Succulents and More™

In part 1 of this alphabetical round-up of garden highlights from the 2018 Garden Bloggers Fling  I went from  A gaves to L ush . This installment covers the rest: M exico  to Z ilker Botanical Gardens . M exico Texas was part of Mexico until the Texas Revolution of 1836. The relationship between Texas and Mexico has always been turbulent, and in a February 2018 CBS 11/Dixie Strategies poll 57% of Texans supported Trump's border wall. But in spite of the current political animosity towards Mexico, Texas's neighbor to the south continues to be a major cultural influence: 31% of the total population of Texas is of Mexican descent and 30% of households speak Spanish at home ( source ). Mexican food—and Tex-Mex, a fusion between Mexican and American cuisine—are insanely popular, and even hard-core conservatives would change their tune if Trump slapped a tariff on the import of tequila. Food writer Lucinda Hutson 's garden, our first stop on Sunday, distills...

As I mentioned in my previous post , I spent five days in Austin, Texas recently to join 90+ kindred spirits for the 2018 Garden Bloggers Fling . We toured a dozen private gardens and several public gardens and visited a couple of nurseries. And on the day after the Fling, I had the opportunity to see even more gardens. Instead of a traditional chronological overview of what we say, I'm giving you a potpourri of Austin vignettes from A to Z. This installment covers A to L, this one M to Z. A gaves Austin and agaves go together like hands and gloves. With maybe one exception, we saw agaves in all the gardens we visited. The whale's tongue agave, Agave ovatifolia , seems to be particularly popular—no surprise there. Agave ovatifolia at Mirador Garden