Maggie Ross McNeely's Newspaper Column
In My Year-Round Garden
and her plant profile series
Plant This for ...
appear in the Life section
of the Ft. Worth Star Telegram
every 2nd and 4th Saturday
 

In the tradition of the last five years of this sites Come Stroll entries, the newspaper columns narrate firsthand gardening experiences with incidents from Maggie's garden. Within the telling, she reports on regional plant culture and space-saving backyard schemes of classical garden design with plants and flowers for all the seasons.

An early exposure to classical gardens led Maggie to an ongoing study through research, garden touring and first hand experience. As well as practicing her subject, she writes, photographs and lectures on garden history and design, specializing in timeless historic features translated to a homeowner's scale for a multi-season garden in the unique Texan climate.

Welcome to our home, we are privileged to have you as our guest
and hope you enjoy your garden visit.

The weather here in North Central Texas has a short winter and extra long summer, divided by a mild-climate spring and autumn. Rather than grow only desert dwellers, we take advantage of these cooler seasons, when we can enjoy many plants which often bloom during the summers of cooler-climate gardens. Texas native plants and other acclimated heat dwellers rise to fill their spaces in summer. This strategy makes for a yearlong garden that catalogs a wide range of plant materials for gardeners around the world. Non-Texan residents can translate our bloom dates by using the rough rule of green thumb: plants flower about 4-6 weeks earlier here than in areas with shorter summers.

This site has evolved from an ornamental family garden on the ½ acre lot of our Ft. Worth home of 20 + years. Our 40-year old house was built on prairie land, made into a residential subdivision. When we moved in, the lot was still only parched tan grass lacking even the traditional foundation hedges of suburbia. After building a pool, we began spending more time outside our little house on the prairie, where I could stand it no more and began ripping out the turf. What I replaced it with came from my childhood memories, as personal gardens usually do. Having grown up in both England and Texas has produced a garden anomaly, that for us brings much of the best of both worlds to our outdoor home, here in Ft. Worth, Texas.

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