Touring my garden with Pam

When I learned garden blogger and author Pam Penick was scheduled to speak in San Antonio, I emailed an invitation for her to drop by and visit my garden.  She graciously accepted.

Now what?  I had just invited Pam of Digging and Lawn Gone! book fame and her camera to our garden which is also home to numerous "works in progress".  Some might even be called "experiments" if you get my drift.  What do I do now?  As it turned out, I didn't do any more than I would if one of my local gardening friends was coming for a visit and all was just fine.

Rain measured in feet along with heat and humidity meant I could spend very little time in the garden last week so what Pam saw was the garden as it looks every day.  That's okay for some areas.  The front looks pretty much the same all the time from this angle.

Gardening on the Rocks: What's new in my own garden?

It's been a while since I posted about my own garden and there have been recent changes that are beginning to pay off.  The biggest change is the wheel garden, which is bigger and better.  We've had several good rains so it's also been a good spring generally for the garden.

We built the circle garden last year to cover a bare spot in the yard.  At the time I limited the size of each wedge for ease of working and the amount of soil and other materials available.

Autumn Garden Round-up

My garden always seems to look best in Autumn.   After the heat-induced slumber of August the garden responds to the cooler weather by greening up and blooming like mad for three months.  By the end of November blooms begin to fade and the plants prepare for winter dormancy.  To celebrate a good year in the garden and because Garden Blogger's Bloom Day always eludes me, I'll post two days of blooms from the last few weeks.

The best place to begin a round-up is with the wheel garden in the back yard of course.   Just finishing its first full season, I am thrilled with how it has worked out and grown so beautifully from a rocky patch of dirt this time last year.

Looking toward the shed from the house, Gregg's mistflower, pine muhly.   The large plumes catching the light in back are the "mystery muhly" which was incorrectly tagged as Lindheimer's muhly and has worked out well in the garden.

Hot wheels and butterflies

Butterflies are covering the flowers in the new wheel garden and I'm enjoying them each morning before it gets too hot.  The wheel garden was intended to turn an eyesore into eye candy with plants that can take the full-sun heat of August here in San Antonio.  It's a bonus that these heat and drought tolerant plants are also popular with butterflies.

Queen butterflies (Danaus gillippus) particularly like the blue mistflower (Conoclinium greggii).

They prefer the spent, slightly dried blooms of the mistflower so I'll hold off trimming these back for fall bloom.

Yesterday I found this Queen Butterfly caterpillar on the tropical milkweed.   I was planning to attract monarchs but there may not be any milkweed left when the monarchs begin their migration through here in a few weeks.

Queen Butterflies look a bit like their monarch cousins though they are smaller and lack the distinctive "stained glass" pattern on the wings.

Gulf Fritillaries go for the 'Fireworks' gomphrena

And the Mexican Bird of Paradise (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) is popular as well

The colors of the garden also provide great color camoflage for butterflies.  Look closely above the gomphrena and you can just see them against the green trees flitting above the flowers in the center.  (Click on the photo to enlarge.)

While researching this post I discovered the excellent Texas Butterfly Ranch blog which I highly recommend if you would like more detailed information on attracting butterflies in Central and South Texas.

Texas Style Shed Project

In my post on the new wheel garden in my back yard I showed a glimpse of the shed.  Pam Penick from the blog Digging left a comment asking to know more about the shed.  I was planning to post photos at some point so here by special request is the story of our Texas style shed along with some how-to tips.

Gardening on the Rocks: New Backyard Garden

What did we do with all that top soil delivered back in February?  We created new gardens in the back yard.  The main work went into this 24' diameter garden which we refer to as "the wheel".  The formal name for this style garden is parterre, but this is a Texas style parterre and quite informal so wheel garden it is.

While not exactly reinventing the wheel, this garden has reinvigorated a scruffy spot in the back yard and provided a nice sunny spot for growing native and adapted plants.

It was worse than a blank slate back in 2009 when we had just reclaimed our home from a series of renters and the drought hadn't even kicked in yet.  This area, like everything else both inside and out, needed attention.  The fence was falling apart and the green shown here is mostly weeds.  We temporarily directed our efforts to the front yard and ignored this spot for a while.

This area really began looking bad a year into the drought when the weeds died and the buffalo grass went dormant.  It made a pretty good golf driving range though.

We built a shed and small garden in the corner and replaced the fence we shared with the neighbors.  I planted wildflowers and we set up a temporary wire fence to help protect plants along the fence from deer browsing.  In spring 2011, a few bluebonnets managed to take hold.  My vision of a wildflower and native grass lawn wasn't working out too well just yet

 
By fall of 2011, the drought had obviously taken its toll.  Even the weeds were struggling and thin soil over a rocky slope was not a good place to plant anything.  A new approach was needed.  We decided on a circle garden because terracing across the yard would have been too involved for a DIY project.  The circle allows access from the shed to other parts of the yard and rain runoff goes around it or is used by the garden.

The 48" diameter center circle was laid out and planted in the fall of 2011.  The surrounding wedges were added in the spring of 2012. Leftover fence boards were used to lay out the pathways.  After the boards were in place, we walked through and around the circle changing the boards until the direction of the paths connected comfortably with other points in the yard.  Over to the right a new screen porch fitted with salvaged windows is under construction.

We used rocks from the yard to line the beds and measured every few feet to make sure the beds stayed even.  No point buying rocks when these are free and indigenous to the site.  It's also a nod to the Hill Country tradition of lining paths and flower beds with found rocks.

The wedges were filled with top soil and compost.

This spring the bluebonnets looked great both in and around the circle.

The interior paths were lined with landscape fabric and then filled with gravel salvaged from the front yard.  The plants are kept low to allow a view of the trees and creek from the gate.  Far from being an impediment the circle has created a very pleasant plant and flower-filled transition to the shed.  The gravel path from the deck is most helpful when it rains to keep shoes from getting muddy.

The circle is planted with ornamental grasses, native and drought tolerant perennials, and a few annuals.  While the plantings are not precisely laid out they are tied together with Ruby Crystals grass (Melinus nerviglumis 'Savannah') planted at both ends of each wedge along the spokes of the wheels.  Eventually the spokes will connect paths that lead to other areas of the yard and shed.

Now I look forward to seeing this area and occasionally walk out here just to stand in this garden.

Building this circle garden has made a huge difference in how we view the backyard.

It's so nice to have this garden finished.  We have many more projects planned for the back yard so it will keep getting better from here on.