Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)

This post, "Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

A year ago I sang farewell to an Arizona Ash tree on YouTube ~ today's song is a musical tribute to the beautiful, deer-resistant flowers in the genus Salvia.

Welcome to Annie's virtual piano bar ~ find a cozy table and spend two minutes in Austin, the Live-Music Capital of the World. We tried to make it sound live by using a simple mic connected to the built-in recorder on a laptop.

Philo and I had five years to learn about gardening with deer at our last Austin house. I wrote "Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)" while we still lived there - it's part of an unfinished musical play called Roots in Austin. This plea came straight from the heart!

Our present garden doesn't seem to need deer-resistant plants so our Salvias don't have to work for us - they can just be beautiful.

This post, "Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

March Comes in Like an Iambic Pentameter

Hi Carolyn - Annie's outside in the garden -I think she mentioned something about committing crepe murder? Since she's too busy to post anything for Garden Bloggers Muse Day she handed me some photos and said, " Thalia, you're the Muse of Rustic Comedy, go be a-mus-ing."

Frankly, it sounds to me like an excuse to post flower pictures but no one can say I'm not a good sport! I hope this will do!

~Thalia~

Some daffodils had opened in the sun

The heat rose up and fried them one by one

But heat can also make the iris bloom

Until to freezing temp'ratures they zoom

It's leveled out and all is well today

But this is Austin- it won't stay that way! Happy Muse Day everyone!

Garden Bloggers Geography Project

This post, "Garden Bloggers Geography Project ", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Pam/Digging's post about Austin is wonderful and comprehensive - go there for the main dish about our city. I'm posting a few photos of places that Pam didn't mention as my addition to Jodi's fun project. Some of you with sharp eyes may note the presence of a small paper person in a few of these photos - we've taken several editions of Flat Stanley out to tour Austin.

Nine years ago I landed at Mueller Airport and saw Austin for the first time - our Illinois house was up for sale and we intended to move to Austin at the end of the summer. It was a whirlwind meeting - just a couple of days driving around to get an idea of what it might be like to live here. Later that spring I returned for house shopping - but didn't land at Mueller... within that time frame Mueller closed and the Austin-Bergstrom Airport opened. So you bloggers coming in for Spring Fling will land at a converted Air Force Base, while ex-airport Mueller is now the site of Austin Studios and innovative new housing.

Until companies like 3M moved in (this explains the high percentage of ex-Minnesotans in Austin) and the high tech boom began, Austin was a two-horse town. One horse was government - Austin is the capital of Texas - above is the dome of the state capitol.

The other horse was the University of Texas - UT. Burnt orange pennants of alumni fly all over town but if the flags are red and white they'll belong to rival Texas A & M alums, subject of many an Aggie joke.

Soon after we got here the University of Texas unveiled a wonderful new sculpture of Dr Martin Luther King - we've frequently taken visitors to see it.

When visitors come we also take them for a ride along Loop 360, originally a scenic highway, now a crowded but still scenic thoroughfare. The Pennybacker Bridge, opened in 1982, caught my eye on the first trip.

Drive a little to the north and you can visit Innerspace Caverns in Georgetown - this cool cave was discovered by the highway department when IH35 was being built.

Drive to the Southeast and you'll find McKinney Falls State Park... here the falls are flowing. It was strange to walk over this area on a day when drought had dried up the water and the air temperature was 110 °F.

[edited Friday morning: Philo noticed that last night I'd posted a photo of Bull Creek rather than McKinney Falls. McKinney comes off Onion Creek. You now see a photo of the real McKinney Falls above with Bull Creek below.

Bull Creek is on the NW side of Austin. Both of these streams were at flood stage when the photos were taken, and can look quite different depending on the amount of rain that's fallen.]

Drive far to the Southwest and you can find Hamilton Pool. When approaching it from the top you'll see what looks like more of the usual juniper-live oak landscape, but deep in a crevasse is another world, with bald cypress trees, ferns and a stream attached to the Pedernales river, ending in a grotto. The preserve, home to endangered species, is part of the Balcones Canyonland Preserve. This enchanted world is endangered by development and pollution.

Maybe there are some Stevie Ray Vaughan fans among you - this iconic blues guitarist died in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin in August 1990, and the city where he paid his dues as a young man erected a memorial to him on the banks of Town Lake - well it's not called Town Lake any more - now it's called Lady Bird Lake, in memory of Lady Bird Johnson.

We say "Lake", and the system of Highland Lakes also include Lake Austin, Lake Travis and more - but these are actually reservoirs formed from the Colorado River [no not that Colorado River in Colorado - this one in Texas] which traverses more than 850 miles of our state. Before the dams were built, the Colorado was just a stream under normal circumstances, running through the small capital city - but when a storm hit, the floods were horrific. Dams were built - some failed causing death and destruction- some held, allowing this part of Texas to grow and prosper and allowing this peaceful paddleboat scene in downtown Austin.

In Hyde Park, north of the University area, you'll see another peaceful scene - the Elisabet Ney Museum, once the studio of an interesting Austin sculptor, a German artist who came to Austin in the late 1800's with her husband Edmund Montgomery. He was a philosopher and she created dramatic biography in marble, riding from their farm to what was then the outskirts of the city. I can't explain why, but this is one of the places I love best in Austin.

Thanks for letting me tell you about the city where I live.

This post, "Garden Bloggers Geography Project ", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Adding A Water Feature

This post, "Adding A Water Feature", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Are any of you Social Garden Shoppers? I sure am - happily volunteering when a friend wants company on a trip to a nursery or garden center. What's not to like? Wandering the aisles while talking to another gardener is one of my favorite things! Sometimes I find supplies or a few plants and sometimes I just look and think and dream.

I'd been up to Cedar Park's Hill Country Water Gardens with Philo a few times, looking and dreaming, then last summer I tagged along when a couple of other gardeners wanted to go there. On each visit I found myself gravitating to the same area of the display yard and my dreaming found a focus.

A few weeks ago Philo & I went back to HCWG - not to look, but to buy. This place is fun to wander, with large demonstration ponds, plants, fish, pottery, all kinds of fountains, fun garden art and water-work supplies fanned out for the visitor. They arrange for installation or give advice to those who want to do the work themselves.

I threaded my way back to the stone fountain bases and showed Philo the one that had been calling my name.

At Hill Country Water Gardens we met a very knowledgeable guy named Nicholas. He told us that this interesting stone came from Lueders, Texas. Then he explained the process of making a base into a fountain and we made decisions - delivery or take-with, tub size, the pump, concrete blocks and screens. He went for a forklift and soon the parts were ready to load.

We could have had the stone delivered but my old car has hauled heavy garden supplies and plants for years. Philo decided it could carry the block of Lueders Stone. The door opening was a tight fit but the guys made it work. Our son was glad to help unload the stone once we had it home.

The block sat on the sidewalk for days while I reworked the patio area. We planned to install the fountain in the decomposed granite area right outside the breakfast room window. Some pots and troughs needed to move aside and a lot of self-sown fennel had to be pulled out.

Swallowtail butterflies lay eggs on fennel so I'd let it grow wherever it sprouted for a couple of years. We liked seeing the larvae, but the fennel's shadow was killing sun-loving herbs like thyme, and the space was needed for something else now. (Don't worry about future generations of Swallowtail larvae - I've established a second patch of fennel in the long fence border and have young plants in containers.)

While I puttered with pots, Philo measured and planned. He tacked together a depth gauge from pieces of wood, a useful tool for knowing how to dig the hole for the black plastic reservoir tub. He sketched and took notes and made a cardboard template of the base.

I did not want to rush this part - wouldn't a Dress Rehearsal be a good idea? Philo dollied the burlap-cushioned, heavy stone to the spot we'd chosen. We thought we knew which side should face the house, but wanted to look at it from the patio, from the walk, and through the window before we started to dig. Even without water we really liked looking at that stone!

We needed rocks to hide the black plastic tub and screen - Nicholas told us to check out Jacobs Stone and Landscaping , a wonderland of building materials where we found a medium-size mix of Texas river rocks that we liked. We only needed a few 5-gallon buckets and shoveled them ourselves, reusing 5-gallon sacks from our previous expeditions for compost and decomposed granite to tote them home.

(The story of how we extended our standard rectangular concrete patio by using thick layers of pea gravel and decomposed granite is told in this 2006 post. )

We wanted to save and reuse those layers, so once the stone was moved out of the way, Philo spaded up the gravel onto a screen made to fit across the garden cart. The larger gravel that stayed on top of the screen was scooped into more of our handy sacks and the smaller stuff scooped from the bottom of the cart went into separate sacks.

With the good stuff cleared, he then started on the black heavy clay underneath. He dug and I hauled the soil away with the wheelbarrow, returning to use the Cobra head tool to pry out rocks when he hit them.

It took a long time to get that hole dug, use the depth gauge, get out rocks, add back finer screenings as a base for the tub, level and readjust the base and that tub moved in and out of place a number of times.

I'm not going to detail the fun with concrete blocks or fitting the pipe and motor or describe the access hatch Philo constructed - each installation will be different. The gravel and granite were packed in around the black tub.

The most nerve-wracking part came next - it took strength to move over three hundred pounds of solid rock across gravel or concrete, but now Philo and our son needed precision as well as strength.

They used the dolly and boards, getting the heavy stone up over the lip and onto the plastic grate with the concrete supports underneath.

We filled the reservoir and watched the water come out the top, then I started adding the rocks, hiding the black plastic.

The rock placement has already changed and evolved, and they'll be moved again for cleaning or possibly raccoons will rearrange them. Maybe rocks from other places will be added by visitors.


One recent visitor found out that adding and subtracting rocks where the water emerges from the rock results in different sounds and sprays, and she also improved the arrangement of the rooks at the base.



We can now sit at the table, listening to the peaceful water sounds of our dream-turned-real. Appropriately for a place called Circus~Cercis, the name of this kind of water feature implies that it performs a trick -
Ladies and Gentlemen...presenting for your amusement...

the Disappearing Fountain!

This post, "Adding A Water Feature", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.