August 21, 2023
This summer season, y’all. Am I proper, my fellow Texas gardeners? However even with two months of surface-of-the-sun temps and 0 rain, at the very least just a few vegetation are completely satisfied. Like this pink-flowering mammillaria cactus that burst into silken bloom just a few days after I gave it a deep soaking. What a pick-me-up!
I’m additionally loving the dappled-moonlight coloring of ‘Moonglow’ mangave, which is prospering in shiny shade.
This view is a little bit more durable for me to take pleasure in proper now as a result of my plumbago, skullcap, and new Shantung maple sapling are burning up. The ‘Winter Gem’ boxwoods in full solar are sun-scorched on high. However hooray for ‘Fireworks’ gomphrena nonetheless blooming its little pink-puff coronary heart out. And the tall beaked yucca is a summer- and winter-defying pleasure.
The view from my front room window. I’m glad I took the time to repaint the shed this spring as a result of that refreshed blue is visually cooling issues off — at the very least mentally. The stock-tank vegetation — woolly stemodia (which I planted in July!) and variegated agave — are doing nicely with supplemental hand-watering. I did have silver ponyfoot in there, which I anticipated to make a reasonably silver-green groundcover by now, but it surely burned up this summer season.
When you might have an enormous turquoise point of interest, why combat it? That’s why I repeated the pool colour in chairs and shed doorways. Within the foreground, there’s an entire lot of burning-up vegetation (principally hidden on this view) and an ‘Alphonse Karr’ bamboo struggling to recuperate from final winter’s Arctic freeze. If it’s not one excessive now, it’s one other!
Mexican feathergrass and chile pequin — two native Texas survivors
Chile pequin peppers add good colour at the moment of yr. The cleaning soap aloes within the foreground are sun-bleached however hanging on. I really feel ya, aloes.
Garlic chives within the hellstrip have began flowering in defiance of the Dying Star, providing a thimble of hope that fall isn’t too far off.
Pale-leaf yucca is one other native that defies the Dying Star and drought. Take a look at that lovely blue-green colour with golden edges.
New e book!
And now for my information. Following two deep-freeze winters and now two blistering, record-busting summers, I made a decision it will be a good time to jot down a brand new e book — ha ha — about Texas gardens. I’ve been crisscrossing this large ole state since early spring, visiting every kind of gardens and selecting a various and galvanizing group to {photograph} and have. The e book, which is able to come out in spring 2025 with Timber Press, will likely be full of lovely Texas gardens and essays that inform their tales: how they got here to be, the that means they bring about to their homeowners’ lives, and nuggets of knowledge about how the gardens are weathering our new regular of hot-and-cold, wet-and-dry extremes. It’s the e book I’ve been eager to learn for a few years, and I’m tremendous excited to be engaged on it and assembly fantastic and beneficiant gardeners and designers from Marfa to Houston and from Dallas to McAllen.
However man, what a yr to be photographing gardens in Texas! It’s not simple right here, is it, Texans? Nonetheless, we’re all in the identical boat, and there’s one thing compelling about seeing what different gardeners are in a position to create, and the way they hold making an attempt, no matter their private challenges. I do know we’ll study one thing from every backyard’s story and be impressed to make our personal gardens the most effective they are often, whether or not meaning selecting up the items after a summer season like this one or relishing triumphs when vegetation present us what they’re able to.
Hold in there. Fall is coming.
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