Playin' Outside

  If you attended Festival of Flowers in San Antonio this year (2026), I promised access to the slides in my presentation.  They, along with bonus slides at the end, are posted here if you follow this link . Thanks to the San Antonio Water System for its sponsorship and engagement, and thank YOU for participating!  Special thanks to Wizzie Brown, AgriLife Extension Service Program Specialist - IPM.  She inspires and educates in equal measure.    

When I first started gardening, it was great fun seeing what would or wouldn't grow.  I collected cacti and scented geraniums (pelargoniums), and had a wide assortment of culinary herbs.   Little forethought went into any design or view of the yard as a whole, and you would have been hard pressed to call it a garden.  Playin' outside is exactly what I've always done, with little attention paid to the longer view of gardening - design. Gaining proficiency in propagation and some skill in keeping plants alive did not lend cohesion to my chaos.  Local garden centers never talked about design but were always happy to feed my addiction to the new and unusual.  Being a master gardener put me in the company of others who shared my fascination, but who also rarely if ever discussed design.  So I gathered more plants but it's fair to say my yard looked MUCH better in close ups.   Chaos continued to reign. A gardening friend calls it "cramscaping". ...