millward studios

I am a retired florist and a frustrated transplanted floridian gardener... my yard is beautiful... with flowers, ferns, hibiscus and such blended with our local more native plants.....my yard has always leaned towards having more of the tropical stuff than the native stuff, and i guess that would be ok, if i wasn't living in the desert... trying to maintain this little oasis takes a lot of work (which equals time) and a lot of water (tucson's shrinking water table has been on my mind quite a bit lately).

This last year i've begun to resent the amount of time my gardening takes from my studio time...i still love to garden, but i want to reduce my workload and reduce our water consumption... i have been saying goodbye to the high maintenance water guzzling stuff and replacing it with some really stunning low maintenance native stuff... no cactus though!... i don't do thorns and spikes!... although i have made an exception for a really nice giant spanish bayonet that was living here before us and he's here to stay! stunning! he just sent up a 20 foot bloom last month that was incredible!.

Anyways, the results of my yard makeover so far are really nice and i know brian will appreciate the lower water bill... in some of my outdoor pots, i'm using native plants to mimic the look of flowing water... the effect is really neat and these pots could someday star in one of my gardenscape paintings... i also designed and built a waterless fountain, that uses succulents, asparagus fern and dusty miller to suggest the look of water in a fountain...below are a few photos of my back yard taken today.

I will go into a bit more detail about the succulents and native plants i've added to our backyard in a later post... some of the potted plants that mimic water flowing are in these photos, but difficult to see, so i'll post some close ups later, along with botanical names and such.

On a different note, this last week our 5 year old grandson needed a soccer banner for his team and i was elected to make it... being an artist i probably spent more hours than necessary on the project, but trevor loved it, as did all his cute little dinosaur team mates..... i think casey will have some pics of the finished banner in the livingstone family blog soon. When i finally catch up, i am looking forward to some serious studio time.