There is a first time for everything and this was a triple first for me: I was a first-time flinger at the Garden Bloggers Fling Austin 2018 (#gbfling2018); it was my first visit to Texas, the lone star state and it followed therefore that it was my first to Austin, a city that boasts it is ‘the live music capital of the world’.
My first time badge for The Tenth Anniversary Garden Bloggers Fling in Austin.
The guitar at the airport is one of several on show in the arrivals hall.
Making a claim to be the Live Music Capital.
There was a ‘swag bag’ filled with catalogues, offers, tools and information about the wonderful sponsors of the Austin Fling 2018. My choice of cake was the Texan cowboy boot… it was delicious…
There were more than 90 garden bloggers from the US and Canada mainly, with four from the UK (Victoria Summerley, Helen Johnstone and Michelle Chapman) including first-time me! So what was it like and why go all that way to meet other garden bloggers?
It was amazing; friendly people with a similar interest in gardens and plants, great company on the bus, at lunches and dinners, and wonderful gardens, large and small, where the owners and gardeners were on hand to showcase them with us. I learned a great deal about a completely different plant palette and style of gardening and brought back many ideas that I would like try out at home, albeit on a smaller scale!
Nearly everyone was in this photo… just before we set off to visit the Lady Bird Johnson wildflowers… and were soon to be driven back indoors to the gift shop by the side-ways rainstorm. I was one of the crew who had to (willingly) buy a new T-shirt and trousers to replace my rain-soaked apparel! Photo credit: Jeff Genung
Weatherwise it was hot and humid at times, and we experienced a ‘gully-washing’ storm, just a bare half-hour into our first garden tour on the Fling, a visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. More about this wonderful place in a future blog as, with a group of several other bloggers, I returned the following week, to see it on a sunny day.
This quotation at the entrance to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center summed up what flowers and a place like this can do for the environment and individuals alike.
This was my first sighting of ‘Hesperaloe parviflora’, a plant that I was to see in many of the gardens we visited on the Garden Bloggers’ Fling weekend. Here it was at the top of the steps leading up to Mount Bonnel, Austin.
Pam Penick (Digging), one of the trio of Austin Fling organisers, had offered to show me and my fellow UK garden blogger Michelle Chapman a few of the sights of Austin on the pre-Fling day. The fact that the whole group was visiting her garden the following day didn’t seem to faze her in the slightest!
We lunched at the Hula Hut on the shore of Austin Lake and then headed for Mount Bonell, a limestone height that rises 775 feet above sea level. To reach the top there is a gently rising stone stairway of 102 steps that lead to breathtaking views over downtown Austin.
Pam noticed that one of her own images was in use to highlight the flora on one of the information boards for the five-acre Covert Park on Mount Bonnell.
Michelle Chapman and me: two UK Flingers at the summit of Mount Bonnell… a great start to the Fling weekend. Image: Pam Penick.
We walked along the top of the limestone ridge, taking in the view of the city and over the houses that lined the banks of Austin Lake, a section of the Colorado River. It was here that I first realised that Austin was much greener than I had originally thought. The main trees on Mount Bonnell were live oak, ash juniper, persimmon and mountain laurel. Live oaks were predominant in many of the areas of the city that we visited and here we saw at least two plants that recurred on many occasions during our garden visits. One was the prickly pear, shown here with its citrus-lemon flower. The other was agarita (Mahonia trifoliolata). Its bright berries, although difficult to harvest as the plant has spiny foliage, are worth the trouble for agarita berry jam. Its foliage reminded me of both holly and ivy foliage and its bright red, almost festive berries added to that thought!
Prickly pear flowers on Mount Bonnell.
Agarita foliage and berries.
Our next stop was Barton Springs Pool, a three-acre pool fed by underground springs. With an average temperature of 20–21C this is an ideal place for visitors and locals to cool off in the heat of the day. We three put our toes in the water and felt a little respite from the heat of our first day in Austin. I couldn’t be specific about which American novels this lovely pool brought to mind: I imagined hot summer days and characters in a novel cooling off in the creek or river, rather than the swimming pool of today. I sort of understood how heat and swimming in an unusual setting could be just as solid as a character in a novel. Could the author be F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salinger or even Henry James? Or none of the above-mentioned but just a feeling that the place communicated something to me. To add to this notion of mine, I later learned that Robert Redford learned to swim here when he was a five-year-old visiting family in Austin.
Barton Springs Pool made me feel I had stepped into a page of American literature, real or imagined!
Testing the water x three!
The Tenth Anniversary Garden Bloggers’ Fling officially started on Thursday 3 May with a reception at the stunning Austin Central Library, which was five years in the building and opened on October 2017. Overlooking Shoal Creek and Lady Bird Lake, it has a rooftop garden with views across the lake and downtown, and at the lower level a series of terraces can be used for outdoor events.
On the rooftop garden I was stopped in my tracks to see carpets of Dichondra ‘Silver Falls’ which I am more familiar with as a tumbling accent plant, that cascades from a container like the waterfall of its name. Here it was grown as a ground cover, making a shimmering silver pool-like mat beneath palms and succulents.
Tumbling container plant becomes a ground cover in the rooftop garden at Austin’s Central Library. It was a plant use that I saw in many other successful combinations during the Fling.
The rooftop garden was my idea of heaven at a library – a place to sit outside and read…
Writers are easily pleased if they can see the spine of a book in a library with their name on it, so I made a little trip into the library to see if one of my books had made it onto the shelves. I was disappointed on the night not to track any of my titles down, but delighted to see that Victoria Summerley, one of the UK Garden Bloggers, was represented on the garden shelf at the library. Not willing to give up my quest to be ‘on the shelf’ I googled the catalogue on my return home and was relieved to know that two of my books – Garden Lover’s Guide to Spain and Portugal and The Ultimate Herb Gardener – are held in the Austin Central Library.
Spines on a shelf in the Austin Central Library.
This was Thursday evening and the Fling had only just got going… so be patient, I am jet-lagged and have to sort out gazillions of images from this long weekend of garden visiting… there will be more.
What a wonderful capsule of your visit to Austin. It’s always fun to see it through someone else’s eyes. I so enjoyed visiting with you at the Fling and I can tell from your post that you enjoyed your time here as well.
Thank you Diana for your comment. This is just the first of a few more blogs! I just had to get something down and out of my head, so I started at the beginning. There is so much to catch up on when you have been away and so there will be a little pause before I manage to do another Austin blog. I so enjoyed meeting you and visiting your garden, albeit in the last throes of that gully-washer. You were so patient with the poncho-clad, wet-wet-wet creatures that seemed to float at the edges of the pool and lawn. I was sorry not to be able to see it on a better day. Thank you for your part in the organisation of the Austin 2018 Fling. I so enjoyed myself, as you rightly surmised. It was good to meet you.
How fun to see our city through your eyes and lens, Barbara. It was lovely to spend time with you, and I’m delighted to be the proud owner of one of your books (thank you!). I will be thinking on the American novel that Barton Springs Pool might evoke — an intriguing notion.
I don’t think I could put the lens down… there was always another photo to take and I bet we all have similar and yet different views on a host of wonderful gardens and plants. It was good to meet you and thank you so much for taking us on a pre-fling tour of the city: so much appreciated this. Yes, my American novel…maybe it is in my mind… or yet to be written! I did enjoy seeing Barton Springs and it was an evocative place. Thank you for your part in the organisation of my first Fling. So enjoyed it. It was good to spend time with you Pam and thank you for that time when you might well have been relaxing before the onslaught of bloggers to your garden!
What a fabulous trip. Oh, to live somewhere where the library has a garden room.
Yes, I can truly say that although this was an account of just day one and a bit of day 2, Austin was/is an awesome place. And the library was truly inspiring. The roof garden and the plantings around it were interesting and the idea of sitting and relaxing with a book, well, who could wish for anything more. I was given a while back a tea towel with a quote, allegedly, from Pliny: If you have a library and a garden, you have all you need! That certainly came to mind at the Austin Central Library.
What a wonderful pre-fling day you had – I have learned that it pays to allow for at least one or two extra days at the Fling as doing a bit of on-our-own exploring with fellow flingers is so much fun.
It was truly wonderful getting to know you, Barbara, and I hope that this will count as the first of many flings to come!
Thanks Margaret. And this was just the pre-fling days… yes, I agree it is a good idea to have a little time before and after such events. First to acclimatise in my case after lengthy travel and then to relax after a wonderfully full schedule. I enjoyed meeting you and indeed will hope to come to another Fling in the future, or GWA meeting.
What a fabulous array of plants – lovely to see new species and to hear about which trees grow wild in the state. Looking forward to hearing more about the visit.
Thank you Nic. There will be more posts from my Austin trip in weeks ahead… but now all eyes are on RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2018… and I will come back to Austin in a little while.
Barbara, I am finally slowing down with y job (well another 2 weeks of it) and then I have the pleasure of sorting through my pictures from the fling and processing all those lovely gardens. This is such a sweet recap (sweet meant entirely as a compliment) and has me excited for that moment I may sit down and sort and write. It was a pleasure to meet you and your co-UKers. I hope you’ll be in Denver next year. I’m looking forward to it. It’s after my busy season so it’ll be more leisurely for me. Great blog, btw.
Cinthia, thanks for your kind words about the blog and am glad that you enjoyed my thoughts on the days before the actual fling. I have yet to look at and write about the rest of the wonderful visits we had. There is so much happening at present in my garden world, at home and in the work place, so there is a bit of a time-lapse. I look forward to reading your blog(s) about the fling, when you have had the chance to sort and sift those images and thoughts. It is wonderful to have such photos that bring it all to mind. I was delighted to meet you too and am hopeful that I will get to Denver…