Town Lake, Austin

Lady Bird Johnson at Town Lake

Austin is situated on the Colorado River in Texas - not to be confused with the Colorado River that provides much of Southern California’s water. Dams along the river create a string of man-made lakes in the Austin area: Town Lake (renamed Lady Bird Lake in 2007), cliff-lined Lake Austin, and the largest, Lake Travis to the west. I would jog around Town Lake which had been “beautified” by Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign in 1970’s to improve the city’s riverfront. People would mimic Lady Bird’s Texas drawl and say “plant a booish, flar, shruub or tree – too-day”. In spring and early summer I would count the varieties of blooming wildflowers that had been planted on the north side of the lake, often losing count somewhere in the high 40s. The show was spectacular.  Today the trail and wildflowers are maintained by the Trail Foundation.

Bats at the Congress Street Bridge

To get to the north trail I’d cross the river on the Lamar Street Bridge.  The newly completed cyclist and pedestrian Pfluger Bridge allows for much safer crossing.  Further south on the lake is the Congress Street Bridge. At an estimated 1.5 million the bridge is home to largest urban population of Mexican free-tail bats in North America---did I mention there are a lot of bugs in Austin?

On my jogs I would cross back over the river on the pedestrian bridge that runs under the MoPac freeway.  Lining the south bank of the river is a stand of 100+ year old native cypress, cottonwoods, and pecan trees.  Several of the cypress trees where the tallest trees I’d ever seen in Central Texas. 

Town Lake and upstream Lake Austin have significant problems with a water plant introduced by the aquarium trade, Hydrilla verticillata.  Hydrilla is native to parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia and can grow up to 25 feet in clear water. It has few pests and chokes out native species, creating large monocultures. In the 70’s in the late fall Lake Austin would be drained in hopes that a cold winter would kill the hyrdrilla, or at least control it. The good news is that due to the recent drought a local native water plant, cobamba has been able to out compete hydrilla in Town Lake.                  

On the south side of the lake is the 350 acre Zilker Park.  The trail on this side of the lake is much higher above the lake.  After crossing the bridge, there is a large lotus pond.  People would stand at the edges and count the water moccasins (venomous snakes) that had staked out a sunny spot on top of the lotus leaves. 

Japanese Garden in Zilker Park

Tw0 notable attractions in the park are the Zilker Botanical Garden and Barton Springs.  The 32 acre garden was the first botanical garden I had ever been in. Unusual for Texas, it includes the Isamu Taniguchi Japanese Garden. It is situated on steep hillside with 2 large koi ponds, connected by limestone lined rivulets, a Moon Bridge, teahouse and other traditional Japanese garden features. This was my first introduction to Japanese gardens. 

Back on the path around the lake, I’d cross the bridge over where Barton Springs meets Town Lake; large turtles are everywhere sunning themselves on the rocks and fallen trees. Barton Springs in comprised of 4 springs where the Balcones fault cuts into the Edwards Aquifer. The large limestone caverns of Texas produce one of the most prolific artesian aquifers in the world. Cool and clear fast-running springs dot the area between Austin and San Antonio. Aquarena Springs, the Comal river, Barton Springs and several other springs are popular attractions for escaping the long hot & humid Texas summer. Central Texas creeks and rivers are popular for “tubing”- a day long float down a cold river in an oversized inner tube accompanied by friends and a beer-filled ice chest. Barton Springs is one of the most urban springs and had been channeled into a manmade pool about the length of 3 football fields (Texans measure things by football fields.).  The springs produce on average 31 million gallons of 68 degree water per day. The best way to enter is a head first dive that takes your breath away as your body tries to adjust to abrupt change from 90+ degree air.  If the cool water isn’t enough to draw visitors, the pool is also popular with topless sunbathing  young women and their admirers. I spent many a hot summer day floating on a raft in the middle of the pool and now have the skin cancers to prove it. 

 Spring fed, 68 degree Barton Springs 

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Ostentatious Austin

After graduating high school and without giving it much thought, I enrolled in the Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Texas in Austin. Compared to Houston, Austin was a breath of fresh air.  With less rain than Houston’s 50+ inches, Austin is slightly dryer with just 35 inches. It is sunnier and often has a southerly breeze and is somewhat removed from the Gulf Coast haze and humidity. I would spend the next 6 years in the garden spot of Texas.

Fountain on the South Mall of the University of Texas

I arrived at UT in the middle of an oil boom. UT was set up as a land grant university in 1839 with the original intent for agricultural lands to provide an endowment to fund the university. By the time UT actually opened in the 1880s worthless barren west Texas land had been designated for the endowment. In a Texas-sized twist of fate, one of the largest oil reserves in the US was discovered on those lands in the 1920s and by the 70s UT was flush with oil money and an endowment larger than Harvard. 

A sizable part of the endowment was poured into football and a building boom. Overlooking the campus, the LBJ library had recently opened. It was landscaped with live oaks and massive beds of azaleas. The contemporary building clad in sheets of Texas limestone was a stark contrast to the more traditional red tiled roofed buildings of the main campus.  To join the various styles of buildings limestone planters and walls were being erected around the existing live oaks and pecan trees that lined the perimeter of the campus to separate it from the city of Austin...euphemistically called the Great Wall of UT. In spite of the alkaline soil, UT installed huge beds of azaleas, spirea, ferns and other acid-loving plants. 

LBJ Library overlooking the University of Texas Campus in Austin

At the center of campus is the 307 ft. Main Building, better known as The Tower, with 14 1/2 foot diameter clocks on each side and a 56-bell carillon at the top.  From the tower, south, east and west malls lead to various parts of campus.  Rumor is there is no north mall because the original 40 acres of UT land was donated by confederate George Washington Littlefield under the condition that no buildings on campus faced north or included the word “north” in their names. The grassy south mall terrace is the most beautiful of the three, situated on a slight slope and lined with massive live oak trees. At the top of the slope is a statue of George Washington facing south towards the legally protected unobscured view of the State Capitol and downtown Austin.  Lining the slope are 6 controversial statues of southerners including Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and James Hogg (James Hogg was the first native governor of Texas and father of the Ima Hogg I wrote about in the April 2012 newsletter). At the bottom of the slope is a large World War I memorial, the Littlefield fountain. The statues and fountain were commissioned by George Washington Littlefield and created by Italian sculptor Pompeo Coppini. The fountain is famous for its very un-Texas nude Mermen being sprayed by huge jets of water and riding finned seahorses while pulling a warship and a statue of victorious Columbia returning from war. In the 1970’s, the planter in front of the fountain was planted with hesperaloes which bloomed with red flower spikes and seemed unfazed by the Texas heat and humidity.

Like the south mall, the west mall was originally grass-covered. As part of the 1970s building boom and with much controversy it was paved over and raised limestone planters were added.  The original design included a large round fountain at the edge of campus. However, by the mid-70s the energy crisis and student protests about the inappropriate use of electricity resulted in shelving plans for the fountain and instead a large round flower bed was installed.   

After the death of George Washington Littlefield’s widow in 1935, the Victorian Littlefield house was donated to the University of Texas. The high-style Victorian house was completed in 1894 at a cost of $50,000. Besides the beautiful red granite façade with iron verandas, the property is famous for the large Deodar Cedar (Cedrus deodara), or "Himalayan Cedar" imported from the Himalayas and planted on the property by the Littlefield’s. The tree is one of the most distinctive on campus and today is 58 feet tall and nearly as wide. Littlefield even had the soil where the tree was planted dug up and replaced with Himalayan soil.

Pen & Ink of Littlefield Home by Jim Bishop

Across from the Littlefield home are 3 large pre-civil war live oaks. All other oak trees in the area were cut down during the civil war to build a fortress around the capital. Years later, the oaks were to be cut down to construct the Biology Laboratories.  Fortunately Dr. William Battle, for whom the oaks are now named, started a successful movement to relocate the building and save the oaks.

Other notable trees on campus are several other tree species that were new to me. There was a small stand of Ginkgo biloba, (when I heard they were “living fossils” I hunted them out). Behind one building were 2 large-leafed Aesculus pavia, known as Red Buckeye.  These are native to the southern portion of the US and put a beautiful spring bloom display.  On one side of campus runs Waller Creek. Alongside the creek are many native bald cypress, Taxodium distichum. In the courtyard of my dorm were a few evergreen pears (though not evergreen in Texas), that bloomed in late winter. Papershell pecan grew along the street in front of the dorm. 

Today, UT has about 4900 trees on campus and was named “Tree Campus USA” in 2008. 

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My First Landscape

At the end of my freshman year of college, my parents moved from the Spring Shadows subdivision in Spring Branch, home of Spring Woods High School, to an unincorporated wooded area north of Houston simply known as Spring.  They built a two story house on a corner lot in a quasi-French style and lived there for the next 25 years. 

Surrounding the house were large oaks and pines, most so tall that their first branches were above the second story of the house...leading my younger brother - much to my father's dismay - to dub it the telephone pole factory.  Over the years, most of the trees would be removed -- some by tornado. 

That first summer my mother and I installed the landscape.  We ignored the tradition of a row of foundation shrubs around the house, and instead used curved brick walkways and deep planting beds full of layers of plants. We used treated 'peeler logs', made from the centers of trees leftover from creating plywood, to separate the beds from the lawn and create a mowing strip to one wheel of the mower along.  My father complained that there wasn’t enough lawn and the neighbors would think we were crazy.  We used the latest plant introductions, including a hybrid St. Augustine grass that was chinch bug resistant, so required less pesticide. 

We started with a brick path along one side of the house and another from the back patio to the vegetable garden behind the garage. The front of the house was mostly boxwoods, hollies, azaleas, flowering quince, ivy, liriope, and pittosporums. My mother always wanted a redbud tree, so we planted one in the curve of the front walk. At the street we flanked the walk with watermelon-pink crepe myrtles. To block the view of the neighbor's driveway, I placed a loquat tree near the property line, along with variegated Pittosporum tobria, leaving them untrimmed to create a 6 foot tall screen. At the front corner of the lot, mother planted a 1 gallon Southern magnolia which grew to dominate that area. To decrease the amount of west sun on the front of the house we planted a dozen one gallon pines, which grew so large that 15 years later all but one was removed. In another island bed, we planted a bareroot pecan tree with a 3 foot tap root. In planting it we learned how high the water table was.  One of us dug out the heavy clay soil while the other baled the water that kept filling the hole.  We surrounded the tree with hybrid triploid daylilies we bought from a local hybridizer.

Queen Elizabeth Rose

In one island bed we planted roses.  None did well except Queen Elizabeth (God Save the Queen!).  Between the long hot humid summer, bugs, and diseases, it is almost impossible to grow hybrid roses in Houston.

In the backyard, we installed hydrangeas underplanted with violets and impatiens.  Another exceptionally wide bed received dogwoods, gardenias, oxalis, cast iron plants and amaryllis.  At the end of the garage mother planted a bottle brush, wrapped every winter to keep it from freezing.  Other beds contained hybrid azaleas, newly introduced bush cultivars of crepe myrtle and fruit trees.

In summer mother planted celosia, which grew 4 feet tall with brilliant flame-like flower spikes in yellow, orange, red, burgundy and purple. Mom would make huge bouquets of them at Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, celosia is a wind pollinator and I developed a severe allergic reaction - ah the joys of gardening in Houston!

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Going Back to Houston

After 3 years living in Missouri, my father accepted a new job in Houston and we moved to Texas in February of 1970. We had last lived in Houston in 1959. We moved into a neighborhood of newish tract homes. All the houses were one story with same basic floor plan and different exteriors...Spanish, Southern Colonial, traditional, and ours, which was Tudor. Our neighbors were mostly mid-level executives or blue collar workers for oil companies or other energy related businesses. About ½ were native Texans and the others were recent transfers to Houston.

Even though I was born in nearby Pasadena (Texas), the hot and humid weather, the concrete and billboard-plastered freeways, the ugliness of the largest city in the U.S. with no zoning, the pancake-flat and swampy terrain, the lack of outdoor activities, the Texas-sized bugs and the newly arrived fire ants, plus way too many “cowboys” ...all made me long for somewhere, anywhere else...or maybe I was just experiencing a difficult adolescence. Houston boasted that it was the most air conditioned city in the world and without it would have been uninhabitable for 9 months of the year. It was always too dry or too wet, too hot or too cold. All this made it an unlikely place for being outside, let alone in the garden.

Still over time I would start to pursue gardening as a passion. Our house was on a corner lot. The street on one side dead-ended at a 10 foot deep drainage ditch. The ditch was dry for months at a time, but could overflow during the periodic monsoon rains. It was home to toads, giant bullfrogs, a few turtles, snakes (mostly 6 foot long water moccasins) and assorted small mammals and birds. Our side was lined with tall yaupon bushes (Ilex vomitoria). In the fall, migrating cedar waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) would eat the fermented berries and sleep off their stupor on the roof, occasionally tumbling off onto the ground. Between the ditch and our back wooden fence mom would struggle to grow vegetables, mostly tomatoes and strawberries. We piled the grasses clippings into an informal haystack next to the vegetable garden in hopes of creating compost…but it was usually too wet and full of anaerobic bacteria and fire ants to be of much use. On the other side of the ditch, ran a large linear field below high-power transmission lines. In the field grew a variety of plants: Texas goldenrod (Solidago altissima), snow-on-the-mountain (Euphorbia marginata), wild grasses, passion vines (Passiflora incarnata), and a lot of dewberries (Rubus trivialis). Dewberries are the shorter, less sweet, poor southern cousin of blackberries and raspberries…all in the genus Rubus. Mom spent countless hours, and many years, picking dewberries and freezing them and somehow avoiding encounters with fire ants and snakes. Despite adding copious amounts of sugar, dewberries make the world’s densest and sourest pies and cobblers.

In the backyard were a couple of messy native Texas Persimmons (Diospyros texana) and an Eastern Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis). If we had a wet autumn, the sycamore (and most other trees) were defoliated by hoards of stinging caterpillars. The back fence was lined with waxleaf ligustrum (Ligustrum japonicum). This was one of the few plants that Texans called by its Latin name. I was surprised to hear Californians call it Texas Privet.

The front yard came with builder-installed foundation plantings and one water oak tree (Quercus nigra). Most of the foundation plantings were new to me. Under the bedroom windows were planted variegated Pittosporum tobira and the corners were anchored with taller yew, (Podocarpus macrophyllus). On either side of the front door were planted a pair of naturally round dwarf yaupon (Ilex vomitoria 'Nana'). A boxwood hedge fronted with mondo grass (Ophiopogon japonicus) grew under the living room window. A Xylosma was in the corner between the dining room and living room with Elaeagnus pungens planted under the dining room window. Along the side of the house was a shiny hedge of Burford holly. All except the yaupon quickly grew out of scale for the house and needed monthly shearing. I used a large pair of clippers to trim the shrubs and quickly ended up with a dense mass of twigs at the top. By trial and error, I learned to shorten some of the branches more than the others to encourage new inner growth. I also would angle or round the front and tops so sunlight would hit the lower branches and keep them green.

Our house in Houston after a very rare 1973 snowfall

By my sophomore year in high school, the lawn and garden had become my domain. Besides never doing yard work after my brothers and I were tall enough to push a lawn mower, my father worked long hours and travelled frequently. My mother poured herself into golfing, bowling, painting and volunteer work. My parents golfed every Saturday morning and were gone most of the day. My older brother was away at college and my younger brother disappeared into a haze of hard rock, beer and weed. This left me home alone most of the time and I spent a lot time working in the garden. I started reading all of the garden books in the house and the weekly garden section in the newspaper. I remember one thick Reader's Digest book that had designs for different types of home gardens. I became obsessed with a drawing of a New Orleans courtyard garden with its moss -draped live oak circled by brick paths, azaleas and caladiums. I couldn't understand why, since we had the same weather, there weren't gardens like this in Houston.

About the same time I would meet my first garden mentors. The first was Steve Millard. He was a year older than me, his family had moved to Houston shortly before we did and he lived at the end of the dead end street across the ditch and open field behind our house. Steve wasn't much of a gardener…he said it was too hot to garden… but he knew a lot about plants and was the first person I knew that used Latin names. He had worked in greenhouses in the Chicago area and was knowledgeable about propagation and cultivation. He had an Alexander palm which he called 'Alex' (Archontophoenix alexandrae) growing in his bedroom. His windowsill was a jungle of assorted exotic plants. Steve and I would occasionally walk home from school together and he would point out unusual plants and tell me about them.

My other mentors were the Pruitts, a couple that lived up the street. I would walk by on the way to school and noticed that their garden had more interesting plants and flowers than just about any in the neighborhood. The Pruitts were often in their yard and were always willing to talk about their garden. They would teach me about annuals and perennials, mulching, and candling pine young pines to make them grow denser and shorter. They grew the most impressive pansies, sweet peas, rudbeckias, petunias, verbenas, yarrow and geraniums.

I would attend the “Azalea Trail” hosted by the River Oaks Garden Club. The annual tour includes a visit to the eight classical gardens on the 14 acres of the Hogg estate, Bayou Bend. The gardens were the creation of Miss Ima Hogg, a wealthy Houston patron of the arts and philanthropist. Huge azalea hedges created garden rooms. Several of the garden rooms feature classical statues surround by formal gardens with boxwood hedges. The tour of the gardens ended at the back of the house with a large lawn that sloped down to buffalo bayou. There in the shade of the back porch I met 90 year old Ima Hogg.

Miss Ima Hogg's home, Bayou Bend, on the Azalea Trail tour in the 1970's

Back at our house, to add color to the front yard I added two pale pink crepe myrtles trimmed into small trees under planted with annuals on either side of the front walk. At the time, most crepe myrtles were watermelon pink and grown as large bushes or topped trees. My mother added a maple and some golden rain trees (Koelreuteria paniculata) to the side yard. She grew hydrangeas and chrysanthemums in an east facing bed.

In the back yard, began my first experiments with plants and garden design. I dug the thick St. Augustine sod away from the house and back ligustrum hedge to create planting beds. I dug up roots of the wild passion vines (Passiflora incarnata) that grew in the field behind our house and planted them on the fence behind the ligustrum hedge. I had always been obsessed with zinnias--at first I tried growing them under the house eaves but it was too shady and the heavy rains pounded them to the ground. So in the middle of the yard I created a circular planting bed around a small peach tree. They did better here, but I had problems with corn worms eating the centers of the flowers. At the corner of the house, I grew large cut-leaved philodendron (Philodendron bipinnatifidum) and was so excited to be able to grow a tropical plant directly in the ground. I covered them during hard freezes, but still they would freeze to the ground each year. I started caladium tubers in pots each spring and once the ground temperature stayed above 70 degrees, planted them in the shade, organized by color for a bigger impact.

In the narrow passageway between the garage and back fence, I removed all of the grass and put in a walkway of rectangular concrete pavers with a large planting bed next to the sunny fence. This would be the first garden I created from bare soil. A volunteer Chinese Tallow Tree (Triadica sebifera) in the corner of the lawn separated the area from the rest of the yard creating a secret garden. I scoured the Burpee seed catalogue for the best hybrid seeds to plant. I ended up with tall cleome and amaranth in the back, nasturtiums and double balsams in the middle, and low marigolds and portulaca along the walk. It didn't quite grow in like I expected, but when it was all in bloom it was my favorite place in the garden.

The first garden I designed behind the garage. 
Dug out the sod, laid the pavers and 
grew amaranthus, zinnias, cleome, and portulaca from seed.

Mother would bring home things for me to try in the garden, including one time a small paper bag of these brown things that looked like tiny hula skirts. She said they were some sort of tubers with an unpronounceable name, ranunculus, and were supposed to have beautiful flowers. Not knowing which side was up or how deep to plant them, I dug in compost into a flower bed and took a guess. A few months later up came bright green celery-like foliage followed in the spring by the most beautiful double bright colored flowers on tall stems. I could look at the flowers for hours. I made watercolor copies of antique postcards, attached them to small arrangements of ranunculus and pansies and gave them to all my friends. I soon became popular with all the girls at school.

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Kansas City, Here we come!

 Kansas City, Missouri, is the only place I’ve lived that has 4 very distinct seasons. The winters were cold with snow, then everything would burst into bloom with the first warm days of spring. Summers were hot, humid and green with frequent thundershowers. In autumn the deciduous trees and shrubs turned brilliant shades of red, orange and yellow.

Sumac in autumn

We were very excited when my father was transferred to the Kansas City area. Over spring break, we took a house hunting trip to KC. Compared to Wichita, it looked like paradise. While Kansas was still brown Missouri already had tulips, daffodils and many trees and shrubs in bloom. There seemed to be deeper sense of history, permanence, and civic pride. People were proud of their home landscaping. Public parks were designed by landscape architects. My parents bought a house in the suburban town of Gladstone (called Happy Rock by the locals). The surrounding countryside had rolling hills, woods, picturesque pastures, many streams, ponds, small lakes, and the mighty Missouri River.

Between our house and the neighbors grew a large black walnut tree. My mother used a hammer to break open the walnuts on the garage floor and then added them to homemade vanilla ice cream. Down the hill behind the house was an undeveloped wooded area with a small stream. My younger brother and I would spend countless hours exploring the area. We found 2 arrowheads and the neighbor found a cannon ball, presumably from the Civil War. Wild redbud trees bloomed in the spring and in summer fireflies lit up the woods. In early fall sumac and poison oak turned scarlet. In the winter we’d walk on the frozen creeks and sled down the hills when the snow was deep enough.

But the best season was spring. There was a progression of flowers unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else. The landscape would quickly turn from winter brown to vibrant green. The season was heralded with fragrant hyacinths and yellow forsythia, followed by tulips, white spirea and flowering trees. It concluded in May with peonies, heavy-scented lilacs and roses. Everyone acted differently and I understood the meaning of spring fever – you know - the desire to be outside immersed in nature. All of these colorful plants, unknown to me, seemed to be begging for attention.

In our yard, mother would grow the most beautiful rainbow-colored tall tulips in front of the house. In the summer on the south side of the house she grew lilies, roses and zinnias. At the edge of the lot she would grow tomatoes. Knowing it was unlikely we’d live there long enough to see them mature; she planted fruit and maple trees in the lawn.

Dam that forms Lake Taneycomo
Photo by my grandfather

My father was born in and grew up in Branson, Missouri. We frequently visited his mother there. The drive through the Missouri countryside with old red barns and pastoral farms looked like Currier and Ives paintings come to life. As you approach Branson, the hills became taller and more wooded. My grandmother owned a small souvenir shop on Lake Taneycomo where she hand-colored and sold postcards and photos of the Ozarks taken by her husband in the 1920’s. After my grandfather’s sudden death in 1925, she ended up owning a sizable part of downtown Branson. Over the years she would sell off parcels…but it would all be gone before the re-birth of Branson with country music and all that followed.

Lake Taneycomo, in the Missouri Ozarks

My grandmother only had one flowering plant in her yard, four o’clocks, Mirabilis jalapa. They weren’t much…but they were fun to watch open each afternoon. However, a neighbor had a gigantic vegetable garden with towering tomatoes, corn and squash. She grew giant beefsteak tomatoes that were the size of grapefruit and tasted fantastic.

I know this view well.  Lake Taneycomo as you enter Branson on the old Highway.
My grandfather took the photo. My grandmother hand-colored it.

The lake was just down the hill from her house and was set in a narrow wooded valley with a cliff on the far side. The lake was very cold because the dam that formed the lake was inoperable so the warm water lake flowed over the top. Upstream Table Rock Dam pulled cold water from the depths of the lake and fed it into Taneycomo. Rarely reaching 50 degrees the lake was too cold for swimming, but perfect for trout. On a balmy summer evening, my brothers and I took rented paddle boats out on the lake and watched the summer fog rise up from the cold clear water. That night we’d be awakened by the sound of thunder echoing through the Ozark Mountains.

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Return to Kansas -- Dorothy hated it!

On a white-hot day in July of 1965, our family returned to Wichita. The thermometer at a roadside bank sign said it was 105. Florida had been warm and humid, but never this hot. My father was transferred back to Kansas to work on a second power plant, next to the one he worked on four years earlier. We dreaded leaving our beloved South Florida --my brothers and I had taken up snorkeling, swimming and exploring the nearby swamps. I was developing a serious interest in plants and knew that Kansas was not nearly as interesting. However, I think the move was most difficult for mother who left behind her many friends, parents (they had retired and lived nearby) and the garden she had created. Though we didn’t know where we would be transferred after Wichita, we took solace knowing we would move again in two years.

Osage-orange (Maclura pomifera)

We lived on the far west side of Wichita…just before the Great Plains started in earnest and the wheat fields stretched all the way to the horizon. Our brick ranch house had a Bermuda lawn and bag-worm infested juniper foundation plantings. The only blooming plants were 3 sickly roses beside the front porch. The backyard had two full grown silver maples and one sycamore tree – which let us experience some fall color and the joys of raking leaves. The perimeter of the lot had a 15 foot hedge of cedar trees. After a particularly rainy period, odd-looking apple-sized fleshy growths with orange tentacles appeared on the cedar branches. I now know that these were the spores of cedar-apple rust. The rust has a strange life cycle and requires that apple and cedar trees grow nearby. A couple of ornamental flowering peach trees next door poked through the hedge and each year put on a beautiful display for a couple of weeks.

Raking leaves with my brothers

Fortunately, we were able to take long trips to more interesting locations, including frequent trips to my paternal grandmother’s home in Branson, Missouri. My older brother and I attended Boy Scout camp in the southern Colorado Rockies and the next summer in southern Wyoming. Our family took a car trip to Yellowstone. Along the way we stopped in tiny Belgrade, Nebraska, where my mother was born and lived until her veterinarian father lost everything in the Dust Bowl and moved back to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania. We were amazed at the enormous silos of Nebraska corn; the rugged Badlands, Black Hills, and Mount Rushmore of South Dakota; the scenery of Yellowstone and the Tetons; and the fossils of Dinosaur National Monument.

Being in the middle of America’s bread basket, almost every open space was planted with winter wheat, immortalized in song as amber waves of grain. Imported from the Ukraine for dryland farming, winter wheat is planted in the fall, germinates, lies dormant until the spring, and is harvested in the early summer. Snow fences were strung across the fields to capture the moisture from drifting snow. Farmers’ fields were frequently lined with windbreaks of a native Texas plant, Osage-orange (Maclura pomifera). The sharp-thorned trees, in the mulberry family, were one of the primary trees used in 1934 WPA project "Great Plains Shelterbelt“. At the height of the Dust Bowl, the project was as an ambitious plan to modify weather and prevent soil erosion in the Great Plains states. We would use the orange-sized fruits in closets to deter spiders.

Across the street from our house, next door to the neighbor in whose basement we took refuge whenever we heard tornado sirens, was an incredible tall sparse tree. It would rain pollen, leaves and seeds on the neighborhood. It was America Elm, Ulmus americana, and succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease decades ago.

Our piano teacher’s house sat in giant field of zinnias and petunias that her husband grew from seed. In wet spots along roadside fences, native tiger lilies, Lilium superbum, bloomed with abandon in early summer. Another neighbor grew what my mother called “flags”, better known as bearded iris. I thought they were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Most everyone grew a patch of vegetables, usually corn, tomatoes, squash and melons. For a Boy Scout merit badge, I would grow my first vegetable garden and harvest a few green beans and summer squash; however, I really wanted to grow a giant field of zinnias.

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Florida's First Commercial Tourist Theme Park

Me in the rose garden at
Patricia Murphy's restaurant, Ft. Lauderdale 

In previous articles I've reminisced about our 1960's home landscape in Plantation, Florida. Besides the plethora of plants and natural landscapes in Florida, there were massive developments created out of the former swamps. The swamps just to the east of the beaches of South Florida were dredged to create subdivisions of finger islands – long residential islands of homes surrounded by water with a road in the middle. At Christmastime tour boats took tourists on nightly cruises to gawk at the holiday lights and decorations of the yachts and lushly landscaped mansions that line the waterways. High-end restaurants and night clubs used landscaping to create a lush jungle-like atmosphere. My grandmother’s favorite was Patricia Murphy’s, as famous for its beautiful landscaping as their butter filled popovers. I recall a Mother’s Day meal and her gushing about the fragrance of gardenias and orange blossoms on their patio.

In the pre-Disneyworld Florida of the early 1960’s, amusement parks were starting to move beyond thrill rides and shows to create a tightly controlled utopian environment safe for tourists to spend the entire day and hopefully lots of money. One of the earliest was Cypress Gardens, located in Central Florida and first opened in 1936 as a private botanical garden. Cypress Gardens was the dream of the energetic Dick Pope Sr. and his wife. Pope used photographs of the swamps to layout the winding paths and gardens to make sure the result was a very photogenic garden. See yesterland.com/cypressgardens.html for a longer history of how the Popes turned a 16 acre swamp into a garden. Many movies (some featuring Ester Williams swimming in the Florida shaped swimming pool) and TV commercials were filmed here in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The Bishop's sitting on bent over palm tree at Cypress Gardens

By the mid 60’s Cypress Gardens was known for waterski shows and manicured gardens that featured young women dressed as Southern Belles resting leisurely in the gardens. The ski show and gardens were an odd combination, but worked well and provided something of interest for both men and women. Compared to the alligator wresting and ride-based amusement parks, Cypress Gardens was far more refined. It was a pedestrian park and given the automobile culture of Florida that in itself was a novel idea. We visited Cypress Gardens on a summer vacation, watching a ski show and strolling through the gardens. The soil dredged from canals was mounded into small hills and planted, that too was very unusual in flat Florida. Planting was done on a massive scale with large beds of colorful annuals and tropical plants with a backdrop of palms. We strolled along waterways lined with cypress trees and draped in Spanish moss. Strategically placed antebellum-costumed Southern Belles smiled and waved to the passersby. We sat on one of the “Seminole palms“– supposedly small palm trees that were bent over decades ago by Seminoles to mark the trails - and had a family photo taken (See photo above). My skeptical engineer father had serious doubts about the veracity of the story. While it was certainly an escape from everything else in Florida, for our mid-western tastes, we found it just a bit too contrived and almost kitschy.

Tourist tour at Cypress Gardens

Over the decades, Cypress Gardens has gone through many problems; severe freezes, hurricanes, and competition frommore exciting parks. After several unsuccessful reincarnations, today it is Legoland Florida, but vestiges of the original gardens remain along with Southern Belles constructed from Lego bricks. Still, Cypress Gardens was the first of the highly landscaped central Florida destination theme parks, a tradition that lives on at Disneyworld, EPCOT, Busch Gardens, and Legoland.

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River of Grass

The biggest publicly accessible landscape in Florida is also the largest subtropical wilderness in the US: Everglades National Park. At 2400 square miles it still only protects about 1/5 of the original Everglades. The Everglades are a natural freshwater drainage system flowing south form Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico and covering much of south Florida. The most dominant plant, which also gave the Everglades its pseudonym “River of Grass”, is sawgrass, Cladium jamaicense. Though technically sedge, sawgrass grows to 3 feet tall in slow moving or standing fresh water. Sedges have edges, grasses have stems; and the edges of sawgrass are armed with very fine saw teeth that will easily cut you.

Most people think of south Florida as endless white sand beaches. However, the metropolitan areas of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale also are adjacent to the Everglades just to the east. Many of the plants and animals associated with the Everglades were also found in undeveloped areas near our neighborhood. There were palmettos, pines, and peat fields nearby. In an extended drought one summer, the peat caught fire and burned for days. Alligators and catfish lived in the nearby canal and there were many snakes, lizards, frogs, burrowing owls and other birds just a few blocks from our house.

On cub scouts trips and on weekends, we’d visit nearby Seminole villages and alligator wrestling venues, and took fishing trips into the mangrove swamps.

Me in the rose garden at
Patricia Murphy's restaurant, Ft. Lauderdale 

Anhinga bird
Drying its wings in the sun

In the early 60’s a TV show called "The Everglades" gave the impression of the Everglades as an exotic and dangerous place. The show featured airboats chasing criminals and the theme song popularized the phrase and song, “Movin', ever movin' through the Everglades". My brothers and I begged our parents to let us go on an airboat ride. An airboat is a flat-bottomed boat with an airplane propeller mounted on the back. While the airplane engine allows the boat to travel quickly in very shallow water and helps ease the oppressive humidity, in reality it wasn't nearly as much fun as we imagined. The propeller and engine are so loud and pull so much air that we could not get beyond the fear of being sucked into the blades. Add to that the bug-laden air, the constant spray of muddy, murky water, and being just inches above a swamp filled with sawgrass and reptiles and it was just too much for a nine year old cub scout to truly appreciate the experience. Today due to the environmental damage to plants and animals, airboats are banned in much of the Everglades, though there are still commercial trips just outside the park.

One year we took a longer trip inside the Everglades National Park and stayed at the Flamingo Lodge. (The Flamingo Lodge was damaged beyond repair in 2005 by hurricanes Katrina and Wilma and no longer exists.) This introduced us to the much more subtle and natural side of the everglades and provided a much deeper appreciation of swamp ecology. We saw raccoons, alligators, large snakes and bird estuaries in the mangroves. On a ranger-led tour, we learned about the anhinga bird that fishes in the water but lacks waterproof feathers. It climbs into the trees and outstretches its wings to dry in the sun.

Postcard from the hurricane destroyed Flamingo Motel

On elevated walkways we visited tropical hardwood “hammocks”. Hammocks are tree islands and the only dry land in the park and home to many unique plants and animals. There are 1000s of them rising out of the swamp with live oaks (Quercus virginiana), saw palmetto (Serenoa repens), short-leaf fig (Ficus citrifolia) , wild-tamarind, West Indian mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni), and many other tree species. The mid-story plants form an impenetrable understory perfect for sheltering larger animals. Trees are draped with Spanish-moss (Tillandsia usneoides) and other epiphytes. These hammocks are small ecosystems teeming with life and an amazing amount of diversity.

For the last 100 years the Everglades have been under severe stress due to invasive plant and animal species and encroachment by adjacent communities and their need for fresh water. As California gardeners we would recognize many of the invasive plants species;Melaleuca quinquenervia, Schinus terebinthifolius (Brazillian Pepper), Eichhornia crassipes (water hyacinth), Pistia stratiotes (water lettuce), Cupaniopsis anacardioides (Carrotwood). Our short visit left me with a better understanding and appreciation of natural ecologies and how important they are to preserve and protect.

For more information online:
nps.gov/ever/index.htm

nwf.org/Wildlife/Wild-Places/Everglades.aspx
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_hardwood_hammock

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Florida Paradise

On Halloween night of 1961 our family arrived at our new home in Plantation Florida, a fast growing suburb of Fort Lauderdale. To keep up with the growing population and demand for air conditioning, Florida Power and Light was building what was at the time the largest power plant in the world at the Port of the Everglades and my father would be the general construction manager.

Our House in Florida 

This was the first new house that anyone in my family had ever lived in. Due to devastating hurricanes in the 1950s, building codes were very strict. All outside walls of the house were made of reinforced concrete block. The roof was heavy ceramic tile that required a conveyor belt to lift the tile to the roof. To keep from being blown in, all doors and windows opened out. The house had no air conditioning and everything was painted white to reflect the heat of the tropical sun. There was no landscaping and the yard and neighborhood was entirely sand. We were in paradise.

Tradescantia pallida purpurea 

Most of the lawn was “sprigged” with Saint Augustine grass, Stenotaphrum secundatum. Tiny plugs of grass were placed every foot or so and runners from the plugs would fill in the open areas. But before it could fill in, Cenchrus echinatus (common name southern sandspur but we would come to know it as stickers) invaded and almost took over the yard. Stickers produce a seed pod that has a row or burrs about the size of a caper. When the seeds are dry the burrs stick in clothing, shoes, bare feet, socks and just about anything else and are difficult and painful to remove. My parents paid my brothers and me a penny for each sticker plant we pulled and we quickly had more spending money than we knew what to do with.

Unusual for my parents, they had the front part of the house professionally landscaped. I still remember all of the plants and how they were placed to create a tropical garden. In the corner where the driveway and front walkway formed a right angle, a coconut palm was planted and leaned out from the house. On either side were placed smaller, more tropical looking palms. Where the curved planting bed met the front lawn a neat row of Mondo Grass, Ophiopogon japonicas, bordered the garden. Behind was a groundcover area of bronze and burgundy Ajuga reptans. Behind the ajuga was the slightly taller Tradescantia pallida purpurea, commonly called Wandering Jew. (After a 40 year hiatus of growing Tradescantia, I recently added it and a few deep burgundy bromeliads to a planting bed of mostly succulents. I associated this plant with tropical Florida and thought it required generous water. I was pleasantly surprised to discover it grows well with succulents.) Taller still and towards the back came 2 clumps of oyster plants, Tradescantia spathacea. Under the overhang from the house and lining the walkway from the carport to the front door were planted various types of crotons and between the 2 front windows was planted what my mother called an umbrella tree, Schefflera actinophylla. Mother would add in Elephant Ear, Colocasia and caladium bulbs in the open spots between the shrubs.

Along the back wall of the house, my mother planted some poinsettias leftover from Christmas. They quickly grew to be taller than the house. Mother would line me and my 2 brothers up in our scout outfits and take the annual Christmas Card photo in front of the blooming plants.

To screen the carport from the neighbors, a row of small flowered pink hibiscus was planted. Dad liked to tease my mom by calling them hot biscuits. In front of the house, as a foundation planting under the windows, was a dense row of some sort of bushy vine that had very fragrant white flowers and dark green leaves. Besides being plants that I was unfamiliar with, this was the first professional landscape I’d ever known. I would spend hours looking at the different plants and how they would grew and changed and occasionally bloomed; trying to understand why this are looked so neat and tidy and organized compared to the rest of our landscape. The front garden was the first garden I’d ever seen composed mostly of foliage plants that used colored foliage and textures to create a landscape. The design of this garden would influence my design style many decades later. The curve of the front bed, the massing of plants, a variety of leaf shapes and textures, taller accent plants and using plants with a similar tone are garden design elements that I frequently use today when creating a garden.

Standing in front of a trumpet vine that covered out house
Me on the right, my brother Billy on the right
and Bobby in the back 

The back and side yards were planted by my mother with plants that intrigued her, were given to her or she had seen in other gardens. I suppose you could generously describe my mother’s gardening style as “early sustainability”. However, it could probably more realistically be described as “Darwinian”, as in survival of the fittest. Luckily, most of the year around 3PM we had tropical showers blow in from the Everglades, resulting in an average rainfall of over 60 inches and over 140 days per year with rain. Watering was seldom the problem.

The backyard was a large grass rectangle. The neighbor on one side installed a chain link fence. The neighbors behind us and on the other side planted hibiscus hedges. There was a screened-in patio off the living room. Mother laid a path of square concrete pavers from the carport around the side of the house to the back screen door. The walkway soon would be overgrown and almost impassable. The master bedroom stuck out from the back of the house. Along the bedroom wall mother planted trumpet vines, Bignonia campsis, which quickly covered the wall and grew up onto the roof. At the corner of the house she planted leftover Christmas poinsettias. These too quickly grew taller than the house and bloomed each fall and winter, looking nothing like the short greenhouse-grown plants. Across the back of the lot there were several 18-inch squares cut into the lawn. In these mother planted fruiting plants: strawberry, raspberry, orange and grapefruit. To my young designer eye, it seemed strange that the squares didn’t all have trees the same size and type of plant.

Me and a Poinsettia 

Against the screened patio and along the back and side of the house, mother grew an assortment of plants. There were small palms, begonias, sweet potatoes, crotons, pineapples, bromeliads, firecracker plant (Russelia equisetiformis), sansevieria, mother of thousands (Kalanchoe daigremontiana), coleus, white and lavender periwinkle (Madagascar vinca) bougainvillea, Euphorbia milii, bananas, tomatoes, papaya, chrysanthemums, and just about anything else that grew easily in South Florida. Mother’s favorite was the Swiss cheese plant (Monstera deliciosa) which climbed the wall under the kitchen window. While the garden wouldn’t win any garden design competitions, it was definitely a great place to learn a lot about many different plants.

I didn’t much care for the plants with thorns or serrated edges. The bougainvillea quickly outgrew its space, making it impossible to get out the screen door without getting stabbed. The pineapples and bromeliads grew too big to be able to safely navigate around them to the hose faucet. The banana would bloom, which we found fascinating, but then produce undersized bananas. By observation and trial and error, I learned to propagate many of these plants from cuttings or seeds. Things rooted quickly in the wet sand. My favorite was putting coleus cuttings in a cup of water and checking daily for new roots…and mosquito larvae. I also loved looking at the leaves of Kalanchoe daigremontiana lined with little baby plantlets and seeing how the ones that landed on the ground sent out new roots.

Inside the screened patio, mother would grow “air plants” that she found on the golf course and other places. She attached them to wire coat hangers or electrical wire and hung them from the framing of the screened ceiling. I really didn’t like the way these looked, especially the way they were mounted and didn’t understand why anyone would grow these odd things. Decades later, I would realize that these were tillandsias. From looking at pictures online I suspect they were either Tillandsia fasciculata or Catopsis floribunda, both are now endangered by collecting, habitat loss and the Mexican bromeliad weevil. Who knew that I would collect tillandsias myself one day? (I only grow nursery raised plants).

In the middle of the lawn, mother planted a coconut palm from seed. She didn’t know how to plant it but figured that like most seeds it should be planted in a hole 3 times its size. So she dug a 3 foot deep hole and planted it. Later, she would learn that you plant them on the surface of the soil. We forgot about it, but several years later when we returned home from vacation we found a 2 foot tall coconut tree growing in the middle of the lawn.

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Wichita and the Cold War

In 1960, my father was transferred from Houston, Texas to Wichita, Kansas.  Our house had junipers and other evergreen foundation plantings with a Bermuda grass lawn and no trees.  We planted portulaca seeds saved from Houston in the small garden bed along the front walkway.  The neighbor two doors away grew giant brilliantly-colored zinnias on the south side of their house.

I do, however, have memories of the Cold War.  On a clear night, my parents would get my brothers and me out of bed to watch the bright glow of sputnik as it passed over. Mom didn’t allow us to eat the snow or hailstones for fear that they were ‘radioactive’ from nuclear tests being conducted in Nevada and Utah. And mother said that should the Russians waste a nuclear bomb on Kansas, there is no doubt that the Bermuda grass would survive…and it would still be a very brown place.

Our House in Wichita

From Wichita, we were close enough to Colorado to go camping in the Rockies on my father’s two week vacation. More than the mountains though, I remember the endless fields of corn in western Kansas -  that were in fact - as high as elephant’s eye. We stopped beside the road to take photos of zinnia fields that grew as far as you could see, and wonder, why doesn’t anyone grow sunflowers in the Sunflower State? For lunch we’d stop at roadside parks usually alongside a creek. I recall the load noise made by the leaves shaking in the hot breeze, and the fuzz from cottonwoods falling on everything and thinking what a strange tree and how tall they were compared to everything else on the high plains.

That summer my grandmother fell off a ladder and broke her back. My mother returned to her family home in Pittsburgh with my younger brother and me to help her father in his veterinarian business.  My Aunt Betty showed me all the plants on the property.  We picked fresh mulberries for breakfast.  In the back, grandpa raised rabbits for food and fertilizer. Mixed into the flower beds was a strange plant called rhubarb with poisonous leaves, but you could eat the stems in early spring. My younger brother would stay on with mom in Pittsburgh while I was sent to spend the summer with my Aunt Mary and her family in Akron, Ohio. Their entire backyard was a large vegetable garden where they would grow all of their fresh produce. Aunt Mary would can fruit and vegetables in mason jars and store them in the basement for winter use. Though it would still be several decades before I would be willing eat them, it was here that I saw my first vegetables that didn’t come from the freezer or a can. On the front porch, between hands of bridge, my aunt would show me how to prepare fresh snap beans for cooking.  In the garden, she’d explain how to grow beans, tomatoes, corn and strawberries.  The different shapes and varieties of the plants were very surprising and fascinating to me.  I was very confused that mulberries came from trees, strawberries came from plants that crawled on the ground and raspberries came from bushes.  On Sundays, we’d go on long drives in the country and stop occasionally at roadside stands looking for good prices on seasonal produce.  At one stand I remember seeing the strange looking orange and white turban squash.  I wondered how you would eat anything so hard and strange looking.  I wanted one even though my aunt assured me that a picky eater like me would never eat it.

Our stay in Wichita would be short and we’d soon be off to the tropical paradise of South Florida where my interest in plants would really take off.

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Collecting Seeds

In 1959, we were transferred from Monahans, Texas, to Houston. Though both are very flat with spring thunderstorms and long hot summers, they have drastically different climates. Houston annually receives over 50 inches of rain compared to Monahans’ meager thirteen. The result in Houston is steamy tropical weather for nine or more months a year. The difference in flora was remarkable. Most of Houston is under a forest of native loblolly pines, oaks, sweetgums and southern magnolias. Houston had been a lumber town long before oil was discovered in east Texas. We had azaleas growing in the front yard and my mother tried growing bananas in the back. The neighbors down the street had pine trees over 75 feet tall.

On one pleasant spring day, mother would put our play table on the back patio and cover it with an embroidered tablecloth. My younger brother and I would pick a vase of dandelions and serve Kool-Aid and homemade cookies to the twin girls next door. Was this the pre-cursor of our popular Coffee-in-the-Gardens?

As a result of moving every 12 to 18 months, mother had developed impressive skills painting, sewing drapes and curtains, and reupholstering furniture. As soon as possible, she would plant a flower garden from seeds saved from the previous home. I remember the petunias, rose moss (Portulaca grandiflora), marigolds, touch-me-nots (Impatiens balsamina), and bread poppies (Papaver somniferum) that grew so well in Houston’s wet springs and summers. Helping collect seeds and put them in paper envelopes was my first hands-on gardening experience. As a 4 year old, I found gathering seeds strange and fascinating. It became my first plant obsession.

The different way each plant produced seed was amazing to me. Gathering petunia seeds required looking down each plant stem for a dried flower. Underneath there would be a small brown dried dome surrounded by the sepals. Squeeze the dome to crack it and seeds poured out.

I loved the bright flower colors, plump leaves and red stems of rose moss. It was my favorite plant and also my first succulent. It has a semi-spherical dome that covers the seeds. The top easily pops off when the seeds are ripe. Turn over the little cup that remains on the plant and out drop the seeds.

When I first collected seeds from marigolds, I would put the entire dried flower in the envelope. Over time, I learned to break open the dried flower. Inside would be straw-like material and things that looked like black grains of rice. You could see where the tiny true flower was attached to the top of each grain. These were fertile seeds and the rest could be thrown away.

Marigold Seeds

The favorite for collecting seeds, as well as for the other kids in the neighborhood, were the touch-me-nots, or as my mother called them Lady Slippers (Impatiens balsamina). After each flower fell off a juicy green and fuzzy pod would form at the end of a little stem. Squeezing the ripe pod results in the sides splitting open and curling up around your finger and the seeds inside shooting out in all directions. These were lots of fun to explode, but difficult to actually collect the seed. I still remember the smell of the pod and the feeling of being pelted by seeds.

The oddest of all were the bread poppies. My mother grew large hot pink double and semi-double “carnation flowered” poppies. After the petals fall off, a one inch diameter spherical shaped container with a flat top is left behind. When the seed inside ripens, it spills out of holes at the top like salt out of shaker. I thought this was really cool…and next to impossible to catch all of the seeds. When I bought my first house in 1983, mother mailed me some of the poppy seeds she was still collecting. They didn’t flourish in my crowded Encinitas garden, but did well enough that I was able to collect and bring some of the seeds to our current house in Mission Hills. I scattered the seed on the hill behind the house just before the first fall rain like mom did 50 years ago in Houston. They’ve been coming up annually - alas, mostly in the gravel pathways.

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