THOUGHT POPS

This photo was taken at a place I dearly love, the Elisabet Ney museum in the Hyde Park area of our town.
Tomorrow is Museum Day in Austin – some locations are open free of charge, others have special events for the day and a few have food involved. Here’s a link to the Austin Museum Partnership.



There’s an Iris sale at Zilker Botanical Gardens, [today and tomorrow] sorry - it was Saturday only - so no new iris for me, darn it!.

Scroll to September 9th for details.
I grew at least 50 varieties of Iris in Illinois; some were hybrid cultivars with fancy names and fancy pricetags, while my passalong plants bore personal names like "Ruth's prairie iris", "Dad's blue Siberian" or "Vi's dwarf white".
I liked them all, and planted many tall-bearded, quite a few dwarf-bearded, a handful of Siberian and a few species like reticulata and pseudocorus.
In this 10-year old photo you can see a couple of the bearded iris that grew in our front garden in Illinois. [I have no resistance to the purple shades.]
The varieties of bearded iris is stuck at #4 in our present garden, but the numbers may go higher as more lawn is converted to mixed borders. Along with producing lovely flowers, the plants seem to do well here, so why not?

This is an interesting time to be an Austin gardener who also enjoys reading about Austin gardening. In addition to long-time local garden sites like Soul of the Garden, [from our tireless public-media multi-tasker Tom Spencer], Garden Bits by naturalist/photographer Valerie, and Zanthan Gardens from M Sinclair Stevens, there is a site on herbs and herb gardening called Horsetail Haven from Ann Marie.

While not primarily a garden blog, 'Rantor' also posts entries about what's in bloom in South Austin at Rantomat. The Hill Country landscape is frequently the subject at Lifescapes, by mystery writer Susan Wittig Albert, the creator of the herb-themed 'China Bales' series. Susan Albert lives to the west of Austin, but we'll count her as one of us!

Pam Penick has been writing and posting incredible photos at Digging for quite awhile, with newer blogs R Sorrell’s Great Experiment and my Transplantable Rose beginning within weeks of each other in June.

On August 28th, we heard a welcome new voice when Austin Susan started telling us garden stories at South of the River. A few other sites that sometimes talked about gardening, like Martha's, are not active now, but may return some day. Are there any more local garden writers that I've missed?

I'm happy to be one of the Austin Garden Bloggers in such an interesting town.

Sunday AM: I think the Susan Albert link will work now.