I saw the house two years ago this weekend. That spring, after moving, I had neither the physical, mental, nor material resources to think about gardening. I was too spent getting settled. Instead that first year I watched the yard, learning where the sunlight fell and what had been done to it beforehand. A great deal really! The house is fifty years old and cedar elms tower a above all the houses in the neighborhood. We had eight cedar elms and have lost two to mistletoe and ball moss. We also have two pecans which have suffered from drought and are sickly. Apparently several other very large trees died before we bought the property. There are a lot of stumps in the yard. I believe they were live oak. Live oak wilt is killing magnificent old trees all over Austin.
The woman who had the yard before me did not have any sense of design. She seemed to be one of those people easily tempted by the bright annuals at the garden center or supermarket. “Seasonal color”. I’m still finding plastic markers of plants long dead.
Last spring, I had no gardening budget. However, I planted on Japanese persimmon (“Eureka”) to satisfy my Fall cravings for persimmons. I hope someday to have all the persimmons I can eat. Persimmons are suppose to do well here.
I spent last year learning about native plants, both by reading and by visiting specialty nurseries. I lost an old, established fig to the heat and drought. But last August, it began raining and it has been temperate and wet since. The plants have no idea what season it is. the temperature has only dipped below freezing a couple of times this winter. All the foliage is green and lush. And so, repressing memories of scorching dry Texas summers, I have gone plant crazy.
I have more money in the budget for plants. And I have the largest yard in the neighborhood. I have bought native ornamental trees: 2 Mexican plums and a Texas persimmon. And I’ve bought trees that probably won’t do well: a Japanese maple and Italian Stone pine.
I want my garden to flow naturally into the surrounding landscape. I’ve developed a dislike of the artifice of English and European gardens. Here, they would be too bright, too deep green and glossy, too fussy. The more I observe the Texas landscape, the more I dislike the man-made, geometrics of the formal, English garden. Garden books refer to my preferred style as informal. But I think in its spirit it more closely resembles the unnatural Nature of Japanese gardens than American casual. Or rather, my sense of garden beauty is more allied with Japanese values than European ones. I prefer texture to color. I love rocks, twisted, stunted trees, and crumbly fallen leaves. The lawn is a weedy, patchy mess–a battle that I’m losing or lost. I have no hedges, or borders. I want, instead, to plant a thicket of ornamental trees to block the sight of the neighboring houses. Being boxed in with hedges is the antithesis of the Texas landscape.
I’m reading a great deal about plants. For all my love of gardening, I don’t have much of a green thumb. And so, I’m trying to find plants, mostly ornamental trees and flowering perennials, that can survive on their own. As for flowers, I’m trying to plant a mini-meadow of Texas wildflowers and southern, naturalizing bulbs.
In keeping with this natural approach, I pretty much leave the yard to grow as it pleases. I only remove a plant if it is sickly or threatens something more delicate. Any plant that can survive a Texas summer deserves to be left to flourish.
I’ve identified two plants that are truly weeds, even in my yard: goose grass (a kind of bedstraw-it is a bright green beautiful, delicate plant when it first emerges, but then with sticky leaves and stems, it clambers over everything, forming thick mats that dry to a dull brown, and worse, produce millions of crescent shaped stickers that cling to socks and shoelaces); chickweed (another matting plant, succulent, with little white flowers).
I leave the henbit, the dandelions, the wild carrot, the sow thistles (except in the lawn). And I’ve identified spiderwort, summer snowflakes, pink oxalis, and oxblood lilies-planted by previous owners. The yard is so big that I need a 100 times as many plants to have any effect. So I’m trying to propagating perennials and bulbs.
I have dreams of brown-eyed Susans, Maximilian sunflowers, yellow native columbine, and bluebonnets, wine cups and bulbs. I have a long term plan and guess it will be ten years before anyone else can see the yard as I do, as a garden.
