GARDEN DESIGN

A link on Jenny Peterson's blog led me a to a great garden website. Rachel at Successful Garden Design offers some great tips on what to do before you get planting. Plants are the icing on the cake, she says, and you had better have a good cake on which to put it. If you sign up for her newsletter she will send you a tutorial on how to go about designing your garden. I sent for the newsletter and there are some very useful tips. It is well worthwhile if you are contemplating some new garden design.

It is a glorious morning in Austin but there is more than a chill on the air. I went out with camera to take a few shots before the sun came up but was glad to get back in the house to warm up my hands. In this view looking towards the archway I have two pots with all that remain of my Agave desmettiana. Fortunately these two were in the potting shed so made it through our harsh winter. A bunch of dried Nigella fill the second pot waiting for a summer planting of asparagus fern.

When it comes to garden design we had a great backdrop with which to work. We just had to work with filling in what was in the middle. This year I have lost so many plants and spring is so late that without the garden bones things would look terrible. I just have to redo the icing. What I lack are more structural plantings to get the garden through the winter months.

Central Texas has more limestone than we know what to do with. These ledgestones came from our foundation and one man in a bobcat and I worked to arrange them into our sunken garden. Inspired by the central sunken area at the Wildflower Center. Granite covered the ground for a while until the seedlings became a problem. That was when we switched to Arizona sandstone. That was a giant jigsaw, I can tell you. Now I still have too much going on in the cracks, which requires a lot of weeding, but the rewards are Blackfoot daisies, blue eyed grass, blanket flowers and skullcap to name a few.

In the corner of the raised area I have replaced the A. desmettiana with a Yucca recurvifolia, soft leaf yucca. No more messing around with plants that don't make it.

In the English garden I will have to replace one of my roses and most of the wall germander which was edging the birdbath circle. Lost to hot/cold/wet. One or all. It remains to be seen whether the pomegranate tree will have survived.

For now the bare bones are holding the garden together.

More rocks, gravel and river rock in the front and a bumper crop of bluebonnets too. So many that I have had to remove many to prevent overcrowding. Whatever happens this year I think it is going to be the year of the bluebonnet.