This beautiful plant was one of the first plantings I made in my garden, along the pathway to the back garden and I can't remember its name.

I thought originally it was some kind of skullcap because I didn't know anything about plants when I bought it, but its behavior is almost identical to Texas red sage (Salvia coccinea) so I'm thinking that I planted a variety of red sage called "Coral Nymph'. Both can get quite rangy by the end of the summer, are the same height (1 1/2 to 2 feet) and have similar leaves and both like growing in the same dappled shade conditions. I thought that Salvia coccinea was more of a tender perennial treated like an annual here but this pink sage is almost four years old and has been green in winter.

I'm adding this to my plant list because I battle it often and don't want to forget the name. If you live in Austin, you probably know this vine, the one that seems to grow unasked in the shade and tangling up your trees; one day you decide to pull it out and in response it attacks you with a sharp cut from one of its very rose-like sharp thorns. These thorns make it hard to pull this vine out and even if you do, it will still respond by sending up more green vines from some big tuberous root...…

This lovely little annual phlox has bloomed in my garden from November until April. It is not as showy as the big garden phlox like Phlox paniculata, but I love how little I need to take care of it and how it blooms when not much else is. I've often seen it for sale in nurseries in the fall along with other annuals like snapdragons and alyssum, but it's just as easy to grow from seed and will bloom in fall if you start early enough. (The seed germinates in about 3-5 days if you keep it moist, and often...…

February 2009. I was greeted by this flower last fall, nearly five years after living in our house. I had never noticed it before, but this year was full of surprises, in the middle of a drought no less. A whole ribbon of these appeared on a very shady fenceline near our dog run. Not the prettiest place in the world, but where better to surprise me with Texas wildflowers? I absolutely adore daisies, and so one can imagine I was delighted to have some effortless ones suddenly appear. This perennial autumn-blooming Aster is sometimes called White Aster, Heath Aster...…

The state flower of Texas, and the glory of the spring. No roadside or edge of a ranch, or even small garden like mine feels complete without them. Bluebonnets are diminutive lupines, but look stunning in mass. While they're the essence of meadow in Texas, they're also very pretty in carefully arranged garden beds. Bluebonnets are sown in fall, and occasionally you can find them as nursery-grown annuals, but the seed is so widely available and easy to sow, that it's worth it to always try some every year. While the peak of bluebonnet season is in April, they occasionally...…

OK, just to get this out of the way, a little Latin lesson. Some days I feel like a gardener, and others a scientist. My husband calls it my right-brain/left-brain garden. When researching wildflowers, the first problem one gets into is in the matter of names. Flowers have different common names all over the world, and the more this world piles its information online, the more confusing it can get.

Latin names help us get this confusion out of the way, but I admit they are rather boring to most people, sometimes just down right goofy. The gardening world now persists in calling Ranunculus "ranunculus" rather than its much more fitting common name "Persian Buttercup". But then, people might get Buttercup confused with Narcissus, which is what we called "Buttercups" as children where I grew up, and what others in the South call Jonquils or you call Daffodils. Ahh, never mind.

This flower needs no introduction. During my first-ever gardening escapade, I sowed Texas wildflower seeds all over my bare back yard (in January!), and native Purple Coneflower was among them. They never came up but the next year I sowed the seeds in a prepared bed in fall. By spring it seemed like hundreds came up. I discarded many and potted many others, giving some away to friends that summer. Since the seeds germinated in spring, it would most likely be another year before they bloomed (since many perennials take about a year to reach blooming stage from seed, a...…

Penstemons are becoming hugely popular in gardens, it seems, and they encompass a wide range of species native to the U.S. Since I first started gardening, I was attracted to foxgloves but haven't had much success with them so far, as with many perennial cottage garden plants they fare better in cooler summers. I was also on the lookout for spiky tall plants for parts of my garden that needed less sprawly things (I seem to have a lot of sprawliness). I've tried Mulleins, foxglove, larkspur.During one trip to the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower center I noticed a clump of foxglove-looking...…

Do I love, love, love this vine. And I am so proud that something this ridiculously showy could be native to Texas. It has proven to me that wildflowers don't have to be rustic (and I do like rustic). After my failures with the Passionflower 'Incense', which was repeatedly chomped on by caterpillars, I decided to try another type. This is definitely the more frequently-grown kind, and the showier. Passionflower incense--i.e., passiflora edulis--has smaller leaves, and smaller flowers which are pale purple whose petals sort of fly backwards, rather than splay out. Passionflower incarnata, however, takes over with just a...…

The one thing that should bring me out of the period of silence on this blog is my discovery today that Lady Bird Johnson passed away 2 weeks ago. I wondered if I would get the chance to meet her some day (on earth at least); she was and is an inspiration to the dream garden I see when I close my eyes. In this garden, there are beautiful flowers, elegant and regal but with a delicate and wild balance that arrange themselves in sometimes indiscernible patterns. My first visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center came at a...…

Perennial
Height: 12" or under