Snow Big Deal

It's a Snow Day in Austin - just these few inches of large fluffy flakes have sent the town into a tizzy and sent me to the photo archives... snow makes me nostalgic and it triggers my record-keeping instincts.



This is what we called snow in Illinois! I liked shoveling smaller snowfalls, but it was tough clearing 20" from our drive and walk in January 1999




Then we moved to our first house in Texas where this February 25, 2003 sifting was also called snow




We might have missed the few inches that fell in the middle of the night on February 14, 2004 but a 2AM phone call took us out on the roads...slushy snow, steep hills and road surfaces built for warm weather combined to give us an exciting ride



In December 2008 a thin layer covered the drive, grass and car - enough to make Sleetman a hit on Twitter!


Look fast and you might think you're looking at snow... look close and you'll see it was the destructive March 25, 2009 hail - resulting in billions over $160 Million dollars in damage (and a new roof for Annie & Philo).



Can the 16th largest city in the US can handle today's snowfall without too many problems? I sure hope so - want to enjoy these decorative February flakes without guilt



Here are 14 seconds of the fountain in the snow - listen for the birds!

Tomorrow is Another (Garden) Day

Yes, the weather is hot and it's very dry. Yes, we could be heading to the kind of historic drought that gripped Central Texas in the 1950's. At my house the container plants get water and so do the borders. I water the tomato patch and the young trees and non-established shrubs but not the lawn. The grass looks okay where it grows next to the borders, the lawn is hanging on unwatered in the shade, and it is dying in the parkway and in the sunny parts of the front yard.


But I don't want to talk about any of that! Today I want to be Scarlet O'Hara, ignoring reality to concentrate on what's still good as we mark a "late-1970's ranch-style home" anniversary...it was five years ago that Philo & I bought this house, got the keys and began the move here, bringing a pile of plants along.We'd spent the previous 5 years living in another part of Austin, in a tall house on a canyon with deer in the front yard, a view, and nearly 100 pots of plants hiding from the deer on the deck. Losing the view was not fun and it would be very different to live with a flat, fenced back yard. That almost-blank slate was pretty exciting, even though the backyard was smaller than the front yard and shaped like a trapezoid. In the photo above you see the original long view across the back of the oddly-shaped back yard. Two pecans grew at the far end and most of the yard was grass. The concrete patio was a rectangle large enough to hold the table & grill.
When you entered at the gate a few medium-sized pink crepe myrtles grew along the left fence and a metal shed held tools and the mower. Nothing terrible, just normal and kind of boring. But what we wanted was something interesting. We wanted to walk out the back door and feel as if we were going Somewhere.

Five years in are we closer to that goal? When we open the gate the white Acoma crepe myrtles have filled in along the fence and reached up to soften the magenta explosion from the next yard:

Look down the long axis today and it's obvious that the pecan trees have grown, that the grass has been turned into mixed borders and that the patio has expanded. Our original view from the breakfast room window was the inside of the old shed - now we look out to watch the fountain add sound and motion to the life-giving water flowing for birds & beasts.Whether you come in the gate or come out from inside the house there's always something to do, something to see, somewhere to go - perhaps to check out a magnolia with edges browning almost as soon as it unfurled, its decrepit beauty still appreciated by a bee.
Maybe I could take a photo of an open flower on the Bauhinia/Orchid tree from my friend Ellen so the image can be used to help identify the species.
I can take back my earlier complaints about partial shade delaying the formation of blue blooms on the Duranta and instead rejoice that the shade gives the plant some relief from the intense sun.

Taking out the trash can be an adventure since it brings me near enough to admire the yellow Plumeria/Frangipani against the blue sky, even while hoping for dark clouds!
I can bend down to pull a few weeds and see the Crocosmia flames and Yarrow sparks at the base of the white Acoma crepe myrtle
Against the back fence a few tomatoes haven't given up - not the sturdy grape tomato 'Juliet', which sets fruit in heat and not the old favorite 'Early Girl'. A couple of 'Carmello's have set and might grow to maturity while the single plant of 'Costoluto Genovese' produces one small fruit every day. That's not shade cloth from a garden store - it's an old cotton curtain bought for a slider door, then used on an interior doorway, now draped over the birdnetting, held up by Philo's homemade wooden tomato scaffold.


At the back of the small plot the volunteer Pattypan makes tiny perfect squashes.
And in the shade under the curtain the tomatoes do their best. As you saw in the last post, I bring them in the second they show any color and put them on the counter, ripening just fine because the kitchen is always at least 80°F. Developing inside is a good idea right now. I've finally caught up with the 2009 events at the Divas of the Dirt blog and am gradually reworking the archives from 2001 to 2008, using the text from the original website with added photos. A new song is in the works, too, but until then, here's the Pond Song I wrote last summer - the 18th and 19th of July are the dates for this year's Austin Pond Society Tour.

A Garden Blogger's Bird Day

This post, "A Garden Blogger's Bird Day", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Okay, it's not really one day... it took a couple of weeks. And there aren't that many birds, but if I wait any longer to add photos the leaves will be falling.

In the middle of July a very striking rusty orange & black bird began appearing at the fountain - but I had no camera. He kept appearing while we borrowed a camera, purchased one, returned it and bought another and I kept trying to catch my pretty bird visitor with no success. Then a couple of weeks ago our son was standing at the window with the new camera, experimenting with the settings, when the small bird appeared and posed. Showing us not only the rusty orange front but the striped feathers, too. Using links from local blogger Mikael at Birding on Broadmeade, I've tentatively identified the bird as an Orchard Oriole. The photos of the female at the link resembled a bird I'd been seeing, but thought was a female Lesser Goldfinch. I'm still not sure, but this bird has a beak more like an oriole than a goldfinch, so I think it's the female Orchard Oriole. I delayed posting the photos my son took, hoping for a chance to show the pair. Both male and female appear off and on and I finally took a couple of not-so-hot photos of what might be his missus through the window. Unfortunately that window is double pane glass and it's got moisture trapped between the panes. - replacing the windows is on our "must be done" list!

Both birds have been around this week, too. Since these sightings were spread out over three months, I think there must be some source of the fruit and pollens that they need nearby. The hummingbirds remain elusive - instantly leaving the yard if I so much as peek out any door. So I'm trying to entice them closer to the window. A month ago I used twine to make an arch from the crook of a shepherd hook near the fountain up to a large 'S'-shaped hanger attached under the eaves outside the breakfast room window. Then I trained the cypress vine along it - knowing how much those hummingbirds like the little red trumpets. Maybe some day I'll get lucky. And yes... I do know there will be a million cypress vine seedlings next spring. These were some of the million seedlings from this spring!
The Blue Jays pose so often that they're on my blog banner and in this photo from May. But most of the birds I see all day long - sparrows, wrens, housefinches and White-Winged Doves - are so common, and at the same time so jumpy - that I seldom attempt to photograph them.

Iris at Society Garlic once mentioned that she wasn't even sure what a White-winged dove looked like so yesterday I stalked them. They're Baby Huey birds - nervous and clumsy when landing next to each other and scattering if a leaf falls off a tree. This dove landed on the old bird bath, far enough away from the back door that it let me take a photo. I've read that twenty years ago these White Winged Doves were rather rare birds in the Austin area, found mainly in the Rio Grande Valley. We never saw them around our previous Austin house, less than 2 miles from here, but our present neighborhood is thick with these birds and their cooing call of "Who cooks for you?" Another common bird soars high overhead, too far away for good photographs - My new camera takes such large photos that I can clip that tiny dot and enlarge it into something that's at least recognizable as a vulture.

Cooing is one way that birds talk to each other...twittering is another. Look in the left sidebar and you'll see that I'm trying out Twitter as a way to communicate. It took Hurricane Ike to convince me to join after wavering for months. With Houston area friends in danger, I could read Twitter updates to follow the storm and then felt enormously relieved when bloggers sent messages via Twitter. There was a comfort in that connection! And tweets are faster than making posts if you have a quick thing to say.

The Moonflower vine in the last post got so many compliments that I may have to include a different photo of it every post! FaireFrances has been having fun photographing her moonflowers, too.

This picture is a genuine "point and shoot"... the point of the metal obelisk is 7 and 1/2 feet tall, and I'm about 5' 6". So I couldn't focus and aim...all I could do was hold the camera way over my head and point it at the flower while pressing the shutter button.


Before leaving bird day let's look at this close-up of a Stapelia flower. My collection comes from one plant given to me by my aunt Phyll long ago. A small descendant of that first plant bloomed in the laundry room this week, pressing its flower against the window as it developed, deforming the edges. I'd hoped the heart of the Starfish Flower would resemble one of the flower Mandalas that Healing Magic Hands finds everywhere. But I'm not sure this heart qualifies as a Mandala ... it looks as if belongs to zoology rather than botany. Am I the only one who instead of feeling centered, had a sudden mental image of Robin Williams?


This post, "A Garden Blogger's Bird Day", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Design Workshop - Decks, Porches and Patios

Annie in Austin wrote this post about her patio as part of Gardening Gone Wild's Garden Bloggers Design Workshop- Decks, Porches and Patios.


Each month the designers at Gardening Gone Wild ask bloggers to post about a different element in their gardens' design. I've enjoyed reading those linked posts and would like to join in this one. We like the long narrow veranda across the front of our house - but the space we use the most is the patio.

A realtor took this photo of the back of the house before we moved here in late summer 2004. We were glad to have that slab of level concrete - it would give us somewhere to put the metal table and chairs and the grill. But would anyone want to sit out there? It took a couple of years to change that barren rectangle into a place we want to be.
In October 2006 I wrote about the evolution of our patio, describing how we'd dug out grass and used packed decomposed granite to extend the usable area of our patio. We didn't want to add more concrete, but we wanted more space... the granite worked for us, and it's also permeable rather than a hard surface to encourage water runoff.
We added an arch with a Lady Banks rose, a coral honeysuckle and a clematis taking turns at bloom. We used flowers, shrubs and trees in large containers around the perimeter and made an herb garden in hypertufa troughs at the sunny end. Now the patio feels more like an outdoor room.Earlier this year I wrote about adding a disappearing fountain to the granite area right outside our breakfast room window. So far this seems like one of the best projects we've ever done. The fountain is not only beautiful, but it's been life-giving for insects, birds and animals in this hot, dry year.

Instead of a hard line between inside and outside, we now have someplace that blurs the line and connects the spaces where we live. The back of the house faces southeast, so from October to April, this is a good place to sit and have coffee, watch the birds, read, snack, converse, relax.
But in summer, when daytime temperatures are in the normal nineties, or when we get a scorcher of a year like this one, when the high temperature approaches 100°F/37ºC each day, the chairs are used more by birds waiting for a turn at the fountain than by us.

In the afternoon the sun swings around the end of the house, and pecan trees shadow the patio, giving the plants a break. The table is handy as a work bench or to set things down as I go in and out for short stretches of time - to look at what's blooming, to water the containers, to watch the birds or to do a little gardening. The sound of the fountain is pleasant as I putter around. I use the long axis to travel from one end of the yard to the other within the shadow of the house.
The grill is in shade by afternoon - we seldom eat outdoors in summer but cooking out here keeps heat out of the kitchen. If we want to sit outside we use citronella cones, oil lamps and torches to discourage mosquitoes on these hot and humid evenings.

Sometimes the mornings aren't too humid, and it's pleasant enough for coffee and a newspaper. But midsummer is not Austin's finest season. We're more likely to stay in the air conditioning and wait - remembering how wonderful it felt last winter to sit at this table, in a space open to the south and protected by the bulk of the house. That's when we'll really appreciate the patio, as we eat lunch and bask in the sun under the bare pecan tree, with a nearby sweet olive wafting its scent on the pleasantly cool air.

Here's a link to Nan's wrap-up of gardeners who wrote about Decks, Porches and Patios.

Annie in Austin wrote this post about her patio as part of Gardening Gone Wild's Garden Bloggers Design Workshop- Decks, Porches and Patios.

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.