Brush Country

This weekend I went for a long overdue visit to my sister and her husband at their home, a cattle ranch outside of Encinal, 4o miles north of Laredo. When you are traveling at 70 miles an hour on I-35, this countryside looks bleak and featureless. But when you are on foot, walking through it, you see why many people come to develop an attachment for this land. Its beauty is intricate, elusive, and always comes with brutal thorns. Hunters love it and this area is one of the most coveted regions in Texas in which to hunt (it's where Dick Cheney had his shooting mishap). For my sister, Janet Krueger, who is the current Texas State Artist, the brush country and its culture is a central theme of many of her works.One of my favorite pastimes when I visit the ranch, is taking long walks to observe the land, its vegetation, and the sightings of critters.


Janet with cactus, an heirloom she brought from our mother's garden.


Flowering black brush acacia at left.


Black brush closeup; smells great.



Amargosa, pretty evergreen and armed with long thorns



Black brush and prickly pear

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An arrowhead with broken point



Guayacan, which resembles prostrate rosemary, even has little blue flower (plus thorns...)

Century plant agaves



Skeletons of past century plant blooms



Aptly name, All-thorn or “Corona del Cristo”.


There is a caracara nest at the top of this ladder. This is very large raptor, sometimes called the Mexican eagle. In flight, the bird is beautiful with striking black and white markings. I climbed up the ladder to see if the mother was there. Yes, I'm an idiot. Once I saw she was there, I realized why she was not concerned. Her beak could probably have coldcocked me with one blow.

So of course, once up there, I attempted to get a shot. If you blow this up you can just see her beak to the right of the top of the large stick.

Betty's Garden

Layanee’s post at Ledge and Garden about her father inspired me to write about my own gardening mentor. Barely five feet, my mother Betty McLaren had a personality as big as her adopted Texas. A native New Zealander, Betty came to the US to marry her Navy sweetheart (my dad) in 1946. They soon moved to Texas where Betty dug herself in, literally, creating elaborate gardens at every home we lived in. A lifelong smoker (Lucky Strikes), bridge player, gin & tonic drinker, stay-at-home mom, autodidact, accomplished seamstress, and artist in many media, my mother rarely sat still.

Relentlessly creative, she mastered woodcarving, furniture building, batik, papier maché, oils, embroidery, decoupage, and her true métier, watercolors. My walls are filled with her remarkable paintings of landscapes, San Antonio Fiesta celebrations, Mexican markets, and beach scenes.

But my mother’s largest canvas and her masterwork was her garden. I remember staying home from school one day when I was in the sixth grade (sort of sick but really just needing a mental health day) and enjoying the great luxury of having Mom all to myself. We dug a hole in the back yard, mixed cement, and created a small pond. This was one of three ponds my mother eventually built in her yard. Fish, fountains, pumps, cypress plants, lilies; something was always being transplanted or improved, winding brick paths laid, new beds dug. The patio which started out by the kitchen door, kept growing until it wrapped around the whole side of the house and was filled with hundreds of pots of impatiens, firecracker fern, pentas, twining cypress vine. Her yard was packed with crepe myrtles, trumpet vine, pomegranite, plumbago, oxblood and day lilies, pyracantha, turk's cap, tradescantia, physotegia, elephant ears, philodendron, ferns, and nameless climbing roses. In the mild San Antonio winters, my mother was able to grow violets; and the memory of collecting little nosegays of violets with Mom and my two small daughters is as sweet as their smell. My mother loved a challenge and succeeded in growing in the ground tropicals like plumeria, croton, and bananas. If you closely at this photo, you'll see that she is eyeing a bunch of green bananas on this tree. Twelve years after her death, an immense hot pink bougainvillea, that must be around 30 years old, continues to thrive and bloom in the front yard of her garden undaunted by winter cold.

Curving beds, no straight angles. Ruthless pruning and getting rid of weak or untidy growth. Patience and the long view. Having a big vision that informs one’s garden plan. Scale, pattern, and texture matter as much or more than flowers. These are some of the things about gardening I learned from my mother.

Cajun Shrimp

That's the name of this OPI nail color and nothing says “spring planting” like this color mixed with a little dirt and set off by oxalis. In the front bed, which is still pretty quiet, the gray germanders and sages yet to break out, I put blackfoot daisy and white nemesia fruticans, both perennials that should withstand the blast furnace placement next to the street. In memory of my mother who loved shrimp plants, I put two by the front door.
Because the deck rose garden was tailing out at both ends without any definition, I planted aspidistras to edge the plot and to create a pedestrian entrance into the side gravel yard. Along with another stand of aspidistras in the empty corner of the deck, the space already looks much better. The west end of the rosebed is still undefined; I want to curve the bed around the paving. This will have to wait until I figure out what to plant.



Looking towards gravel bed; what to plant to screen AC?
I also went crazy and bought a brugmansia. I’ve seen one growing in the ground on Scenic Drive. The tree is about the size of a typical mimosa. Having spent one winter here, admittedly a fairly mild one, I think parts of my yard might qualify as safe. I’m so close to my neighbors and have many closeted sheltered zones. For the time being it’s sitting in a pot looking exotic.



Looking to the back; big remodel going up behind

Buh-bye, winter!

Recipe for House Beautiful: Place stalks of bush honeysuckle in a vase. Deploy on a table. Beauty and fragrance imbued throughout house for week+.

I was happy to discover that my potted parsley has survived the winter. Most of today I spent in stoop labor thinning and transplanting cosmos seedlings. And heaving 40-lb bags of soil and mulch into and out of shopping carts and cars. Have taken 3 ibuprofen and am off to drink beer with ex at Flying Saucer before attending Rachel’s improv night.

Uh, didn't it rain, like, all day yesterday?

The rain gauge says exactly one-half inch fell here at Aurora which is disappointing after what seemed like nonstop rain all day yesterday, including some heavy downpours. Today I went to the Vale house to dig up some liriope plugs, since it’s always much easier to dig these after a rain.
I was trying to come up with something different to frame the rose bed, but in the end I’ve fallen back into my routine edging solution, reasoning that Big Blue Lily Turf is bulletproof and of course, free. The Vale front garden is really quite mature now; I cut back some of the deadwood on the perennials as a kindness to George, who’s oblivious to overgrowth. I remember after my mother died, observing how her garden evolved in response to its no longer being lovingly tended. Some things keeled over, but the bones of the garden remained: crepe myrtles, Barbados cherry, pomegranate, fig, even the bougainvillea. It was the fleshy subtropicals that disappeared: bananas, elephant ears, cannas.
Nothing is dying at Vale, it's just the opposite. Massive overgrowth. The backyard in particular is a jungle.
One interesting thing I notice at Vale is the disparity between the two different plantings of soft-leaf yucca. The first batch planted are dark gray bluegreen and after 5 years, the size of giant tumbleweeds. As yet they have no height or stalk emerging; they’re still low to the ground and their shape is a handsome globe of symmetrical leaves. They are really spectacular among the cenizo. The second batch I planted, also identified as soft-leaf yucca, are completely different. These are more yellow green, their shape is in no way globe-like, they are not symmetrical, the curve of their leaves have a ratty random quality. And they are now twice as tall as the original SLYs. At first I disliked them, but now I accept them on their own terms, though I prefer the globular SLYs. I have been harvesting pups from the preferred SLY because I can never find this one in the nurseries.
The front garden here at Aurora is heavily dormant and without a single point of interest. Every single inch of the front yard and flowerbeds is still littered with a half-foot of nonbiodegradable liveoak leaves. My across-the-street neighbors have completed their professional landscaping, so I at least have something interesting to look at. Or in my know-it-all fashion, criticize. These are professionals, after all. Why would they plant those straggly chlorotic-looking dwarf nandinas? And surely the most overplanted landscape plant going these days is the dietes or African iris. Can't they think of something different?
One happy development in my backyard are the flourishing cosmos seedlings which I need to thin. Can't wait for these blowsy frousy ramshackle kids to bloom!

¡Hola, jardineros!

Daughter Rachel and I returned from our week in Los Cabos and I think we both agree it has been a hard landing. After seven days of sun, the glittering Pacific, nonstop whale watching, and doting waitstaff (otro pina colada, senora?), we are both less than charmed to be returning to day labor.














I took a bazillion garden photos to inspire. Since Baja California is a desert, there is lots to take away from their plantings. I wish I knew what kind of baobab-like tree this was. There was no on-site landscape person to question.






























I thought the raked sand was interesting. One could do this with crushed granite or gravel.



















Rachel and I call this the EatPrayLove shot. Many women at this resort were reading the book. This was a sister hotel to the one we were visiting and it was billed as a holistic spa (if by holistic you mean over the top luxury in a minimalist contemporary sculptural architectural fabuloso kind of way).















The dark planting between the cactus is our good friend, purple fountain grass. And check out the artisan trimming of the agaves--this makes such a graphic statement (and somehow also evokes pineapples). Also possibly a safety precaution considering margarita-soused gringos stumbling about the paths?














A wall of alternating tiers of oleander and bougainvillea. ¡Que bonita! Okay, back to the real world: massive aphid infestation and 343 emails at work.

A February Fave

Sadly there is no scratch’n’sniff plug-in on the Internet. So you cannot smell the winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima). It’s almost a rose scent and intensely powerful rather than evanescent like so many flowers. When you stick your nose in a blossom, the fragrance comes up big and doesn’t quit. The shrub is straggly in an old-fashioned way and the flowers themselves are so tiny they don’t make any display. This plant is often described as invasive, but the bush in my backyard is clearly very old and hasn’t spread or thrown off any suckers. The fragrance from this one bush perfumes my whole backyard from February to when the heat kicks in late spring.