Guest Posting New Song for Kiss My Aster

Many of you already know Amanda the zany gardener who writes a blog for Horticulture Magazine as Kiss My Aster. She's lots of fun both on the blog and on Twitter. Amanda recently invited me to premiere my new song on the Horticulture website and it was fun to be able to say "Yes".


Like Anna in "The King and I" doing her best to quell her fears by whistling a happy tune, I've tried to make it through this summer by writing a funny song and having Philo make it into a video.




Please check out Kiss My Aster's fun blog and " I Don't Want to Be in Texas In July" over at the Horticulture Mag Website.

Tourists in Our Own Town

Last Saturday our daughter Lily and her dear husband returned home after a visit with their Austin relatives - but most of that special time is not the stuff of blog posts. We were glad to be together and also glad Austin displayed spectacular blue skies. It's been a long, cold, wet winter in the Pacific Northwest.
When guests come from out-of state, it gives us a chance to act like tourists in our own town - that's the part I want to share with you.

A favorite place to take visitors is a funky mini-golf course on Barton Springs Road, south of the river. Nearly 60-years old, Peter Pan golf was created by the Dismukes family. It's not a tournament-type course, but can present interesting challenges to the players, especially at night.

You might not think of a bike store as a tourist attraction, but when the shop is called Mellow Johnny's and it belongs to Lance Armstrong, it's a must-go-there destination, especially for a guy who bikes in triathlons and a gal who will be part of the Livestrong Challenge this summer. Within the bike store we found a coffee shop named Juan Pelota cafe in ironic tribute to Lance's battle with cancer. It was very cool to see bikes Lance rode in races on display in the shop.

Even when we have no company to impress we occasionally head down to South Congress for Home Slice Pizza. What a fabulous crust on those pies - and such perfect toppings. And it's right across the street from Tesoros Trading Company. Lily & I bought identical oval black clay bowls. Here's mine with some beautifully decorated, blown-out eggs that our daughter made as a gift and hand-carried on the plane.After we went to Tesoros, I realized that exactly one year earlier during Austin Spring Fling, Garden Bloggers from all over the country ambled together down South Congress in search of souvenirs. Shout out to Kathy Purdy & her friend Cynthia!

When the Garden Bloggers met in Austin last year another place everyone wanted to go was the Natural Gardener. We love to take people there! Not only is it a wonderful nursery but it's a great place to stroll around and think and dream - with a butterfly garden, vegetable demonstration gardens and water features. Philo and I usually make a stop at the dig-it-yourself Soil Yard whenever we drive down. This time we had four people wielding shovels, so filling the back of the car with bags of John Dromgoole's Rose Magic and Revitalizer Compost was a very speedy process, giving us more time to wander the nursery lanes.

I couldn't resist snapping a stack of turtles in Lady Bird Lake. The name used to be Town Lake, but after Lady Bird Johnson died, the downtown section of the Colorado River was renamed in her honor. We walked the part of the very popular hike and bike trail that passes the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue, the Long Center for the Performing Arts (just a few days after we'd been there for the Leonard Cohen concert), and the off-leash dog park. When we strolled the paved hike and bike trail it wasn't much of a workout, but it was a little hotter and dustier when we climbed up the trails at Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve . This preserve is not manicured and you have to watch where you put your feet. Wildflowers grow along the trails, At some points there are views of Loop 360 to the West and a pond surprises you when it appears in this arid setting. It had been a few years since we'd been to Wild Basin with a different set of visitors. That hike turned out to be quite an ordeal because the temperatures were over 100°F...guess it took us awhile to get over the experience! It was funny to realize that because I can now identify more of the trees and plants in the woods, walking there was somehow more enjoyable than in the past.

Six of us went to the Flat Creek Estate Winery for a wine tasting - a fun new thing for some of us and a chance for the experienced to show off their sophistication. The drive out to the beautiful Tuscan-style buildings and grounds near Marble Falls was long enough to be interesting without being tedious.


We enjoyed the different wines, bringing home a few bottles. (If you go to the winery on the weekends the Bistro will be open. Because we were there mid-week, instead of snacking on Mediterranean fare after the tasting, we ended up at a roadside Sonic in the nearby town of Lago Vista.)

Our daughter admired the label on the Bucking Horse Red which featured an image of "Cage Johnson Spurs 'Em Up Aboard Cyclone" by famed Texas Artist Bob Wade.

The tasting had proved to us that the inside of the bottle was as fine as the outside - this red was perfect with delicious pies from Reale's Pizza. For our group there is no such thing as too much pizza.

Mayfield Park was once the private home of the Mayfield family with the gardens developed over a long time by Mary Mayfield Gutsch and her husband Milton Gutsch. Some of the plants have been here since the 1920's with peacocks and peahens added in 1935. Philo & I first saw this park in September 1999, soon after we moved to Austin. Mayfield proved to me that beautiful flowers could grow in this climate. Maybe MSS of Zanthan Gardens can tell us whether these lovely red flowers are St Joseph Lilies or something else in the amaryllis family. Not too far from Mayfield is a favorite place to buy plants, Shoal Creek nursery - we stopped there to walk around and look at the pottery. I couldn't make a decision on the pots, but found another Loropetalum and some Purple Nicotiana. Lily & BJ and Philo & I are all gardeners so if we lived closer to each other, visiting nurseries together would be a normal thing to do on weekends. We cherish these chances to act normal and just hang out!

Hanging out in Austin also means enjoying Tex-Mex restaurants. Our son suggested Serranos, which is especially fun on 2-for-1 Enchilada night when the chips & queso are hot and the margaritas refreshing. Taco Cabana is more casual, which can be handy when you're out touring.

The Elisabet Ney museum is an old museum- so it's probably okay to use an old photo. I forgot to take a new picture when we visited this museum, the studio of early Austin's fascinating woman sculptor. Click to enlarge the photo so you can see another visitor we took to the Ney Museum...the paper person called Flat Stanley.


We all had one final outing the day before our guests flew home - a short ride out to Blanco for a tour of the Real Ale Brewery. This was too much fun - beer we like (and can buy locally) and an amazingly detailed tour and explanation of how beer is made. When we lived in Illinois, Philo and our older sons did some home brewing and the process is interesting to all of us. I'm fond of the Rio Blanco Pale Ale and Philo, who looks for high IBU numbers, prefers the Full Moon Pale Rye Ale. He also likes the Real Heavy, which is available seasonally but on draught, not in bottles. The Brewmaster AKA "Tyrant" was a wonderful tour guide, witty and ironic, languidly imparting quite specific information.

The vagaries of Texas law allows the brewery to give tours and samples of the various brews but unlike wineries, breweries can't sell any of the product to their visitors so we couldn't bring home a sampler 6-pack. This inequity has recently been a subject of much discussion in the beer-brewing and beer-loving community.


The backdoor clematis bloomed too late for our visitors and too late for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day - but it opened just in time to be the end photo of this PLEASE COME VISIT AUSTIN post. Hope to see you soon!

Felder Rushing at Florarama

The answer to all of the questions at the end of the last post is Yes! I did get to hear Felder Rushing speak in person. Philo & I did get to Florarama [AKA Zilker Garden Festival]. I bought the two replacement Duranta plants, and also found another Barleria-Philippine violet, a Pigeonberry, a Denver Gold columbine, a Dwarf myrtle, a Bletilla-ground orchid, another hot pepper for Philo, raffle tickets to benefit Zilker Park, and bought Felder Rushing’s book Tough Plants For Southern Gardens, seen above with my well-read copy of Passalong Plants, which I've scribbled in, stuffed with notes and filled with post-its.

You know, that passalong book has been in my possession since the middle nineties. It had me craving Crinum lilies and wanting Banana Shrubs/Michelias when I lived in Zone 5-Northern Illinois. I’ve read and reread it, and made lists of plants I’ve been given and plants that I've given away from three different gardens.

When Felder Rushing walked up to the podium and started talking it was like hearing an old friend – a very wise and funny friend. He talked of left-brain horticulture and right-brain gardening. He talked about his ancestors and his descendents, about plant societies and rules, bottle trees like Pam’s, using plants that want to grow where you live, told how to use plants in combinations, and then he shared the his “Gardeners’ Bill of Rights”, which was quite empowering! He introduced his radio partner, Dirt, who spent decades as a chef, but is now a radio gardener with very unusual advice, a mellow voice and very interesting stories.

Can you imagine how glad I was that we were in that audience?

Apparently with age comes boldness - because after the talk I not only asked Felder Rushing to sign my book, but mentioned that the Garden Bloggers' Book Club had chosen Passalong Plants as the next selection. I even gave him one of the little business cards Philo made for me with the girl-in-the-hat icon and my blog address.

This was my second burst of courage. Earlier in the day, I approached John Dromgoole [John is the garden guru I linked to in The Gardener’s Year post] and told him that there were a bunch of Austin Garden Bloggers who were fans, that we loved his nursery and that we had links to the Natural Gardener’s website on our blogs, so that people all over the country may have heard that rooster crow. And I gave him one of the little Annie cards, too.

For the Wisteria fans, let’s close with a photo of Zilker Botanical Garden’s method of dealing with this lovely, rampant vine. Their venerable Wisteria is pruned into a tree-form on a small, manmade island in the middle of a koi pond:

The Gardener's Year

Last year I noted that that a book called The Gardener’s Year by Karel Čapek was one of the recommended books at the Zanthan Gardens site of M. Sinclair Stevens. When I saw a copy on sale last fall, I was delighted, and then was delighted a second time when it became the March selection for the Garden Bloggers’ Book Club.

The edition I bought is part of the Modern Library Gardening Series, published in 2002, with an introduction to the series by Michael Pollan, and a forward by New York Times writer Verlyn Klinkenborg. This forward has biographical information about Karel Čapek, and a note that the pronunciation of Čapek is chop-uk, which I’m trying to remember. I found this quote via D.G. Jerz:

Čapek's obituary in Newsweek (January 2, 1939) said of the play R.U.R.: "Although he believed it the least interesting of all his works, it brought him greatest fame."

In 2007, the play R.U.R. is till famous and read by students of drama, but doesn’t it seem as if this little volume of garden philosophy has a wider readership? Perhaps Karel Čapek would be amused at that.

The Gardener’s Year was written in the Czech language and was first published in 1929, then in 1931 was printed in an English translation. 1929! That’s 78 years ago, but its descriptions of ridiculous, obsessed, yet still hopeful plant people sound like gardeners in the present, even though there have been changes in gardening over the decades. We still take the weather personally, forget what we’ve planted, buy too many plants, use the feasts of saints as days for planting crops, and struggle with garden technology – and we garden bloggers are all bonding with the author over our still unmanageable garden hoses.

Josef Čapek, the author’s brother, drew the whimsical illustrations, so full of wishful thinking, with winged gardeners suspended over the flowerbeds. I don’t think we’d love the book quite so much without the drawings! When Josef caught the Czech gardeners in action, the only women seem to be a couple of flappers mowing the lawn in dresses and heels. Was this really true at that time and place, I wonder? Did women not garden? Perhaps using men was a way to avoid indelicacy in the illustrations, so that Josef did not have to draw females astraddle rock gardens with rump in the air.

For me one of the most amazing and endearing aspects of Karel Čapek’s writing was the specific way he spoke about plants and soil. He doesn’t give you three names and then add ‘etc.’ His lists tumble on, his similes stretch for paragraphs and the descriptions are complete rather than suggestive, as when he speaks of of cactus:

There are cacti just like porcupines, cucumbers, marrows, candlesticks, jugs, priests’ caps, snakes’ nests; they are covered with scales, teats, tufts of hair, claws, warts, bayonets, yataghans and stars; they are bulky and lanky, spiked like a regiment of lancers, sharp like a column brandishing swords, swollen, stringy, and wrinkled, pock-marked, bearded, peevish, morose, thorny like abatis, woven like a basket, looking like excrescenses, animals and arms; the most masculine of all plants which were created on the third day, bearing seed according to their kind.

[I had to look up Yataghans and abatis – how about you?]

The military references seem appropriate in hindsight, since Karel Čapek was only in his forties when he died, departing as the Nazis took over his land. For a heartbroken man so in love with soil, with earth, with humus, he may not have minded the leaving. As I read those passages on soil, it occurred to me that a few years after Karel Čapek’s death, another man was born with the same kind of passion for soil. And I kept imagining our John Dromgoole and Karel Čapek in conversation, spreading the word that you shouldn’t feed the plants, you should feed the soil!