How Her Garden Grows: Linda Seidel
Linda Seidel’s handsome garden is the result of many hours of work in her large creek-side yard, her enormous depth of knowledge about plant varieties and cultivation, plus a large dose of perseverance. Linda and Tony Seidel’s home in Richardson sits on two-thirds of an acre and the backyard slopes down to Cottonwood Creek.
The backyard features a stone patio, pergola, stone walkways down the hillside, a terraced sun-loving perennial garden, and a hellebore garden on the shady side of the yard. There is a large bed around the Bois d’arc tree by the creek, and beds with iris, daylilies, daffodils, cacti, and succulents.
Linda’s gardening experiences are a lesson in persistence and the resiliency of Mother Nature. After college, Linda left her hometown in Wisconsin for Houston. She had learned from her mother about gardening with roses, peonies, mophead hydrangeas, bleeding hearts, ageratum and white alyssum; not the best candidates for Houston. A Houston neighbor introduced Linda to bromeliads, tropical hibiscus, and cascading begonias planted in hanging baskets and containers which thrived in that climate.
For the move to Dallas in 1982 the moving van loaded with all these treasured plants was delayed by a winter storm freezing every single plant. But Linda started anew in Dallas with roses and perennials, including some from Texas Discovery Garden, along with cuttings and leftovers from friends. Linda created another rose garden when they relocated to the current home in Richardson but later most of those roses succumbed to rose rosette disease. The remaining garden included the surviving roses, irises and daylilies. But alas, the daylilies suffered from rust.
In October 2019, high winds and rain from a tornado took down mature trees and major limbs. However, several of the native trees propagated by dear friend and fellow Master Gardener Tom Wilten survived. At this time Linda, like many Dallas gardeners, is still assessing the damage to live oak trees, podocarpus yew, a Texas kidneywood tree, agaves, and perennials cause by the 2021 “Snowpocalyse”.
Despite all these horticultural calamities, natural disasters, and the not infrequent flooding from Cottonwood Creek, Tony and Linda’s garden offers a huge array of interesting, unusual, and beautiful trees, shrubs, and perennials.
Linda’s successful gardening is not the result of mere bulldogged determination. Linda has developed a deep source of gardening knowledge from reading and studying. She has dozens of gardening books, subscribes to multiple gardening magazines, and searches out information online. When she retired from working in 2007, she dashed to the Agrilife Extension office to apply for the Master Gardener class.
That’s where she fell for roses. Later Martha Stewart’s magazine introduced Linda to another of her favorite plants, hellebores. A highlight of the Seidel’s is the cactus and succulent garden, including an enormous Queen Victoria agave. Other favorite plants include tall bearded iris, fall asters, a Japanese kerria, a Texas mountain laurel tree grown from a small sapling, a gifted staghorn fern and cycad, and native grasses, including Lindheimer muhly.
Linda loves and believes it’s important to not only collect but share plants. From Houston to her two gardens in Dallas, she has benefited from Master Gardener plant and seed sharing, cuttings from friends, and the bounty of fellow gardeners dividing phlox, iris, and daylilies. And she reciprocates in kind. Linda claims one of the most valuable gifts she ever received was the bags of horse manure she and Tony loaded into his Ford Explorer at White Rock Horse Stables for her first rose garden. As Linda says, “The best gardens start with the best soil.”
Linda’s gardening story is one of learning, experimenting, starting over, and ultimately creating a glorious oasis of trees, flowers, and shrubs for butterflies, birds and other wildlife.
Betsy See has been a certified Master Gardener since 2017. She leads the Garden Team at Geneva Heights Elementary School and is working as a lieutenant to Nancy Black on the 2022 Garden Tour. After participating in the 2021 Advanced Tree Training offered by Tarrant County Master Gardener Association, she’s fixated on learning more about trees and doing more to protect our trees in Dallas County.
