The Intent of the Gardener - GGW Picture This Photo

The theme for this month's Picture This Photo Contest is "The Intent of the Gardener", something I've pondered ever since we moved to this small plot of land in July 2004. Rich Pomerantz, the judge for the contest, advises us to look for the unifying principle of the design and also "Look to see if the designer took her cues from the land".
Are there many cues when you buy a 25-year old house on a boring, irregularly-shaped lot in a subdivision? Bulldozers shaped the land, men built the houses and privacy fences carved it into wedges, trapezoids and rectangles. There is, however, a slight rise toward the center back of the lot, which we tried to enhance.

I know exactly what the unifying principle is in this garden... it's the same principle that 'unified' every one of our gardens, although it may only be obvious to Philo and me. Underlying everything is our wish to Not Be Bored. This does lead to a rather messy looking garden - the back yard went from blank to busy in one day after our kids helped us bring all the portable landscape items from the previous Austin house - more than 100 containers full of trees, shrubs, vines, a metal arch, hypertufa troughs, the birdbath from Illinois, wooden benches and patio furniture. Our intent was to have somewhere to go, something to do, someplace to be - and with luck - something to eat. So far so good. I tried to get the yard from the same angle as in the Before photo above. Click this After photo and it should enlarge.
This smaller version is my entry for the contest. The rules say the photo should be under 500 pixels on the long side and when uploaded this was 495 x 359 pixels. What happens now is up to Blogger.
Edit 10 PM - website says size rule no longer in effect.

GardeningGoneWild has a photo gallery for the contest, where you can view the more elegant entries.

A Figgy Embrace for GGW Picture This Contest

The theme for this month's Gardening Gone Wild photo contest is Awakening - something that's already happening in Austin and coming soon to more Northern gardens, long under snow.

Thalia the Muse of Comedy influences many of my posts and today I'll let her rule my photos, too - this photo of my Celeste Fig Tree waking up amused me because it seems to be stretching and reaching out and declaring, "Embrace Spring!"Happy Spring to all of you!

Congratulations Gardening Gone Wild Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the Flowering Tree Photo contest! I enjoyed clicking around the complete list at Gardening Gone Wild seeing flowering trees from other places. Who knew so many of us love redbuds?

For everyone who entered there was something special - renowned photographer-judge Rob Cardillo was kind enough to comment on every entry. The March 2009 photo that I entered wasn't taken for a contest or for the blog but to help me remember what the front yard looked like in spring. Rob's comment about the composition made me resolve to pay attention even for these kinds of "mapping shots", but some of his words made me laugh:

“I like the off centered redbud and how the house line works but this choice view might look even better on an overcast day.”

Frankly Rob, not only the photos but all life in Central Texas might look better if we had more overcast days!

Flowering Trees for Gardening Gone Wild

Some amazing photographers have entered this month's Picture This Photo Contest at Gardening Gone Wild. My photos are seldom amazing but it's worth taking them as documentation and as memories, no matter their artistic value. I'm entering this photo because it shows all three forms of our Redbuds/Cercis canadensis in bloom last spring. I named my garden Circus~Cercis because of these trees:
(Please click to enlarge)

At left near the Pink Garden a Texas Redbud is getting established, waving arms to its cousin the Texas Whitebud across the drive in the sunny native and adapted bed that now fills the footprint where a huge ash once grew. Between them, way back in the shadows at the far end of the house you can see the dark leaves and deep pink flowers of the 'Forest Pansy' redbud, planted in fall 2004.

We're in deep drought here in Central Texas, and have already racked up more than 30 days over 100°F with all of August and September yet to come. I've been watering the trees, but sometimes the ground stays so warm and the nights are so hot that even good-sized trees just give up the fight to stay alive. With a little luck the three redbuds will make it through to live and bloom again.

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.