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Feb 20

Mystery orange and gold tazetta

mysterious heirloom tazetta

February 2009. Well, this winter has brought me two new tazettas, surely as old as our house, but blocked from light for years. I don’t know if they got rain at the right time or what, but this year I discovered I have both “Double Roman” tazettas and this mysterious bulb. For hte last five years it has just shot up leaves, so I assumed it was ‘Grand Primo’, which I have so much of around my property, but it finally decided to bloom this year and here it is, with its lovely pale yellow petals and bright orange cups.

Feb 20

Double Roman tazetta
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Double Roman tazetta

January 2009. I just discovered a lone flower stalk of this bulb blooming in a shady part of our garden along the driveway, at the foot of a pecan tree. This year, I’ve discovered two new naturalized bulbs along the driveway, which is the most neglected part of our garden, and was home to a huge 1930s-ish planting of Oxblood Lilys, Grand Primo tazettas, irises and crinums. I moved the crinums and irises to sunnier part of the garden, but I am still surprised by what blooms here. In five years I never saw this flower, but I guess conditions were ripe. Read more

Feb 2

Sweet Pea that has run wild

It is a rich, full-bodied whistle,

cracked ice crunching in pails,

the night that numbs the leaf,

the duel of two nightingales,

the sweet pea that has run wild,

Creation’s tears in shoulder blades

–Boris Pasternak, “Definition of Poetry” Read more

Jan 29

Double Roman tazetta

a winter surprise

Oooh, I love surprises. There have been so many of them in my garden, things I never planted, or remember planting, springing up out of nowhere. Our very long driveway is lined with a patchy, weedy mess that is slowly eroding away but at one point someone had gardened there. Read more

Jan 3

succombing to the blowers

Blowers are a nuisance, and I’m sure many agree with me. Perhaps in the country or in the suburbs they might have a more innocuous presence but here in the city, the sound of big gas blowers is overwhelming. Worse than the garbage trucks. It ricochets for blocks.

Austin is not a big city, not an urban jungle, so I don’t live every day with the sound of metros and subways and alarms. It’s more like a big village. There are very few cities in the world where one can live nearly downtown and still have a quarter of an acre, more than half of which is yard. That’s what I love about Austin and what it’s known for, its funky little old neighborhoods of cute Arts and Crafts houses and big yards. Read more

Dec 9

bluebonnets and phlox at the Wildflower Center

Bluebonnet

The state flower of Texas, and the glory of the spring. No roadside or edge of a ranch, or even small garden like mine feels complete without them. Bluebonnets are diminutive lupines, but look stunning in mass. While they’re the essence of meadow in Texas, they’re also very pretty in carefully arranged garden beds.

Bluebonnets are sown in fall, and occasionally you can find them as nursery-grown annuals, but the seed is so widely available and easy to sow, that it’s worth it to always try some every year. Read more

Dec 4

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The Texas Bluebell, the Eustoma, or a tale of Latin Names

OK, just to get this out of the way, a little Latin lesson. Some days I feel like a gardener, and others a scientist. My husband calls it my right-brain/left-brain garden. When researching wildflowers, the first problem one gets into is in the matter of names. Flowers have different common names all over the world, and the more this world piles its information online, the more confusing it can get.

Latin names help us get this confusion out of the way, but I admit they are rather boring to most people, sometimes just down right goofy. The gardening world now persists in calling Ranunculus “ranunculus” rather than its much more fitting common name “Persian Buttercup”. But then, people might get Buttercup confused with Narcissus, which is what we called “Buttercups” as children where I grew up, and what others in the South call Jonquils or you call Daffodils. Ahh, never mind. Read more

Nov 26

White Aster
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on a hunt for daisy-ness

Daisy: Any of several plants of the Composite/Aster family, especially a widely naturalized Eurasian plant (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) having flower heads with a yellow center and white rays. Also called oxeye daisy, white daisy. Before 1000, known in Middle English as dayesye, and in Old English as dægesēge.

When I think of wildflowers, daisies and poppies are the first that come to mind. What fantasy wildflower meadow would be complete without either of them? The “day’s eye” is especially the essence of meadow cheer, flowers that open with the sun and close at night. Read more

Nov 22

Lathyrus odoratus

Sweet Peas

These lovely, childlike highly fragrant flowers have become already one of my garden obsessions. I ordered almost 30 different types of varieties by seed, while really only having room to grow about five. And this was never having seen a sweet pea before. But I am not alone, I have read many stories of other gardeners who fell to the same captivation by sweet peas, after seeing a photo in a catalog or gardening magazine. And I wonder why, for such a delicate flower? Read more

Nov 22

German Chamomile

German Chamomile

There are two kinds of chamomile grown for tea, one commonly called Roman or English chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile). There are gardeners in some parts of the world that carefully cultivate this kind into an oh-so-romantic-sounding “Chamomile lawn”. Imagine walking and playing on a carpet of fragrant daisies. Read more

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