. I spy flowering yuccas. Let’s take a closer look!

I love this. The pocket gardens bring this large space down to a residential scale, don’t they? The flowering yucca is ‘Ivory Tower’ Yucca filamentosa. That seems rather appropriate in a garden with an actual tower. I didn’t get an ID for the other spiky plant at left. Notice, though, those pretty planters on either side of the bench.

The conifer-esque, bonsai-looking plants are actually succulents. Spiller succulents fill out below, along with what looks like blue fescue grass. Pretty!

I took a panorama shot here to try to capture the plaza’s expanse.

More ‘Ivory Tower’ yuccas in flower

The long view across the fountain to the tower, with more pocket beds at each end of the fountain

Aha, a rose! See it at left? But wow, the glowing yellows and big tropical leaves are really grabbing my attention. There’s a nice change of paving for the seating area too.

More yellow

This combo grabbed me too: sparkler-shaped alliums gone to seed, their copper hue harmonizing beautifully with short, eggplant-purple tuteurs. Actually, now that I look closely, the tuteurs aren’t painted wood but metal. Either way, a nice color scheme.

This garden puts tuteurs to beautiful use. (So did the Rotary Botanical Gardens.)

Tall tuteurs painted pale blue-green give structure and rhythm to a mass of pink roses, bananas (!), and shell ginger, among other plants.

The whole space is rather eye-catching.

Now let’s walk through the tower, where a series of large, grassy dish planters welcome you.

Stepping through the portal under the tower, you enter a smaller hedged garden. Planters continue the tropical vibe against a green wall of foliage.

Cordyline and sticks-on-fire sizzle.

The sticks-on-fire planter — there are two actually — is a stunner.

They bookend a Prairie-style wall fountain with slabs of stone.

I admired this vertical bromeliad/tillandsia display, created by attaching the air plants to a fine-mesh screen that’s hung on a lattice.

This same bromeliad screen recently inspired Loree of Danger Garden to create something similar in her own garden.

This collection of similarly potted mangaves speaks to me — what a simple yet effective way to display them.

Mangaves are the “it” plant at botanical gardens right now. They pop up in unique displays wherever I go, from Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens to Chanticleer to Houston Botanic Garden.

Another lovely succulent container alongside a bench

Looking up you see the ramped access to the tower. Let’s go up.

Conical green planters hang from the rail and bring color and plants up to the second level.

The ramp offers a nice overhead view of the hedged courtyards. This is the one with the sticks-on-fire planters and wall fountain.

And this one has the mangave collection on stone plinths…

…as well as a striking pink tree.

A stone lion reclines atop a stone wall with a ginkgo espaliered along it. A dove had made itself at home atop his mane.

Departing the rose garden, I enjoyed a handful of tall bronze cordylines spaced along a curving walk.

Their height and shaggy, round “heads” make it easy to imagine them as fellow travelers along the garden path.

Up next: A meadow-style gravel garden that could be replicated for a no-mow home garden. For a look back at Olbrich Botanical Gardens’ meadow, event, and herb gardens, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Planted plaza, fountains, and rose garden at Olbrich Botanical Gardens appeared first on Digging.

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 botanical garden 12 years ago, in the fall when big grasses were in bloom. It was fun to see it in early summer this go-around.

My pre-Fling visit occurred on a blazingly sunny and rather hot Thursday. During our official Fling visit on Saturday, drizzle and cloudy skies dimmed the scene. Two different moods. You’ll see pics from both days in this and my upcoming posts about Olbrich.

Olbrich always has interesting displays of tropical plants in containers — and on wire trellises. Check out the tillandsias and bromeliads displayed vertically on the wire mesh behind this bold collection of nearly black and green tropicals.

What a goth garden with those moody hues. And that tillandsia screen — what a clever way to display them. Loree of Danger Garden recently ran with this idea in her own garden.

The Event Garden has a tropical vibe with palms and bananas adding height among flowering perennials and annuals.

Nearly black millet continues the moody color scheme.

Orange makes a strong contrast.

A graceful old tree

And the lovely flowers of Carolina allspice

Weeping mulberry, I think. I love these droopy trees that offer a hideaway under their leafy skirts.

A boulder pyramid stands out in a meadowy bed. What a clever use of rocks dug up when making a garden.

In the Herb Garden, birch branches bound with sticks or bamboo make tall tuteurs in a pair of pots.

Golden goodness with tiger eyes sumac and other yellows

A closer look

The Birch Walk is lined with 100 native paper birches. White-flowering oakleaf hydrangea echoes their ghostly hue.

A beautiful arbor offers shady bench seating.

This is interesting: an old cauldron filled with water and made into a reflective mirror, with broken chunks of a carved stone baluster piled around it. Edged with white stone blocks that look like teeth! And with a crazy pattern of brick paving around the whole thing. Someone is having creative fun!

Megan of Far Out Flora taking a picture of Natasha of We Sow We Grow, both first-time Flingers

I also ran into Anneliese of CobraHead and Teri of Cottage in the Court. Teri will be coming to Austin in October to speak at Garden Spark!

More birches and a fern stumpery

A cool stone sculpture

An English-style meadow garden with spring-flowering trees, low-maintenance fescue grass left shaggy and long, and bulbs that pop up through the grass to bloom in spring.

“The grasses don’t require supplemental watering or fertilizer and are mowed just twice a year — once in late spring and again in late fall,” according to the garden’s website.

Clematis was king here too, as in the other gardens we visited during the Fling. This dark pink one is a beauty.

Pendant purple is lovely too.

Up next: The Rose Garden, observation tower, and fountain plaza displaying mangaves, plus another tillandsia screen. For a look back at the glowing, rainy-day garden of Cindy Fillingame, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

__________________________

Digging Deeper

Come learn about garden design from the experts at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, and authors a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance. Simply click this link and ask to be added. You can find this year’s speaker lineup here.

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Snapshots from Olbrich Botanical Gardens’ meadow, event, and herb gardens appeared first on Digging.

Garden Spark returns for its 6^th season on September 22, kicking off a new series of entertaining speakers — garden designers, authors, landscape architects — who’ll be sharing their expertise and ideas at in-person events here in Austin. This season we’ll be inspired to reclaim our front yards for our own enjoyment; we’ll learn about African Americans in the world of floriculture; we’ll be encouraged to create ecosystems, not just gardens; and we’ll learn how baseball — yes, baseball — can teach us something about effective plant selection. If you love gardens, design, and learning, these talks are for you.

Talks are held at Barton Springs Nursery‘s outdoor classroom (or indoors if weather necessitates) on Thursday evenings. Exact times are announced when talks go on sale, about a month in advance. I hope you’ll mark your calendar for the following dates and make plans to join us!

Note: Tickets must be purchased in advance, and talks tend to sell out quickly, so don’t miss out. Subscribe to Garden Spark’s email list to be notified as soon as tickets go on sale. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

September 22 – Lorie Kinler and Michael Kinler

Reclaim the Front Yard: From Just-For-Show to Private Retreat

Most front yards are strictly visual. The owner never even uses it. Given up to the public street, these expanses of lawn do little but waste resources and energy. Let’s reclaim our front yards as a space to actively enjoy! Lorie and Michael Kinler of Kinler Landscape Architecture will show us projects that rethink traditional front yards – from the lawn to foundation plantings to the driveway and more. By reducing or removing the lawn and perhaps reconfiguring parking, we can make the approach to our homes more inviting. Using native plants instead of typical foundation shrubs, we create a sense of place and resiliency. Seating areas and plant-filled courtyards give us a reason to hang out and enjoy the front yard.

Speaker Bios

Lorie has always loved art, so after finishing high school in Texas she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Hunter College in Manhattan. Living in New York City helped her understand how people and places shape each other. Art and its relationship with the environment led her to the University of Texas at Arlington, where she earned a master’s in landscape architecture and met her future husband Michael, a talented designer in his own right. She continued her studies by interning at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa and worked for the SWA Group. Lorie has worked with many notable architects in Fort Worth/ Dallas and led a redesign of the plantings at the Amon Carter Museum.

Michael was born in Kitchener, Ontario, and has lived in Ogden, Seattle (he still loves the Mariners and Seahawks), Portland, and Fort Worth. After earning a bachelor’s in business administration at Texas A&M, he moved to London and discovered the pleasures of not needing a car, as well as the world of art and design. He met Lorie at the University of Texas at Arlington, and they have been an unstoppable force since as the owners of Kinler Landscape Architecture (formerly Redenta’s Landscape Design) in Fort Worth.

October 20 – Teresa Speight

Black Flora: Seeds of Our Ancestors 

Teresa Speight, author of Black Flora, a new book about African Americans in the world of floriculture, tells the stories of farmers, florists, and other floral creatives who answered the call of the flowers, tapped into their passion, and listened to their hearts. There is a rich, beautiful, complex, and diverse narrative being told by African Americans and other persons of color in the floral marketplace. It is long past time to recognize their excellence and contributions to cut-flower farming and floristry, as they sow the seeds for the next generation.

Speaker Bio

Author, podcaster, and garden writer Teresa J. Speight is a proud native of Washington, DC, as well as a mother, grandmother, garden writer, and history lover. With ancestral sharecropping roots originating in North and South Carolina, she feels deeply connected with the earth. She’s honored those roots through her work as head gardener for the City of Fredericksburg, Virginia; as a founding farmer of an organic CSA farm; as founder and president of Jabali Amani Garden Collective, an online African American garden club focusing on “beautifying urban areas in our communities”; and as an estate gardener. Teresa also works to reconnect people with the soil through one-on-one garden coaching and by offering curated garden experiences for small groups.

Teresa is the author of Black Flora: Profiles of Inspiring Black Flower Farmers + Florists and co-author of The Urban Garden: 101 Ways to Grow Food and Beauty in the City. On her podcast Cottage in the Court (available on Anchor or Apple Podcasts), Teresa introduces interesting people, discovers unique places, and adds a little poetry to remind everyone to embrace the garden, as it is here for us.

November 17 – Jennifer Orr

Less Gardens, More Ecosystems!

Austin is tough​ ​– our soil is tough ​– and now our already challenging weather requires us to design for a 10- to 110-degree world. ​Jennifer Orr, founding principal at Studio Balcones, will talk about designing functional landscapes that provide habitat, are symbiotic, and can survive ​the ​harsh Central Texas​ elements. ​By prioritizing soil, grading, shading, and plant communities, we can make garden​s​ that not only survive but thrive.​ ​We’ll look at projects that go from gardeny to wild through moments​ of curated color​ ​and texture that transition to a more natural fringe and beyond, and that transform degraded areas into ​lush native prairie-plant landscapes. Well-developed ecosystems are the key to setting up our landscapes for success.

Speaker Bio

A founding principal of Studio Balcones, Jennifer brings her playful design sense, extensive plant knowledge, and deep understanding of ecological systems to each project. Jennifer’s experience ranges from large-scale green infrastructure projects to small-scale residential gardens, both urban and rural, public and private. She has 20 years of experience in the field and thrives on creating resilient landscapes that are integrated, functional, engaging, and beautiful. Jennifer is active in her community, is a mother of two, and has a great love of the Texas landscape with its unique and often challenging characteristics. She is thrilled to be working in her beloved hometown.

February 23 – Mark Word

Sentimentality vs. Reason: Baseball’s Influence on the Plant Selection Process

Choosing the “right” plants for your garden means looking beyond the basics of function, maintenance, and site adaptability. Sentimentality, appropriateness, culture, and neighborhood posture also come into play. Austin designer Mark Word explores the ways in which we can create successful gardens without a stats-driven approach.

Speaker Bio

Mark Word’s interest in art, graphic design, and botany has led to a 35-year career designing commercial and residential landscapes. The work of his Austin-based company, Word + Carr Design Group, is centered on place-making and is noted for its sensitivity to regional character. 

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How to Attend

Subscribe to Garden Spark for first dibs on tickets! Simply click this link and ask to be added.

Sponsor Thank-You

Grateful thanks to Barton Springs Nursery for sponsoring Garden Spark, providing use of their beautiful venue, and their hospitality!

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The post Garden Spark kicks off 6th season with exciting new speakers appeared first on Digging.