Photo: Kenny Braun
A cutout in the courtyard wall at this San Antonio home allows a live oak to reach its branches over a rustic table and stools.
“After many years of wishing for a book featuring a multitude of Texas gardens, showcasing the beauty, creative design, sustainability practices, and gardening passion across our vast state, I realized that I just needed to write it myself,” shares Pam Penick in the preface to Gardens of Texas: Visions of Resilience from the Lone Star State, which came out last month.
In the book, the longtime Texas gardener, writer, and native plants advocate teams up with photographer Kenny Braun to traverse 6,742 miles across the state and document twenty-seven standout private gardens, from crevice gardens to meadows of wildflowers to winding pathways dotted with Mexican feathergrass. After all, Texas is a vast and diverse landscape home to ten eco-regions, including sandy pineywoods, oak grasslands, thornscrub, and shortgrass prairie—and its people love to garden. “We garden for fresh food, to beautify our homes, to create habitat for wildlife, to conserve native plants, to create sanctuaries for ourselves, to cool our yards and cities, to express ourselves creatively, to be outdoors with hands in the dirt,” Penick writes, and in each garden she visits, the passion of the owners is on full display.
In addition to offering standalone eye candy, Penick concludes her deep dive into each garden with practical takeaways for things like adding in pollinator-friendly plants, using boulders for garden seating, or planting a native lawn that will need less water. In the face of a changing climate, she stresses, the challenges and setbacks of gardening in Texas’s extremes—and the ingenuity it inspires—will become increasingly applicable beyond the Lone Star State.
Below, peek inside eight eye-popping gardens in Texas.
On a hilltop overlooking downtown Austin, wildflowers, spiny agave, yucca, and roses in pink and purple frame the view.
Low-growing perennials and small succulents sink their roots into the crannies of this Southwestern take on a crevice garden in Austin.
A ground-level water bowl tucked amid grasses attracts birds and other small creatures at a home in Marfa, in the arid but surprisingly biodiverse landscape of the Trans-Pecos in West Texas.
Yellow bells, Mexican grasstree, and bougainvillea stud a porch at the entrance to an 1936 adobe-and-stone house in Fort Davis near the Davis Mountains.
A faux bois bench overlooks a meadow of blanketflower visible through the trees at a Hill Country home with landscaping inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted.
The branches of a live oak reach over a backyard pool, making this contemporary home in San Antonio feel like a treehouse.
A paved pathway softened with tufts of Mexican feathergrass leads to an arbor made of welded rebar in this steep, half-acre garden in the Ravinia Heights neighborhood of Dallas.
In Houston’s West University neighborhood, this brick home overlooks a garden outfitted with four symmetrical raised beds for growing vegetables like corn, green beans, broccoli, and squash, among boxwood parterres with roses.
Taken from Gardens of Texas © Copyright 2025 by Pam Penick, photography by Kenny Braun. Published by Timber Press, Portland, OR. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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Lindsey Liles joined Garden & Gun in 2020 after completing a master’s in literature in Scotland and a Fulbright grant in Brazil. The Arkansas native is G&G’s digital reporter, covering all aspects of the South, and she especially enjoys putting her biology background to use by writing about wildlife and conservation. She lives on Johns Island, South Carolina.
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