Friday, September 25, 2009


Welcome to Garden Gnome's Texas Gardening Blog.

My name is Jeff Maxwell and I started Garden Gnome Landscaping in Austin, Texas in the spring 2009, specializing in the design and installation of native landscapes.

Here is my back-story.

I have always been interested in science, particularly biology, but was never much of a student so decided to pursue the goal of 98% completion of a B.A. in English from UT Austin with a 2.5 GPA over the course of a decade or so. That goal achieved, I moved on to other aspirations involving retail jobs and lowly computer tech support positions. Once I was satisfied in those regards, I realized that I had in the meantime become an amateur naturalist and botany hobbyist and determined that this would be my contribution to history: gardening and yammering about it on the Internet.

I have, for most summers of my adult life, had a vegetable garden that was planted with great intentions but with no real knowledge of horticulture and flawed technique, resulting in not a bunch of food. I have learned to vegetable garden by process of elimination. And by reading.

Sometime in the late 1990's, I was going camping (I think at Guadalupe River State Park) and decide that I should know the names of the trees, so I purchased The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees Eastern Region. I was able to identify and learn the names of the major trees, like elms and oaks and junipers and the like. This was a lot of fun and made me feel smart.

After this, I noticed plants and appreciated them more and tried to remember their names. I took a great class at UT around 2003 called BIO 406D: Native Plants. It's for non-science majors and focused on the identification of plants and their morphologies and taxonomy. We went on field trips to preserves and parks and really gained an appreciation for the native flora. We learned about 180 plants, their scientific names, jargon for describing them- it was great.

So, I bought some other books and read them and now I feel like I know quite a bit about plants and gardening but there is always someone who knows much more.

These are the canonical books for gardening in Central Texas, or at least the ones I have read, and can recommend:

Texas Gardening the Natural Way: The Complete Handbook by Howard Garrett . This book is comprehensive, detailing what to do and, often overlooked, what not to do in organic gardening. There is an extensive listing of plants, as well as lots of pictures, illustrations, and diagrams. You can open this book to a random page and learn something. I also like that he has his own opinions. I chuckled aloud the first time I read his section of "Worst Trees for Texas" - under Hackberry, his description: "is just a big weed."

Native Texas Plants: Landscaping Region by Region by Sally Wasowski and Andy Wasowski is the most complete, most indispensable guide to native plants. There are about 400 plants described in detail and with a picture of each, as well as well-developed landscape plans for specific botanical regions. That's what great about this book. It divides native plants into regions to describe how to use them best. Now I garden from a Blackland Prairie perspective and everything makes a little more sense.

How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest by Jill Nokes is great for anyone who likes to grow plants on the cheap from seed or cuttings, wants plants that are unavailable commercially, or has fantasized about owning a wholesale nursery propagating native plants. I am all three. So if you want to know whether to scarify or stratify seed, or how much rooting hormone to use for your semi-hardwood cuttings, well, you need this book. There is also lots of information on the plants themselves, so it's a very informative read. It's a mostly-words type of book but they did stick in some pretty plates in the middle.

I bought two books for the native plants class I took, Native and Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Texas Hill Country by Brother Daniel Lynch,C.S.C, and Vascular Plant Families, by James Payne Smith, Jr. These are academic books, so they are really expensive new but are cheap used.

Native and Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Texas Hill Country is a carefully illustrated (black and white) guide to trees and shrubs in our area. It's handy and concise, with nice, terse scientific descriptions of local woody flora.

Vascular Plant Families is a text for the true wannabe plant nerd. The first 70 pages are just definitions. My copy was used and pretty much everything was highlighted for the first thirty pages. I figure the previous owner either dropped the class or ran out of highlighter at this point. There are these crazy floral formulas that look like algebra, but are shorthand descriptions of flower descriptions. It helps you learn to recognize the family of a plant you've never seen and it is chock full of wonderful jargon.

So, those are the books I know and like. Anything I say or write can be attributed to them, Central Texas Gardener on KLRU, some plant person, speculation, or is an outright lie.

I plan to update this blog weekly or whenever the fancy strikes. Future topics will include landscapes I've installed, my veggie garden, killing invasives, vermicompost, and plenty of advice and opinion on native plants.