Tag Archives: Austin

A Texas Garden with English Roots

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When I was consumed with garden fever back in the early 1980s (and finally had my “we’re staying here” house), there was a book whose pages became dog-eared from the hundreds of times I flipped back and forth gazing at glossy photos of English cottage gardens.  I dreamed that someday I’d have a garden crammed with flowers in artful combinations, yet seemingly tossed together with wild abandon. That vision informed the meadows I’d eventually have, both in Toronto and at our cottage north of the city. It was only appropriate therefore, that one of my very favourite gardens during my recent Garden Bloggers’ Fling in Austin, Texas was owned by a pair of British ex-pats and featured garden rooms full of Texas natives and self-seeding flowers that managed to give a nod simultaneously to the local vernacular and romantic English cottage garden style.

Jenny and David Stocker have gardened here at the edge of hill country in southwest Austin for 17 years since they moved into their new home, which was custom-designed by the late architect Dick Clark who’s considered to be the father of Austin contemporary style.   He also designed the garden walls, which have been painted soft mocha tones that match the house. I wish I’d paid more attention to the house itself, since his intent was to align the various windows and views with the outdoor rooms.  Let’s start under the trees outside at the street, with its lovely emphasis on drought-tolerant succulents.  In this area, landscape architect Curt Arnette of Sitio Design arranged for the placement of the large ledgestones, but everything else here and throughout the gardens – including the dry streambed, below, that becomes a very wet stream during heavy Texas rains – was done by the Stockers.

But before I go any further, I want you to see what a blank slate looks like, and imagine the work that went into creating the garden I’m about to show you – given what the starting point looked like in the Stockers’ photos below.

Alright, let’s head into the garden. I loved these generous platform steps that will take us into the first garden room, the front courtyard. They also nicely accomplish a level change, and feature just a few of Jenny’s many containers.

In the front courtyard, we see the source of the dry streambed (what Jenny calls “the wet weather creek”) that empties outside.  Many kinds of agaves are used, including the beautiful whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia) below.

The millstone-like water feature at left, below, was a chance find – the abandoned base of a basketball stand – in a back alley near the Stockers’ son’s house in Dallas. It took two people to load it onto their truck, it looks stunning here.

The courtyard features a rich profusion of plants that seem to thrive in the thin soil including many succulents and self-seeding flowers.  Notice the gravel mulch and liberal use of stones (many were here before the garden was made).

The Stockers love eating and relaxing outdoors, so the garden features several places where they can do that, like the niche below.

Artichoke agave (A. parryi var. truncata) is one of my favourite succulents.

The garden walls are perfect for ornaments.

Containers – always pebble-mulched – are a mixture of succulents and English favourites like foxglove.

Can you imagine how lovely it would be to spend time under that perfumed brugmansia, perfectly placed for inhaling?

All the garden rooms feature their own collections of artful accessories. “You can’t just have plantings,” Jenny said to one interviewer.

I loved the face peering out of the hedge.

Though the rain that had fallen in torrents a few hours earlier at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center had now subsided, plants were still wet. This is lovely Agave desmettiana ‘Variegata’.

If there’s a theme in the garden, besides amazing plants, it’s rock. As Jenny has said: “I love to work with rocks, of which we have plenty, and they form the backbone of the garden. My husband, David, is my rock man and has hunted out some amazing rocks and done some great rockwork. I was on site every day during construction, saving rocks suitable for making the drystone walls.”

So let’s go see the stone wall Jenny made in the next garden room, the English Garden.  There it is in the background, Jenny’s dry-stacked wall made from flat rock gathered as the house was being constructed.  This garden’s motif is circular, from the concentric edgings of brick encircling the birdbath garden…

…. to the circular flagstone-and-brick dining patio…..

…. to the circular paving stones and the spheres that sit in the gravel.

As in any good English cottage garden, there are lots of self-seeding flowers here, like biennial foxglove…..

….. and Texas natives such as blackfoot daisy (Melampodium leucanthum).

I’m sure that Jenny’s garden attracts a lot of birds. That’s Virginia creeper on the wall behind the sweet birdhouse.

The ornamented wall near the next room sets up a galactic theme……

…. which is expanded on in the saying above the arch.  Live by the sun, love by the moon. Indeed!  Notice the change in paver materials between garden rooms – all very subtle, but designed to enhance.

Let’s go down the stairs to yet another level, past another pretty collection of potted plants and an inviting teak bench…..

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….. into the appropriately named sunken garden, aka the pool garden. This, for me, is the full embodiment of those glossy photos I loved in those books long ago. A true cottage garden filled with a mélange of romantic blossoms that will shift and alter their companions throughout the season. The iconic Texas bluebonnets are long-gone in this photo, but that’s how things start out here in April, which you can see in this photo by Jenny’s friend and our Austin Garden Bloggers Fling co-host Pam Penick’s post from April 2015.

Sometimes, in appreciating a grand design, I forget to notice the small details. Here’s the lovely native Texan golden columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha).

It was one of the cast of May characters in Jenny’s garden, along with annual love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), blue mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea), magenta-pink sage (Salvia sp.) As Jenny notes, “I rely heavily on self-seeding plants and am more than willing to let them grow where they plant themselves, as well as passalongs from garden friends. It’s not a low-maintenance garden.”

Most of the breadseed poppies (Papaver somniferum) had already formed their seedpods….

…. but corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) were still announcing their brilliant presence. I loved the flowing urn feature here, which creates a bit of music with its splash.

What an inviting scene. Many gardens we saw in Texas were accompanied by a swimming pool, because as lovely as spring weather can be, summers are punishingly hot.  And since there are no trees inside the garden walls and the rocks do reflect the sunshine, Jenny says the garden becomes very hot in midsummer. The walls here, by the way, are not just decorative, but meant to keep out varmints, including deer.

Here’s another look at the flowery poolside meadow. This area was originally laid with old granite flagstones, so the Stockers laid Arizona sandstone on top leaving 1-inch spaces for self-seeding plants.

You can see in the background against the wall one of the large, porous limestone boulders native to the property.

There are native cacti in the gardens, including the spineless prickly-pear (Opuntia cacanapa ‘Ellisiana’).

I found Jenny in the sunken garden, chatting with fellow bloggers (her own interesting blog is called Rock Rose) and looking mightily relieved that the morning’s rain had stopped in time for our visit.

I waited for my blogging pals to take their leave of this beautiful dining area near the swimming pool – one of six seating areas Jenny and David use, depending on the time of year and day – so I could make my photo. There’s a good reason for being the last one on the bus!

At the edge of the dining area was another grouping of containers, this one featuring the agave relative Manfreda undulata ‘Chocolate Chips’.

Manfreda flowers are so interesting, especially post-Texas-rain.

The herb garden is tucked into an alcove created by the house walls, and looks beautifully wild..

Nearby, behind the wall of the swimming pool garden, sits the potager: a series of raised beds containing…..

… leafy vegetables like curly kale……

….and squash vines starting out under protective wiring….

….and tomato cages.

A long raised bed nearby contains flowers for pollinators. In early May, it abounds with larkspur (Consolida ajacis) and Verbena bonariensis.

Perfumed star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) blankets one wall of a garden shed in this area. How nice it must be to harvest veggies with that scent wafting by!

A galvanized water tank is a great idea for a water garden: small, manageable maintenance, yet a nice spot for a bird to bathe or have a sip of water.

Nearby were little vignettes, like this…..

….. and this. For me in Toronto, Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima) is a textural annual, but here it’s perennial and adds a grace note to the garden.

As always on a garden tour, the bus was waiting to take us to our next stop, so off we went in our rain-soaked shoes down the pathway beside the spineless prickly-pears. But for me, the garden of Jenny and David Stocker had been a chance to satisfy a long-held desire to enjoy time in a cottage garden filled with masses of flowers arrayed with artful abandon.

Mirador – Steel, Limestone & Design Panache in Austin

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On my recent Garden Bloggers Fling in Austin, Texas, we saw a variety of private gardens ranging from tiny, crammed-with-blossoms cottage gardens surrounding modest bungalows to expansive gardens framing large, modern homes. One that impressed me for its seamless architectural integration of house and landscape was Mirador. Both the house (designed by Jim Larue) and garden (by landscape architect Curt Arnette of Sitio Design) were finished in 2013 and are a beacon of fresh contemporary style in a neighbourhood of traditional, Mediterranean-style homes. It’s also the best example I’ve seen of using rusty Corten (COR-TEN®) weathering steel in all kinds of inventive ways in the garden. But if you read my blog on the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center which we’d visited earlier that morning, you’ll know that a lot (3 inches!) of rain had fallen by the time we trooped down the driveway to Mirador in our dripping ponchos.  My first view was of a soaked wildflower meadow spangled with blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella) arrayed in front of massive Corten planters curved against the edge of the property and filled with agaves and yuccas.

As the rain subsided, the homeowner was able to put away her umbrella and chat with us. Though she grew up on a Nebraska farm, she’s lived in Austin for 35 years and taught herself all about gardening here.  In planning the new garden, she had a wish list, much of it inspired by her travels.  “Curt and I worked really well together, so I would tell him things I wanted incorporated and he magically made it happen.”  Given that the property is downhill from the next-door neighbour, one of the challenges had been poor drainage in heavy rains, thus a deteriorating rock retaining wall built by previous owners of the property……

…… was replaced by tiered, curved Corten steel planters filled with drought-tolerant succulents. This was the view from the end of the planters closest to the house.

Look at those knife-edge steel walls. Corten, of course, is not “just” steel, but created with specific alloys that create the weathered look, while simultaneously slowing the weathering. Historically, the trademark for COR-TEN® steel was granted to the United States Steel Corporation in 1933, but it is now made by many companies.  Note all the gravel here for drainage, and the Texas native silver ponyfoot (Dichondra argentea) making a great groundcover under the agaves and beaked yuccas (Y. rostrata).

To the left of the sloping driveway was a stately, little grove of bald cypress (Taxodium distichum), a Texas native. The meadow-like turf here and throughout the property is native Habiturf lawn (buffalo grass-blue grama-curly mesquite), developed at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Further down the driveway, a long limestone planter filled with statuesque century plants (Agave americana) lined the wall of the garage.  In front is a geometric planting of muhly grass just emerging in spring from last year’s hummocks.

I’m sure those agaves would have liked a little less moisture than the monsoon that had befallen them that morning.

Fortunately, the rain slowed as we got our bearings, for this was a garden to be explored carefully – even though it felt a little wrong to wander in dark clouds and drizzle through a succulent-rich garden clearly designed for sunshine. The view below is past a guest house/studio on the left with an enclosed courtyard garden, garage on the right, towards the house with all its complex and interesting roof angles.

That Corten is so perfect here, with the pale Texas limestone and stucco palette of the house and other buildings.  The tree is Texas cedar elm (Ulmus crassifolia).

Below is an airy gate leading into the courtyard garden.

The gardens are an interesting mix of natural and formal, like this little boxwood allée.  I loved the steel wall doubling as a planter…..

…… with the wood-and-stainless-steel bench in front.  That long flower spike comes from the Texas native giant false yucca (Hesperaloe funifera).

Before we go into the courtyard, let’s walk up to the front door, past this fabulous whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia) and the casacading Palmer’s sedum (S. palmeri), its little yellow flowers nodding their soaked heads after the rain.

Look at those lovely slabs of cream limestone.  Notice that we’re still going downhill, via that small step (and it’s still raining a little). Later, we’ll see that the back of the house descends even further.

Now let’s step into the courtyard and head down the Corten-edged gravel stairs. The plants here are firecracker plants (Russellia equisetiformis), with tiny, tubular red flowers sure to attract the hummingbirds the homeowner wanted to invite into her garden.

Inside the courtyard garden, the Nebraska farm girl seems to have found the perfect marriage of abundant vegetable garden and French potager.  “My garden is mostly for my family and me to enjoy: vegetable picking with grandkids, sharing organic veggies with my daughter,” she says.

In early May, the Swiss chard looked healthy, along with self-seeding larkspur and violas. And probably the prettiest tomato cages I’ve ever seen (more Corten!)…

There are roses in the potager, too. As the homeowner says: “I wanted to have some cutting flowers and vegetables mixed in with roses. I never thought I would enjoy roses, but have fallen in love with antique roses”. She specified many for their fragrance. “Stopping to smell the roses is really a good thing.”  Though we missed the antique roses by about two weeks, there were still a few ‘Knock Out’ roses in bloom, below.

Looking in the other direction, the elegant, concrete water feature here reflects the sky (and I’m sure it brings lots of birds as well.) There’s phlomis and catmint here; the little multi-stemmed tree is Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana).  Beside it is an architectural scrim of horsetails (Equisetum hyemale)…..


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…. cleverly trapped in an enclosed space. (If you’ve grown horsetails, you’ll know why).

The courtyard garden has its own comfy chairs.

As I looked towards the back of the property, I caught a lovely, long rain chain doing exactly what it was meant to do, then directing the rain into appreciative bamboo below.

I hurried out of the potager area past the pineapple guava…..

….. and the pretty glass ornaments……

…..down behind the house to find the swimming pool – a welcome oasis in hot Austin summers – and an appropriate interpretation of an infinity edge…..

….. with its Corten walls.

Isn’t this sweet? Blackeyed susans from the garden.

The hot tub was nearby…..

….. and featured more beaked yuccas (Y. rostrata) against the rough-cut limestone of the house wall here.

The view from the hot tub is all green (there’s a greenbelt adjacent to the neighbourhood here), which is perfect, since Mirador means a viewpoint or vantage point in Spanish.

Alas, as our time here was running out, I missed seeing the al fresco dining area with its fig-topped arbor, but other bloggers like Gerhard Bock of Succulents and More managed to photograph it. (Be sure to have a look at his lovely blog.)  At ground level below the pool area, I found a long limestone planter filled with self-seeding larkspur and corn poppies and the blackberries the homeowner loves picking with her little grandson.

Looking out onto the meadow that she seeded with Habiturf and native wildflowers like Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera)…..

…. I could only imagine what it must have looked like weeks earlier, before the Texas paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa) here started setting seed. (A few weeks later, she  said, “And of course now the meadow is abloom with wildflowers!”)

And look! A peach tree in the meadow.

I circled around the other side of the house where a large but friendly-looking gorilla (inspired by the homeowner’s trip to Rwanda) kept watch over the sandbox her grandkids use.

A little further was a small, intimate garden with a pair of lightweight, cement-look, resin chairs, dark cannas and more succulents.

This side of Mirador abuts the high ground next door.. When a storm a few years back dumped 13 inches of rain in one night, “massive amounts of water coming off the neighbor’s yard” necessitated a drainage solution. Thus was the stream bed garden conceived, channeling rainwater safely away from the house.

The rain had stopped and I would gladly have waited for the sky to lighten to capture more images here, but sadly it was time to go. (To appreciate Mirador in its summery glory, be sure to visit Fling co-organizer Pam Penick’s lovely 2014 blog.)  I was so delighted to have had the chance to visit this remarkable Austin garden: a beautiful marriage of modern architecture, skillful landscape design and ecologically-sensitive gardening.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

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One of my gardening life goals has been to travel to Austin, Texas in April to see the bluebonnets in flower, those much photographed sheets of azure-blue carpeting the ground in parts of west Texas. A few weeks ago, I managed one of those goals – to travel to Austin – and I had a tiny whiff of the other – those bluebonnets – when I joined almost a hundred other garden bloggers at our annual Fling, during which we tour around public and private gardens and nurseries to get a flavour of the best horticulture and design from each host city.  The list of gardens included the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in southwest Austin.  The Center, of course, was the dream of Claudia Taylor Johnson, aka “Lady Bird” (1912-2007), one she fulfilled after returning home to Austin from Washington DC when her role as First Lady with President Lyndon Baines Johnson ended in 1969.

But even before LBJ assumed the presidency in 1963, following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Lady Bird had proved herself a capable businesswoman, using her own family inheritance to buy a few small radio and television stations that later parlayed her $41,000 investment to $150 million. But during her time in the nation’s capital, “beautification” was her passion, and by that she didn’t just mean gussying up outdoor spaces with pretty flowers, but thinking hard about improving the aesthetics of the roads and highways so many Americans spent hours driving on and through each day. She also advocated for the preservation of national parks. In Washington itself, Lady Bird, with the help of philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller, launched a project called Society for a More Beautiful National Capital; it resulted in a significant planting program for the capital: dogwoods, oaks, crape myrtles, and more cherry blossoms for the Washington Monument area, below.

More importantly, in October 1965, the federal Highways Beautification Act (proposed by LBJ but known unofficially as Lady Bird’s Bill) was passed, effectively controlling the proliferation of large billboards, lighting, junkyards and other eyesores and advocating wildflower planting along the nation’s highways.  In an appreciation column after her 2007 death, the Washington Post said of Lady Bird’s influence on her husband’s presidency: “It was but one of 150 environmental laws, including the landmark Clean Air Act, enacted with her vigorous support during the Johnson administration from 1963 to 1969. She was a patron saint to the National Park Service.”  But for Texans, her landmark contribution was the co-founding, with actress Helen Hayes, of the National Wildflower Research Center in 1982. Its first 60-acre site was in East Austin, but its popularity with the public dictated a 1995 move to the current site in southwest Austin, now expanded to 279 acres. In 1998 it was renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and was incorporated into the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. It now fulfils its mandate of promoting and conserving Texas native wildflowers, grasses, trees and shrubs and acting as the largest online database of North American native plants (it actually managed to snag the online URL www.wildflower.org) while providing a lovely venue for conferences, weddings and other social events.

And here I was, ready to explore its 9 acres of cultivated gardens. (In actual fact, I had signed up for an early morning photo seminar, but the weather forecast was dire so I made the decision to photograph outdoors before the rain started.)

I began in the courtyard near the Central Complex buildings, where a little “hillcountry spring” irrigates the plants.

I walked around the buildings in the central complex, noting the big muhly grass (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri) and a pretty pink-and-white cultivar of autumn sage (Salvia greggii ‘Teresa’) that the center itself propagates and sells, on behalf of its discoverer, David Steinbrunner, to raise funds.

I passed the Color Garden, created in memory of Leslie Turpin, by his son Ian Turpin and daughter-in-law Lucy Baines Johnson Turpin.

Purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) and blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta) reminded me of my own Ontario meadow garden. I would give anything to be there when those standing cypress (Ipomopsis rubra) in the background sent up their bright-red flowers!

This was the Edible Garden. Did you know that mealycup sage (S. farinacea) and evening primroses (Oenothera speciosa) are edible?

Walking past drifts of blue and white mealycup sage made me appreciate anew that little annual workhorse cultivar ‘Victoria Blue’. It became so popular, we grew a little bored with it, but I don’t recall it ever having quite so commanding a presence as these tall sages.

Strolling through the gardens outside the auditorium, I caught a glimpse of the audio-visual screen and felt momentarily guilty at being outside – but I could already hear thunder rumbling in the distance.

The central complex buildings all have adjoining gardens of native wildflowers, so you don’t have to wander far afield to see beauty.

There was lots of colour here in the Nectar Garden, where Prairie verbena (Glandularia bipinnatifida) was looking lovely.

I took the Savanna Meadow Trail leading to the 5-acre $5.3 million Luci & Ian Family Garden donated by Ian Turpin and Lady Bird’s daughter, Luci Baines Johnson Turpin.

This was a useful reminder to visitors to stay on the pathways.

Native wildflowers have been used in designed areas adjacent to the Play Lawn in the Family Garden.

This pretty combination of Texas yellowstar (Lindheimera texana) and mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea) caught my eye. Love those yellows and blues together!

This is Engelmann’s daisy (Engelmannia peristenia).

And this is Engelmann’s prickly-pear (Opuntia engelmannii), below. Both of these plants were named for the German-born botanist and doctor Georg Engelmann, who emigrated to Baltimore in 1832, eventually setting up a medical practice in St. Louis with his young German wife and doing his botanizing on vacations from his practice.  He was despondent after her death in 1879, when he was approached by Charles Sargent of Boston’s Arnold Arboretum to accompany him on a trip to the Pacific coast, where, at the age of 70, he collected the plants that now bear his name.

This gorgeous flower is Texas rock rose or swamp mallow (Pavonia lasiopetala).

I did find a few bedraggled bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis), but the big show had happened in March and early April.

There were scattered Texas Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa) around, too. Though I had a nicer photo of this plant, I included the one below because it illustrates a peculiarity of this species and all members of the genus. Their specialized roots, called “haustoria”, wander below ground until they touch the roots of neighbouring plants, often grasses, whose roots they then penetrate to secure nutrients and water. Members of the hemiparasitic family Orobanchaceae, paintbrushes do photosynthesize themselves, but they use this method to augment their own metabolisms.

The prime host plant for Texas Indian paintbrush, not surprisingly, is nitrogen-fixing Texas bluebonnet, a partnership beautifully illustrated in the photo of Lady Bird Johnson below.

I think blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella) was the most abundant wildflower I saw in my 4 days in Austin, with highway edges spangled red and yellow like this.

The sign below highlights the center’s focus on education and ecology. A savanna, of course, is a grassy plain studded here and there with the occasional tree, but here, the savanna is managed with prescribed burns to control the incursion of too many woody species.

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Some wildflowers I knew, like Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera), below…..

….. but most I didn’t, such as silverleaf nightshade (Solanum elaeagnifolium)…..

….. and Texas prairie parsley (Polytaenia texana).

It was fun to see white sage (Artemisa ludoviciana) growing with big muhly and prickly-pear, since so many gardeners are familiar with the cultivar ‘Silver King’.

I was unaware, when I walked into the Family Garden, that it had been designed by my friend W. Gary Smith with TBG Partners. An artist and landscape architect who has remained firmly in touch with his inner child and the world of make-believe, Gary created a magical space here in Austin. First off, I noticed the massive windmill……

…. which I suppose is intended to demonstrate wind power, provided the kids work hard enough on the equipment to generate the energy needed to turn the blades!

I was happy to see red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) flowering here, because it had been the star of the Red Hills Desert Garden in St. George, Utah, which I’d visited and photographed a few days earlier. Shockingly (for a plant photographer), I had never even seen a hesperaloe before Utah and Texas, only to find it was one of the most common plants in the Austin gardens we visited!

Look how lovely those flowers are – and a lure for hummingbirds and butterflies, too.

The Robb Family Pavilion offers a bit of shade so kids can engage in crafts or picnic out of the hot Texas sun.

There’s a Dinosaur Creek here with “footprints” of actual dinosaurs whose fossil remains have been found in the region.

Nature’s Spiral features colourful walls (with tiles recycled from a dump) enclosing a spiral path that teaches children about the spiral shapes found in nature, including Fibonacci sequences!

The Stumpery is made from fallen cedar trees and is perfect for climbing.

The Giant Birds’ Nests were fashioned from grapevines and grasses.

And, as if preordained, it was right after exploring the birds’ nests that I heard my first Carolina wren singing in the forest, soon to be followed by the familiar song of a cardinal.  Have a listen…..

The Karst Bridge reminds visitors that the center’s savanna sits on a karst landscape featuring porous limestone through which water percolates and is transported miles away.

Now I came to smaller scale gardens designed to inspire visitors to grow native plants on their own properties. This was the Tallgrass Meadow in the Ann and O.J. Weber Pollinator Habitat Garden, featuring lots of Texas parsley.

A nearby trellis featured the tropical-looking flowers of vigorous crossvine (Bignonia capreolata), which can be found climbing trees in damp pine woods in east Texas.

Thunder was closing in and a few raindrops had begun as I walked quickly into the Theme Gardens, 23 beds all surrounded by a low limestone wall, each demonstrating varieties and uses of plants for “weekend gardeners”. There is a fiber & dye garden, a night-bloomers-for-moonlight garden, a deer-resistant garden, a hummingbird garden (which would surely include red yucca, below, a hummer favourite!)….

…..and dry gardens featuring plants like this handsome agave ……

…. and cane cholla (Cylindropuntia imbricata var. imbricata).

I loved these big tank planters filled with autumn sage (Salvia greggii).

I could have stayed in the theme gardens for hours, but the rain was approaching and I made a dash back to the gift shop and Visitor’s Center. Moments later, the skies opened and we were treated to a Texas rainstorm – and not the 5-minute cloudburst typical of an eastern thunderstorm. No, no. This one went on long enough that our shoes and pant legs below our rain ponchos got sopping-wet and stayed soaked for the entire day!  So, as a final memory of Lady Bird Johnson’s wonderful Wildflower Center, here’s a little taste of a true Texas gully-washer, with a serenade by the late Dee Clark.

A few days after visiting the center, I walked down Congress Avenue and stood on the bridge overlooking what used to be called Town Lake (a man-made reservoir in the Colorado River), but was renamed Lady Bird Lake following Lady Bird Johnson’s death in 2007.  She had worked hard to beautify the lake and create a recreational trail system around its shoreline.

I will let Lady Bird Johnson sign off on today’s blog: “My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth. I wanted future generations to be able to savor what I had all my life”.