As fall dances toward us, bearing cooler temperatures and gentle rains, we Texas gardeners have before us our easiest gardening season, with almost six months to get plants established (if we plant now) before the heat of summer returns. Still, last year, with its 90 days of plus-100-degree temperatures, extreme drought, and water rationing, scared us pretty badly. We enjoyed a reprieve this summer, and recent rains, but we’re still in a drought, and summers like last year’s are bound to return with more frequency. In response, lots of us are pulling out water-starved lawn grass and laying carpets of gravel accented with the occasional agave—an extreme reaction (even for agave lovers) considering our wetter-than-desert climate and the occasional flooding rainfall that central Texas is prone to.

Addressing the difficulties and the future of gardening in what’s likely to be a warmer, drier Texas, Tom Spencer, best known as the host of KLRU’s Central Texas Gardener, gave a free talk last Saturday at the Natural Gardener entitled “The Tao of Texas Gardening: Finding the Right Balance in the Lone Star State.” I found it inspiring and useful and want to share Tom’s main points with you.

Tom began by reminding us that gardening in central Texas presents many challenges, not least to our will and our energy. While in some blessed parts of the country you can stick a plant in the ground and walk away, you just can’t do that here. Even the most well-adapted plant has to be given a good start with regular water and perhaps also the addition of its most basic need—soil—since much of central Texas has only a thin layer of soil over limestone. We’re blasted by intense summer heat, but we also have sub-freezing temps in winter. As the saying goes, we’re always in drought, with an occasional flood. Despite these difficulties, as Tom pointed out, Austin is known to be a gardening mecca, with a plethora of well-stocked independent nurseries; radio and TV shows about gardening; a popular embrace of native plants, led by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center; and nationally acclaimed garden designers like Christy Ten Eyck, Mark Word, Lauren Springer Ogden, and James David. He thinks it’s partly because Austin attracts creative people and artists in many fields, and the creation of a garden is, of course, an art.

Tom sees a metaphor for central Texas gardening in the Tao’s yin-yang symbol—a yield/resist dynamic that is echoed in our desire to create beautiful gardens in this difficult climate while simultaneously trying not to get burned out from the effort. The yin-yang is echoed too in our climatic cycles of drought and flood, oppressive summer heat and fall-through-spring relief.

Even the east-west division of Texas along the 100th meridian—also known as the dry line, east of which lies the moist Southeast, west of which lies the arid Southwest—can be imagined as a yin-yang symbol, Tom suggested. And if climate change predictions for the next 50 years are correct, the dry line—which central Texas straddles, its gardens having long included both southeastern and southwestern plants—will shift to the east, and Austin will become increasingly drier and look more like San Angelo.

And yet, rather than responding by turning our yards into graveled expanses reminiscent of Arizona, Tom counseled that we should look to the western edges of the Texas Hill Country for plants that will prove suitable to our warmer, drier climate. Take Lost Maples State Natural Area, for example, which lies three hours southwest of Austin. We can look to its hot, dry highlands for plants for our sunnier gardens, or spaces that are farther from the hose.

But we can also look to its moist, sheltered canyons for plants for our woodland gardens and shady spaces. It’s a yin-yang push and pull, Tom said, between the two types of gardening, both of which are appropriate and sustainable for our gardening future.

In practical terms, how do we prepare for a drier future, while still anticipating the occasional monsoon year that we get thanks to our proximity to the Gulf of Mexico? Tom advised amending garden beds with plenty of granite, which provides essential drainage for those drier-loving plants. For dry, high-country-style beds, he suggested amending with 75% granite sand and 25% compost, and mulching with crushed granite. For shadier, canyon-floor-style beds, he suggested reversing that mixture to 75% compost and 25% granite sand, and mulching with a woody compost blend. For top-dressing and for paths, Tom recommended coarse, crushed granite rather than fine decomposed granite, noting that fine-textured D.G. can quickly become infested with weeds, which love to grow in it. Weeds have a harder time taking hold in a looser medium of coarse granite. Visit the stoneyard to see the difference, he advised, since suppliers may use different names to refer to their various gravels. It’s easy to end up with a delivery of 15 yards of fine D.G. in your driveway when you thought you’d ordered coarse granite—in fact, that happened to him once, he said.

Retama (Parkinsonia aculeata)
For the sunny, dry gardens—the Yin—of our future, Tom recommended the following plants.
Trees: Retama, desert willow, Mexican redbud, and Anacacho orchid tree. These take full sun and provide filtered shade for smaller plants growing beneath them.
Succulents and woody lilies: Paleleaf yucca, twistleaf yucca, Agave parryi, Agave parryi truncata, red yucca (both red- and yellow-flowering kinds), and sotol. These are small enough for the average garden and very drought tolerant.
Perennials, shrubs, and annuals: Cenizo/Texas sage, agarita, Autumn sage, Mexican bush sage, flame acanthus, four-nerve daisy, blackfoot daisy, pink skullcap, rock rose, rain lily, and bluebonnet.
Ornamental and turf grasses: Mexican feathergrass and buffalograss.

Rusty blackhaw viburnum (Viburnum rufidulum)
And for the shady, canyon-floor gardens—the Yang—of our future, Tom recommended these plants.
Trees and large shrubs: Monterrey oak, chinkapin oak, Lacey oak, Texas mountain laurel, Texas redbud, Texas persimmon, yaupon holly, possumhaw holly, rusty blackhaw viburnum, Mexican plum, Mexican buckeye, flameleaf sumac, and evergreen sumac.
Perennials, small shrubs, ferns, and annuals: Fragrant sumac, Turk’s cap, spiderwort, broadleaf salvias like Salvia guaranitica, Big Bend and Hill Country columbines, river fern, oxalis, oxblood lily, spider lily, and larkspur.
Ornamental grasses: Inland sea oats, Lindheimer muhly, and Gulf muhly.

Both styles of garden look to our immediate west, and both are xeric, although the canyon-floor garden is the wetter of the two.

Buffalograss lawn in a demonstration garden at the Wildflower Center
Tom also argued that there’s a place for appropriate lawn in the Austin garden. By “appropriate” he did not mean St. Augustine, which he no longer recommends due to its water needs. Rather he meant drought-tolerant grasses like buffalograss or, presumably, Habiturf—turf grasses that subsist on little supplemental water. He pointed out that lawn is often easier to take care of than a garden full of flowering perennials, and you should balance the practicality of what you can manage with your desire to create a dream garden. Tom’s own former dream garden, beautifully documented in his blog Soul of the Garden for many years, was big, lushly planted, and the envy of many who saw it on tour. It also required 20 hours of maintenance a week, he confided. That’s more than most people can do—more, it turns out, than he could do after a while. “If you can’t take care of it,” he said, “it’s not sustainable.”

Kempson Drive Garden in Austin
Tom summed up his philosophy for the future of gardening in central Texas with the reminder to look west—the western Hill Country, not so far west as Arizona—for plants for our gardens, and with a plea to continue to “be Austin.”

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

In 1994 my husband and I bought our first home in Austin, and I wanted to make a garden. Along the driveway a large, triangular bed, outlined by flat pieces of limestone, had already been carved out of the lawn by the previous owners. By the time we moved in, all that remained in it were thirsty begonias and a few dwarf yaupon hollies.

Having just arrived in Austin from the Carolinas, I made the typical rookie mistakes: I planted what was familiar from my former home, and I impulsively bought plants that looked pretty at the big-box store with no knowledge of whether they would perform well in Austin’s hot, humid summers and our alkaline soil. Azaleas and Crayola-colorful Gerbera daisies, I remember, were two of my first casualties.

There were many more before I discovered the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, whose native-plant gardens gave me a crash course on the beauty and hardiness of plants that are from here and thus—duh!—want to grow here. I visited often and studied the plant combinations in various seasons and made notes of the ones I liked. I took a course on creating a native-plant garden. I pored over books about gardening in Texas and growing native plants. I talked with neighbors who liked to garden and learned about exotic but well-adapted plants that perform well in our climate. And I learned which independent nurseries in town carry a good selection of Texas-happy plants. Lo and behold, the native and adapted perennials, ornamental grasses, vines, and small trees that I planted thrived, and I soon expanded my garden to include the strip along the curb and new gardens in the back yard. Success breeds confidence and enthusiasm, and I was hooked.

I’m thankful for the resources on local gardening that were available to me as a newbie gardener in a difficult climate, with weeks (if not months) of 100+ F temperatures every summer followed by winters that dip below freezing often enough to preclude Southern California or Arizona-style gardens; with long periods of drought followed by flooding rains; with alkaline soil that turns a sickly yellow those beautiful plants featured in the New England and Pacific Northwest gardens that dominate the pages of national gardening magazines.

In 1994, the same year I moved to Austin and started learning to garden here, Lauren Springer Ogden published her groundbreaking book about gardening in the equally harsh climate of the interior West: The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty. Like me, she was a transplanted East Coaster (though an experienced gardener) who’d moved to a challenging region—northern Colorado—where she learned through trial and error how to create a garden with the chutzpah to survive dry, alkaline soil, regular hailstorms, gully-washer rainstorms, and other weather extremes. She recognized that gardeners in the interior U.S., as opposed to those blessed with mild maritime climates, face unique challenges and needed a new model of gardening than what was widely available at the time. She wrote:

In North America, vast regions of great climatic diversity all share one attribute: they discourage many a gardener with their extremes….[T]he interior continental regions suffer from excessive heat, cold, wind, and drought, and outrageous weather phenomena, namely torrential rainstorms, tornadoes, and hail. Out in these wild, unrestrained…landscapes, the gardener needs to approach both design and plants in new ways. Light, color, space—all are experienced differently here….What continental North American gardeners need out here are different plants, inspired combinations, and new ideas that help gardens face the severity of our climates with beauty and diversity.

Writing about her own Colorado gardens in intimate, season-long detail, she provided a model of the undaunted garden: a garden with a sense of place, filled with plants both native and exotic that are well-suited to their locale, which thrives and brings joy, rather than frustration, to the gardener who tends it (and tending is required, she reminds us, expressing dissatisfaction with the concept of the low-maintenance garden).

With The Undaunted Garden, Springer Ogden helped introduce gardeners to a new palette of plants, many of which were not widely available at the time but which today are staples in the Western garden. In 2010, she revised and updated what is now considered by many gardeners to be a classic and published a 2nd edition of The Undaunted Garden, which I recently purchased on a whim, drawn in by the beautiful new cover photo. The new edition contains portraits of 100 new “indispensably undaunted” plants that have thrived in her Colorado gardens; color photos and descriptions of her third personal garden, in addition to her first two; and additional information on deer-resistant, drought-tolerant, and hail-resistant plants.

Springer Ogden is a vividly descriptive writer. Reading her book is akin to being led through a jam-packed garden, blindfolded, by the poetic owner who is deeply in love with her plants and their seasonal changes. In the chapter “Through the Seasons in the Shaded Garden,” she describes autumn’s approach: “Pink or white, musk mallow blooms in great masses in spite of a lack of water. As cooler, longer shadows encase more of the garden, lulling it into early slumber, patches of pink cyclamen rise like tiny naked fairies at the base of tree trunks.” Far from being strictly descriptive, however, The Undaunted Garden is almost picture-book-worthy thanks to the author’s colorful, beautifully composed photographs of her various gardens.

While the gardens described here are all in northern Colorado and her plant selections are particularly suited to that region, the book has resonance for gardeners anywhere who enjoy reading an intimate account of another’s garden and who want to create undaunted gardens of their own.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

I just finished reading Elements of Garden Design by Joe Eck, a delightful series of essays on the theory and practice of garden design. It’s a wonderful book for beginners and experienced gardeners alike, and should be read while curled up on the couch during these last days of winter, dreaming of the spring garden. One section in particular resonated with me. In a chapter titled “Influences,” Eck muses:

Gardening is surely the least lonely of the arts. For though a garden may be physically made alone, it is still a dialogue with all the gardeners one knows and has known, and also with those one only knows about, from books or magazine articles.

He goes on to say that “the first step in making a garden is looking”: looking at nature and how plants grow in natural communities, and how nature arranges rock and watercourses; looking at other gardens, including those of your friends and neighbors, gardens opened up for tours, a garden glimpsed over a fence during a stroll through town, and the many gardens featured in magazines and books. (I’m sure he’d have included blogs had they been around when his book was published in 1995.) And when something resonates with you, he advises, it’s important to puzzle out the underlying thought that may have charmed you more than any particular plant combination. Decide what elements appeal to you, or the idea behind the design, and then take that idea to your own garden and play around with it.

A wonderful side effect of this borrowing of ideas and adapting them to one’s own garden—aside from a more beautiful space—is that when you stroll through it you are reminded of your gardening influences: a friend who shared her iris with you; your grandmother who taught you to grow moonflower vine from seed; the master whose public garden you toured on vacation, and who transformed the way you thought about using perennials; a local whose garden, visited on a tour, converted you to the beauty of native plants, or formal geometry, or a Zen-like restfulness; a blogger across the country who inspired you to lay a stone path. Your dialogue with these other gardeners may be unspoken, but it’s expressed in glorious form as your garden evolves and grows.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.