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The Garden Bloggers arrive in Austin in a few days and we who live here will no longer be photos on a page but living, breathing human beings with gardens that are actual, not virtual. You've seen Pam/Digging's photos and the garden she designed and built from below the ground up, yet Pam has confessed to some pre-Fling jitters! MSStevens just posted about her mixed up, exuberant, wild at heart meadow garden , complete with poetry she wrote as a 17-year old prodigy. The also jittery MSS says she wrote this post to set expectations for visitors to her garden and the laid-back, artistic neighborhood around her. Dawn's garden blog is just fine but her real garden is on hold. She must wait for long-planned construction to be completed before she begins to turn her dreams into reality. While she waits, she takes us on tour around the Austin area and shows us places we might otherwise miss. I don't have much to be nervous about - only a few bloggers are intending to trek northwest to my bits-and-pieces garden, full of passalongs and plants I grow just to see what will happen. There's a hint of Lady Bird Johnson in the front yard and a lot of plants beloved by Mrs. Whaley in the back yard. And one rather cranky, gettin' older lady trying to keep the plants in control.
Last fall I planted ranunculus bulbs after reading a post about them by the wonderful Julie of the Human Flower Project. I gave them a good spot in the long fence border.
This spring the ranunculus opened their delightfully rolled flowers. What fun to see a chrome yellow followed by an orange - the flowers were more vivid than I'd prefer, but they seemed to blend with the lighter yellows, purples and silvers already blooming in this border.
Then number three opened deep fuchsia pink and I couldn't stand it. For nearly thirty years I've made one garden after another with layers of small trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and bulbs to form vignettes - small pleasing scenes with the center focused and the edges blurred.On my series of small small suburban lots I used these vignettes to draw the eye to a defined area of horticultural interest, away from neighboring house roofs, TV antennae, garage walls, basketball hoops and backboards, pool slides, sports banners, trash containers, compost heaps, oversize vehicles, boats under blue tarps, power and electric lines and dead trees.
You'll find every color of the rainbow somewhere in my yard and in a large sweeping meadow I'd love them all swirled together, but vignettes are small. Certain areas have limited palettes - this secluded corner is mainly corals and lavenders -
The hummingbird bed is predominantly red and the pink border near the gate is the spot for pinks, magentas, whites and burgundies. Those ranunculus bloomed in a bed of yellows, blues & silvers along the fence. 
A few days ago Pam/Digging told us one of her bluebonnets bloomed pink instead of blue and she wavered between moving it and letting it bloom. Most of her commenters told her to let it be. I said to move it. I follow my own advice.
I used the garden fork to lift the deep pink ranunculus with a nice chunk of soil, relocating it to the bulb bed near the anemones. Two days later the flower doesn't seem to have noticed that it's on the opposite side of the yard. Julie says these bulbs usually bloom once without returning, but if it does decide to act like a perennial, it will be in the right place.
This way I can enjoy both the deep pink ranunculus and the more coherent long border without being annoyed each time I looked at that 'riot of color'.
More shovel pruning was needed in the front yard. When we worked on the Pink Entrance Garden, last spring, I planted a bareroot rose labeled 'Therese Bugnet' toward the middle of the bed, a good spot for this pink shrub rose. When the rose bloomed dark red I was surprised but decided to keep it since the flower was lovely, nice for cutting and the color looked okay with the pinks and burgundies.
The Pink Garden still needed a Pink Shrub Rose. Instead of taking a chance on another bareroot rose, I bought a shrub rose in a container that was already blooming pink ... 
it's supposed to be the Texas-tough 'Belinda's Dream' and this time the girl looks like her photos. The styles of M.S.Stevens' garden, Pam's garden, Dawn's garden and my garden are as different as the style of our garden blogs and our styles of writing. I think these differences are something to celebrate - if you'd like to read more on the topic of rejoicing in the differences among bloggers , please see Kate's thoughful ode to individuality, "A Gentle Plea for Chaos" at her KateSmudges blog. This post, "Shovel Pruning the Vignettes", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.
I remember enjoying the book tremendously but didn’t feel the earth move – by that time Philo and I had owned 3 different houses with landscapes and gardens to tend. We’d already had our own battles with groundhogs, squirrels, raccoons, invasive plants and the tyranny of lawn as we tried to figure out what to keep and what to get rid of in each successive, pre-owned suburban yard.
But I liked many of his ideas and his book influenced me to try a few things. At that third Illinois yard I mowed a path from the gated square garden behind the house out to the vegetable garden, past the fruit trees, leaving the grass to grow on the sides of the path all summer as a symbolic meadow. Few meadow flowers appeared but I noticed that the groundhog was so happy with the green and juicy clover growing along the path that he seldom bothered to go all the way back to the vegetable patch.
In the real world, all the trees may want to be the only tree and some plants will kill to be the main plant, but we don’t see the strife and battle because it all happens in slow motion. That Coral honeysuckle and Lady Banks rose make a lovely blend of color and leaf on the arch but they are engaged in deadly combat and only I with my garden shears enforce the peace.
One chapter in the book tells of a wild forested area destroyed by a monster storm and what could happen if it were left untouched, or was partly repaired, or bulldozed or treated like a garden. That led me to consider my own yard. Left to itself what would my own garden become? I’ve heard that the land around here was graded and filled many decades ago and that not much remains of the original landscape. Whenever I weed the borders it appears that my garden wants to be a pecan grove choked with understory invasives like Nandina, Waxleaf Ligustrum and Asiatic jasmine. If any open spots are left after those plants take over there may still be room for the native 
This new front bed has tough garden plants like the ‘Mutabilis’ rose, cannas, Verbena bonariensis and larkspur , It also has Texas plants like salvias, bluebonnets, lantana, Gaura lindheimerii, Gregg’s mistflower and Anisacanthus wrightii. My managed landscape may not be “Nature”, but there will be something here for birds, butterflies, insects, lizards and humans.
Once I realized my 2008 turn as hostess for the 
What has thrived in this bed are bulbs - even Christmas-gift amaryllis rebloomed when planted in this ground. 
A few dollar store daffodils called 'Pink Charm' bloomed last spring and returned this year. After its photo was taken, I cut a few 'Pink Charm' and 'Thalia' daffodils for a vase inside the house - although my post may make Austin look like a spring dream, our temperatures reached 94°F/34.4ºC this afternoon. 
One inexpensive bag of mixed bulbs last fall has produced some red anemones 
And some fuchsia pink anemones in both single and double forms. 
This spring is more colorful than last year in spite of sneaky frosts - all the iris had started to open when a couple of cold nights grazed us. Any flowers or buds showing color froze, but the less developed buds are opening now just in time to be frizzled by heat.
The annuals established roots in the unfrozen soil but didn't make much top growth until the last few weeks.
Many of the snapdragons are beginning to open. 
As we head out the gate to the front we pass the small Scabiosa 'Butterfly Blue' whose winter fortitude was admired by 
Except for more white iris and a few petunias not much is happening in the pink garden - a little cluster of dark pink hyacinths opened and finished during the 4 weeks between bloom days. This petunia is an old fashioned cottage variety that made it through last summer and fall... it's also a reseeder and has produced the tiny plant to the right. 
She appreciated the deep fuchsia color of an emerging anemone but felt that the most likely place for the fairy folk to dwell was in the Secret Garden, kept warm in winter by a brick wall and southern exposure, but shaded by deciduous trees in summer. 
Apparently, the fairies didn't feel at home because they had no small benches to perch upon. The cute little caps of the live oak acorns weren't set out on tiny tables. 
Pot feet that could be useful to fairies weren't placed in the secret garden but were stacked on shelves. Seashells from a vacation were kept inside a large plant saucer. How could the fairies use them if they weren't handy?
She liked a heart-shaped rock and some tumbled glass mulch. 
...the pot feet get by because they're clay
The stars were cut from paper, which used to be wood. 
It's possible that I won't see any fairies attracted by these efforts but I'll keep watch for traces of them dwelling in the secret garden. 
I started to believe that there had been a fairy in my garden after all.