Wednesday, June 12, 2013

NxNa Garden Tour - Rudig Garden

The second garden I stopped off at was the Rudig Garden.  Mary is a treasure finder extraordinaire, and she manages to make it look both beautiful and easy.  According to her husband, her favorite day of the month is bulk pick up day.  Right now she only has about a third of the yard dedicated to her garden, but as a good gardener must, she also has plans for the rest of the yard (after the tree dies).  Mary's garden is very much an Austin garden; I just think most would expect it to be in south Austin instead of north Austin.

Round grommets and sprockets and buttons and knobs glued on a clear plastic backing.  Mary saves all Virgin Mary paraphernalia she finds because it's her namesake. I like the sprocket art - my sister used to take my husband's old sprockets and hang them on her wall.

The back patio.  I found the use of different tiles (both type and color) intriguing.  I'm still trying to figure out if I like it.

Mary's garden is fenced off from the rest of the yard to protect it from their dogs.  She also has a ginormous sunflower that has an itty-bitty flower on it. 

Bike sprockets and left over metal petals make for a pretty upcycled flower.

Pots and lamps.  And the really cool stuff - metal plates making up the tiled 'floor'.

Mary (in the cowboy hat) talking to another garden tour-goer.  Mary's veggie garden is watered via a Sub-Irrigation System (Google Sub Irrigation Planters) so all of her plants are in buckets instead of in the ground.  They're all watered by buried 2-liter bottles connected by PVC pipes so everything gets watered when she turns on the water.

An awesome use of an old lantern

A collection of words and cool finds.  This actually reminds me of my desk at work to some extent - every time I go out and do field work I bring a cool rock or some other find back so I have pieces of "creek glass", marbles, rocks, and bottle caps all sitting on the window sill.

A doorknob garden interspersed with sedums.

A succulent planter with another Virgin Mary statue in the background.

A rose with a goblet (?) in the background.

The bowl part was found one week and the stand was found a few months later.

Like seriously?  Prickly pear in an old fireplace?  I mean, crap man - that's freaking AWESOME!  Note:  The husband does not think this is awesome.  Oh well, I'll just have to recreate this at my parent's house or something - it's totally Austin.


My other posts on this garden tour:
The Glass Garden

6 comments:

Goneahead said...

Awww, thank you. I am going to take the fact that it feels like a South Austin garden as a compliment!

(and the porch is a Texas mosaic - hence the different colors. Its so big that sometimes it takes people a while to realized it! Look again and you will see the star where Austin is and the fish tiles in the gulf)

Anonymous said...

What an interesting garden. Love the art , especially the fire pit. Is that a small cactus or a really big fireplace?

Ally said...

Darn, that prickly pear fire pit is genius! How could anyone not like that?

Goneahead said...

to answer @willsfamilyacres.com, the pricky pear is Baby Rita, which is a dwarf optunia.

Its supposed to be purplish - but my experience is that only cold weather brings out the purple. Which makes it a really nice plant for winter containers.

katina said...

@Goneahead - Ah yes - of course it's Texas. Now that I know that, it makes a lot more sense and doesn't just look like different colors of tile fit together.

Anonymous said...

Hey..long time no speak..and your garden is an inspiration. I have finally moved, licked my house into some kind of order and discovered that my garden has quite literally no soil! I'm doing pots until I can persuade a construction company to drop som leftovers off on my next spring!
Photos of house to follow as soon as I've taken some!
Ax