Skip to main content


And just like that, this year's Fling is upon us - three very full days of renewing old friendships and creating new ones, seeing some gardens that challenge us and some that spark ideas we'll modify and plant in our own.  This is the tenth Fling and it's returned to where it started ... here in Austin.

Even though it's where I live, many of the gardens will be new to me.  There are others that are familiar favorites; but I'm looking forward to seeing my city through the eyes of a visitor.  Between the traffic and heat, it's far too easy to retreat to our air conditioned corners and lose out on what the city has to offer.  It'll be nice to leave the driving to our bus drivers and focus on catching up with our group.

We've had Flingers join us from Canada, Spain, the U.K., and most states of the U.S.  We've been to the D. C. area, Minneapolis, Toronto, Portland, San Francisco, Asheville, Seattle, Buffalo, Chicago, and of course, here in Austin.  Every year we learn about new people and "new to us" plants.  In case you haven't noticed, it IS equally about the gardens we'll see and the gardeners we'll meet.  It will be wonderful to focus on the things we share, not the differences that have tried to divide all of us this past year.

I promise to share highlights of my favorites.

If you've seen my blog before, you may notice a change.  In honor of my 10th "blogiversary", the format has changed - at least for now.  Please let me know if you like it better, or why you don't.  Either way, thanks to those of you who've encouraged me to stick with this.



Comments

Margaret said…
Can't wait, Vicki - and I'm looking forward to catching up!
Pam/Digging said…
It would be fun to hang out with all the wonderful gardeners and bloggers, but to see beautiful gardens too is heaven. Can't wait to share the weekend with you again, Vicki!

Popular posts from this blog

A Plant with Purple Leaves

There are a couple of groups on Facebook where I lurk and occasionally dip my opinion into the fray.  They're places where people with knowledge of unbelievable scope can be observed, deftly identifying this obscure native plant or that scraggly left-behind orphan found in the backyard of a newly purchased home.   One such backyard orphan recently was posted in need of identification.   If it were a native plant, two people on "Texas Flora" would've named it within minutes.  Even the taxonomy of those impossible grasses is typically put to rest in seconds.  Not so with this poor guy.   At first I was fairly certain it was one of the purple leafed basils, maybe 'African Blue'.  It's fairly impossible to find it still thriving in a Texas January, but two plants in my yard are still hanging in there.  They even look like they'll come back if we don't have a deep freeze before spring.  BTW, this basil has one heck of a...

Flying Flowers - Butterfly Gardening Handout for Festival of Flowers 2024

Let’s dig into “petals, puddles, and pesticides”. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AkRpm5NGtWnj4aIW1rTnqt7h_w9TpIs2/view?usp=drive_link

Ho-hum to Habitat: My Path to Native Bees - Resources

San Antonio's Festival of Flowers will resume this Saturday, June 3, 2023, after a break of three years.    I've been given the opportunity to share how I garden, as well as a general overview of our native bees.   A link to a Google doc containing my handout (the info dense slides from my presentation) follows this list of resources.  Note that if you didn't attend, some of the handout pages may not make complete sense.     Hyperlinks to more resources: https://www.wildbeestexas.com/ https://w3.biosci.utexas.edu/jha/research/native-bee-communities https://www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?collection=TX_central https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/BeginnerBeeFieldGuide_11March2022_LowRez.pdf https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/nongame/native-pollinators/bumblebee-id.phtml https://www.pollinatorphotos.com/ https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/       https://drive.google.com/file/d/...