Succulents and More™

Day 2 in San Diego , and the succy sights simply won't end. Wherever we go, there are spiky plants that want to be boss. It starts right at our hotel:

I'm in San Diego for a quick family trip to tour colleges with daughter #2. Once again I'm reminded of how unlikeable this city is. The weather is awful: oppressive gray skies, not a trace of sunshine, just an annoying drizzle that never seems to end. The scenery is dull and drab; in fact, there is nothing to see , nothing to do . You want proof? Here's incontrovertible proof that San Diego succs!

Many of you know Jenny Stocker through her blog Rock Rose  and are familiar with her garden in suburban Austin. But seeing photos of a garden is one thing, even if it's hundreds, if not thousands, of photos over a number of years. Visiting it in person is something else entirely. It's a somewhat surreal experience—like a lucid dream where you find yourself in a place that's both new and familiar at the same time. When I finally had the opportunity to tour Jenny's garden during the 2018 Garden Bloggers Fling , I took hundreds of photos myself. I hope that I managed to capture a few angles you haven't seen before. If you're not familiar with the Stockers, here's a brief intro. Jenny and her husband David are transplants from England who came to the US in 1967. After gardening elsewhere in Austin, they built their dream home in 2000 and started their current garden right after the house was finished. In  this post  you'll see their house and garden from a...

I've seen quite a few front yard conversions in recent years, driven by the  historic drought  as much as turf replacement rebates from local water districts and the State of California . But few conversions have been as complete and as successful as what my friend Brian has achieved at this home in Concord . Brian has gone from the quintessential suburban front yard—a rarely used expanse of front lawn and some shrubbery along the sidewalk and driveway—to a garden bursting with beauty and life: All the pollinators for whom the previous incarnation was a wasteland now have a smorgasbord that is as never-ending as the California sun. In addition, Brian's water consumption has dropped to a fraction of what it had been before. I don't think you could do much better than that. Here's a before and after: Now let's take a closer look.

Dry garden: Many of us have that. Hot color: That's something everybody needs. Garden writer, landscape designer and TV host Nan Sterman clearly thought so, too. Her new book Hot Color, Dry Garden (Timber Press 2018) puts an end, once and for all, to the misconception that water-wise gardens are a dull wasteland. In fact, she busts three popular myths right out of the gate: that "low-water landscapes are brown, lifeless, and colorless," that "low-water gardens are scrubby and scrappy rather than lush and plant-filled," and that "low-water gardens are rocks and desert."

A busy spring has morphed into a busy summer. We just got back a from a quick 4-day road trip to Southern California to tour universities daughter #2 is interested in. Getting from Northern California to Southern California involves a goodly amount of driving on freeways which at this time of year range from merely busy to downright congested. In addition, traveling the length of the Central Valley from Sacramento to Bakersfield gets boring in no time. But every now and then you see random snippets of unassuming beauty that take your breath away: Interstate 5, somewhere between nowhere and nowherer

My love for agaves is no secret. They're eye candy, they have a don't-mess-with-me attitude, and no matter where you put them—in the ground or in a pot—they make a statement that cannot be denied. Many agave species live for a long time, but when this happens, the end is near: Agave utahensis var. nevadensis , April 7, 2018 Unlike perennials, which flower over and over again, virtually all agave species flower only once. They literally put all they've got into producing that one flower stalk. Even in a small agave like the  Agave utahensis var. nevadensis above, the inflorescence is very tall in relation to the body of the agave.

It's that time of year when the echinopsis in the front yard go into flower. We only have a few, but they're still quite a sight. In the past, the flowers opened successively, prolonging the show (each flower lasts only a day, two at the most). This year, though, this Johnson's hybrid has six (!) flowers open at the same time: It's a stunning spectacle!

The first garden we visited on the 2018 Garden Bloggers Fling in Austin, TX was the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center . Established in 1982 as the National Wildflower Research Center under the auspices of actress Helen Hayes and Lady Bird Johnson it moved to its current 42-acre site in 1995 and was renamed Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in 1997. The Center acquired an additional 237 acres in 2002, enabling it to pursue "larger scale research on the ecology of the Central Texas region and how best to restore healthy landscapes in the region." In 2006, the non-profit organization became part of the University of Texas at Austin. Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, was a committed environmentalist, working to preserve public lands for future generation and to "beautify" America. She was the driving force behind 200 environmental protection laws that were passed during her husband's administration. At the entrance to the Lady Bird J...