Not that long ago, native plants got little respect. They were considered weeds, inelegant scrub, and surely harbored ticks, chiggers, and rodents. Ahead-of-their-time native-plant enthusiasts faced resistance from neighbors concerned about an unkempt look. And even if you did want to grow these plants, you couldn’t find them at your local nursery.

Michael McDowell’s Plano Prairie Garden
We’ve come a long way, baby! Over the past couple of decades, gardening with native plants has achieved not just acceptance but mainstream popularity, driven in some regions by watering restrictions that make gardens full of thirsty exotics unsustainable, as well as a desire to garden with a sense of place. Native plants are now readily available in independent nurseries or online, and shelves of books have been written about gardening with them. Most botanical gardens, it seems, now devote at least some space to native plants, and here in Austin we’re fortunate to have an entire botanical garden, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, dedicated to education about and the display of native plants.

Tait Moring’s Austin garden
One aspect of growing native plants, however, continues to lag behind: design. Natives are often used in naturalistic or wildscaped gardens but less commonly, it seems, in more-structured designs, whether formal, clean-lined contemporary, or simply HOA-friendly. Can natives, in fact, be used effectively in non-naturalistic gardens?

You bet. After all, plants are plants, as far as design goes. But here are some tips to keep in mind when using natives to achieve strong design in a central Texas garden.

1. Use broad-leaved plants for structure and contrast. So many of our native perennials here in central Texas, especially sun-lovers, are fine-textured. The tiny leaves that help a plant retain moisture become a blur of undifferentiated foliage very easily. Break up that sea of fine texture with broad-leaved and structural plants like agave, yucca, and spineless prickly pear. Don’t worry—it won’t make your garden look like a desert to have a few of these spiny plants in it. Provided they have good drainage and are grown with other drought-tolerant, sun-loving plants, they mingle quite nicely with flowering perennials and ornamental trees, as in this grouping of Gregg’s mistflower (Conoclinium greggii) and rock penstemon (Penstemon baccharifolius) with nonnative artichoke agave (Agave parryi var. truncata) in Curt Arnette’s southwest Austin garden.

2. Include strong lines in your garden through the use of defined paths, low walls, seating areas, and other hardscape.
A wildscape garden can get by with a stepping-stone path or mulched trail. But if you want a more structured native-plant garden, give it plenty of definition, as in this Glee Ingram-designed garden in west Austin. I don’t mean that you have to spend big bucks on fancy stone terraces or high walls (although those are lovely if you have the means). Defined gravel paths and patios work very well too and have the advantage of being less expensive and easy to install yourself.

And anyone can build a low retaining wall to create an elevation change that adds interest and definition to the garden, as in the Poth-Gill garden in central Austin.

If you need more inspiration, visit the Wildflower Center to see firsthand how to add beautiful structure to native-plant gardens through the use of hardscape.

3. Choose native plants with a long season of interest.
The traditional-garden exotics so often used in gardens across the country are popular for a reason: they are sturdy, long-lasting performers. Of course they may also be water guzzlers and intolerant of our Texas summers, so when you turn to native substitutes, look for those that put on a good show for more than just a few glorious weeks. In Roxanne and Ira Yates’s garden, pictured above, Texas mountain laurel (Sophora secundiflora), Wheeler sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri), and damianita (Chrysactinia mexicana) combine to form a multi-layered, mostly evergreen garden with seasonal flowering.

4. Add focal points to your garden along sight lines.
This is a traditional design technique, and it works just as well in a native garden—maybe better because it adds essential structure—to direct the eye to certain features or indicate where one should walk. Plant an allee of native trees, as Austinite Tom Spencer did with bald cypress (Taxodium distichum)—use an ornamental tree like Mexican plum (Prunus mexicana) if your property is small—drawing the eye inevitably toward a focal-point garden ornament.

Or plant a large pot with a native plant and place it midway along a path so as to stop the eye and encourage visitors to stop and look, as I did with a Texas nolina (Nolina texana) in my former garden.

Cathy Nordstrom-designed garden in northwest Austin
5. Remember that native plants require maintenance, just as traditional exotics do, to look their best.
Natives have been sold so well to the public as bulletproof drought survivors that people often think you can just plant them and walk away. Uh-uh. Not only do native plants require some TLC to get established, just as nonnatives do, they also look better in a garden setting with regular grooming. Have you ever gone hiking on the greenbelt and really looked at the landscape? Is that what you want your garden to look like? I’m not saying a wildscape is bad. I’m just saying that’s not what most people want in front of their houses, especially in traditional neighborhoods.

Rather than let your natives grow “wild” in your garden, take time to prune them as necessary. I don’t mean shearing them into meatballs, mind you, just cutting back dead stems and branches, pruning for shape, pulling up or moving seedlings that are taking over your gravel paths, and giving your garden a cared-for look. Such maintenance is made easier from the start by choosing plants based on their mature sizes, so that you aren’t having to continually clip overgrown foundation shrubs or butcher trees that outgrew their placement.

Take Autumn sage (Salvia greggii) for example. This is a beautiful shrub when in bloom, but it has a tendency to get woody and bloom less if you don’t take the clippers to it. Whack it back by half in late winter (mid-February), and again by one-third in early summer (after the spring bloom) and in late summer (in preparation for fall bloom). It’ll reward you with a tidy shape and a burst of colorful flowers—an asset to your garden.

There you have it—my tricks of the trade for designing with central Texas native plants in a more-structured style of garden. Let me know if you have any other tips that work well too!

This is my contribution to today’s posting on Designing with Native Plants by Garden Designers Roundtable. Click for links to other designers’ posts from around the U.S. and England.

Thomas Rainer : Grounded Design : Washington, D.C.

David Cristiani : The Desert Edge : Albuquerque, NM

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Mary Gallagher Gray : Black Walnut Dispatch : Washington, D.C.

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Genevieve Schmidt : North Coast Gardening : Arcata, CA

Douglas Owens-Pike : Energyscapes : Minneapolis, MN

Debbie Roberts : A Garden of Possibilities : Stamford, CT

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT

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

August is a waiting game for central Texas gardeners—waiting for fall rains to arrive, waiting for the muggy blanket of heat to lift and a cool breeze to blow in from the north, waiting for nurseries to fill up with their fall shipments of new plants, waiting for October, the beginning of our best planting season.

Yesterday we got a teaser of fall goodness, with rain showers and a cooling cloud cover. Between showers I went out to look at the sodden garden and pull a few weeds from the softened decomposed granite, and I snapped these pics to remind myself of how much everything has grown this summer, even though at this point in summer the plants don’t look their best. Pictured above is my neighbor’s streetside garden, which I designed and planted to blend with mine. We share a decomposed-granite path that runs between our garden beds.

Here’s how it looked right after I planted it in early February.

And even before that. Now it’s a lawn-gone garden, and in another month or so the salvias and grasses will burst into fall bloom.

Panning to the right, to my own streetside garden, you see a ‘Pink Flamingos’ muhly grass that’ll be blooming in another month or so. (According to Plant Delights, ‘Pink Flamingos’ is a hybrid, from Peckerwood Garden, of Muhlenbergia capillaris and Muhlenbergia lindheimeri.) Behind it is an expanse of shady St. Augustine lawn that I plan to convert into a simple Berkeley sedge lawn. But first I need to have a retaining wall built up by the house, and that’ll have to wait for a while.

Garlic chives are blooming along the curb—yay, a sign that summer is on the wane!

And this eryngium that I grew from seed shared with me by Michael at Plano Prairie Garden is starting to “purple up”—another sign of fall.

The island garden—a live oak-studded berm that was marooned by the circular drive when the house was built—is wearing the tawny shades of a long, hot summer, but plenty of silvers are there to cool things off visually. Year-round structure is provided by ‘Color Guard’ yuccas, a wavy-leafed spineless prickly pear (shared by Jean of Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog), and a big softleaf yucca. Without them, the garden would be a blurry mass of fine-leaved perennials and grasses.

I simply adore the ‘Color Guard’ yuccas. But the plant I get asked about by every person who stops to look at the garden is the silver-blue gopher plant (Euphorbia rigida). Do the deer bother it, they ask? Only once—the irritating latex sap inside the stems taught them to leave it alone. The gardener needs to use caution as well—i.e., gloves and maybe eye protection—when trimming it.

To appreciate how much this garden has grown in 2-1/2 years, here’s how it looked in March 2010, right after planting.

And before that—just tangled Asian jasmine, purple lantana, and a few scraggly nandinas. Easy-care, certainly, and nothing wrong with that, but it was not going to satisfy this plant-a-holic.

Let’s see—other gardens in transition. Here’s the brand-new gravel garden by the front door. An ‘Alphonse Karr’ clumping bamboo hides some pipes in the left corner. Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha) will add purple flower spikes on the right in another month. Agave gentryi ‘Jaws’ occupies the circular planter, toothless sotol (Dasylirion longissimum) the pipe planter. I found the tall, green pot on sale at Natural Gardener recently and plan to add a ‘Red Star’ cordyline. The little pot in front contains a pretty but vicious dyckia.

But what the heck is going on in the deck bed? (This is the view straight down from the deck.) I have struggled with this space for four years. At first it was a dumping ground for many of the sun-loving plants I brought with me from my previous garden. And then I realized that it didn’t have enough sun for many of them—doh!—but it did seem to get blistering part-sun, so shade-appreciative plants suffered. I’m happy with the recent semicircle of ‘Color Guard’ yucca that echoes the lines of the curving path around the stock-tank pond. But the mishmash of flowering perennials and a few holding-bed agaves behind the yuccas is just a mess. I think I’m going to move all those this fall and plant a curving line of yellow-green bamboo muhly to echo the yuccas.

Nearby, the ‘Blue Ice’ Arizona cypress is simply stunning. I can’t believe how much it’s grown since I planted it three years ago.

Here’s how it looked then. Whenever you think nothing’s happening out there, it pays to look at old photos.

So are you making fall garden plans too?

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

Landscape architect Curt Arnette, of Sitio Design, is one of the best and yet most modest garden makers you’ll meet in Austin. Back when I was a newbie gardener, breaking ground at our first house in Austin, he and his wife Melisa were our across-the-street neighbors. What a stroke of luck for me! Over the years, Curt and I each turned our blank-slate front yards of St. Augustine grass into gardens—his a beautiful, New Orleans-style, low-walled courtyard lush with palms under a majestic live oak. Mine was, well, much less impressive, my first baby-gardener experiment, but I learned a lot from Curt, especially about the importance of foliage, structure, and pruning, before we each moved with our families to new (old) homes with new blank-slate yards.

In the years since, I’ve seen a couple of his professionally designed gardens on tours and at Lou Neff Point along the Hike and Bike Trail at Lady Bird Lake. Occasionally I’m asked by garden-tour planners if I can recommend any gardens that haven’t been seen on tour, and I always suggest Curt’s personal garden, which he’s been making for about 10 years on a quiet cul-de-sac in the Circle C neighborhood in southwest Austin. But Curt demurs with a laugh, protesting that it’s not tour-ready and doesn’t yet match the vision in his head.

Sadly for Curt, reticence is lost on me, and I have a (likely annoying) habit of popping by his garden unannounced to see what’s new. Last time I brought a group of garden bloggers with me, my companions on the recent Gardens on Tour; we just happened to be in the neighborhood, so naturally I suggested we do a drive-by of “this great garden I know about.” Poor Curt! We ambushed him while he was out working in the garden—really working, trimming and pulling out plants—not just puttering with a glass of iced tea in hand. After recovering from his surprise at the impromptu tour, Curt graciously invited us and all our snapping cameras into his garden, asking only that we explore the front of his corner-lot garden, not the back, where he had another project going on.

Allow me to be your tour guide! Curt’s garden never fails to wow me right at the curb. On a street of mostly traditional lawns and foundation shrubs, his garden stands out immediately. The public space along the curb is dry and mostly sunny; agave, sotol, yucca, and dasylirion flourish here, their spiky, architectural forms softened by silvery mounds of ‘Powis Castle’ artemisia, purple-blooming salvia, and blond, billowing Mexican feathergrass.

A wider view from the street, near the driveway. In contrast with the public face of the garden, a shade-dappled private garden is hidden behind a low boxwood hedge backed by taller evergreen shrubs, whose entrance is marked by a free-standing blue iron gate, with one side enticingly left open.

Curt found the gate, French-made in the 1800s, at Dreyfus Antiques years ago and used it in the courtyard garden at his first house before bringing it along to his new home and garden. Curt told me that his neighborhood’s HOA restrictions did not allow him to build the low courtyard wall he wanted, so instead he used a clipped hedge of ‘Wintergreen’ boxwood to create a feeling of enclosure and privacy.

Before we step through the gate, let’s explore the outer garden first. An emerald ‘Green Goblet’ agave (Agave salmiana var. ferox ‘Green Goblet’) marks one side of the entry walk. Ooh, I really need to find room for one of these in my garden.

Panning to the right, we see a tapestry of foliage in front of that boxwood hedge.

One of my favorite agaves, ‘Sharkskin’—and it’s a biggie—is softened behind by a fringe of heartleaf skullcap (Scutellaria ovata), which peeks out at the feet of the boxwood hedge.

Toothless sotol (Dasylirion longissimum) creates an airy scrim of thin leaves.

And look at this gorgeous, blue artichoke agave (Agave parryi var. truncata) paired with Gregg’s mistflower and rock penstemon.

A blue-green ‘Whale’s Tongue’ agave (A. ovatifolia) is softened with a feathery clump of snake herb (Dyschoriste linearis), a native groundcover I’m going to try in my garden this fall.

Wheeler sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri)

Yucca australis (syn. Yucca filifera) and Yucca rostrata

Moving around the corner, this is the view from the busier street that runs alongside the house and garden: an effective and tactile screen of foliage in greens, silver, and blue-green.

Entering the private courtyard through the iron gate…

…you step into an open, gravel-floored room, with a bistro table and chairs for relaxing in the shade of the live oaks. Renee, Daphne, and David were busy framing photos too.

Variegated flax lily (Dianella tasmanica ‘Variegata’), clusters at the foot of a tree, brightening a shady corner.

As do the frosted, spiky fronds of silver saw palmetto (Serenoa repens).

Steel edging set into the ground, with only the top line visible (at bottom right), defines the straight-lined planting beds—although a single, feather-shaped Dioon edule breaks out and takes root in the gravel patio.

Curt and Melisa detected a French influence in the architecture of their suburban brick home, so Curt added a bit of French flavor to the courtyard design as well, with Old World-style shutters, soft green paint, a handsome bench set into a boxwood parterre, an iron arbor over the garage, and climbing vines over the doorways. Evergreen fig ivy outlines the front entry, while a ‘Mermaid’ rose clambers above the garage doors.

Now we’re heading around the side of the house. Whereas steel defines the courtyard patio, limestone blocks define the planting beds outside the hedge and separate them from a small area of lawn in the side garden.

Curt doesn’t overlook even the smallest planting opportunity, like placing groundcovers along the base of the boxwood hedges. This is blue shade ruellia (Ruellia squarrosa), a variety I’d never heard of before.

Ice plant offers blue succulent foliage and colorful flowers on this gravelly, one-step retaining wall.

Here’s a vibrant, sun-loving combo that inspired my own recent purchases: ‘Tropicanna’ canna and firecracker fern (Russelia equisetiformis).

Curt uses beach vitex (Vitex rotundifolia) as a shrubby screen between the street and his side garden, along with bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa) and spineless prickly pear (Opuntia), not pictured.

Peeking over the low wrought-iron fence that encloses Curt’s back garden, you see a more tropical-looking garden, with a gravel patio surrounded by an exuberance of palm foliage.

A mass of strappy Manfreda maculosa blooms beneath a tall windmill palm, as silver ponyfoot (Dichondra argentea) foams over limestone steps.

Curt constructed a concrete-edged, circular pond just inside the fence, with an offset rill-like fountain pouring into it.

Simply beautiful

I noticed a false red yucca (Beschorneria yuccoides), with rounded seedpods dangling from a recent bloom spike, in the shade of a Japanese maple alongside his house, and mentioned that I’d just bought one at Peckerwood Garden‘s recent plant sale. It dawned on me later that Curt’s garden reminded me of Peckerwood in its mingling of southwestern desert plants, tropical-looking palms, and a variety of shrubs, and in its reliance on foliage texture and form over flowers. I emailed Curt to ask whether he’d been influenced by Peckerwood. He replied that John Fairey, Peckerwood’s owner, was one of his design professors at Texas A&M, and that Fairey’s garden did indeed have a big influence on him.

When asked about his other gardening influences, Curt replied, “I like Big Bend and the variety of plants out there. I like the work of Steve Martino, Roberto Burle Marx, and Raymond Jungles. I also like minimalist, contemporary gardens. I like a lot of different styles but don’t care much for overly formal gardens or gardens that rely too much on flower color. I prefer more leaf color and texture.”

Curt’s own garden illustrates the beauty and year-round interest of a garden created from a mix of striking foliage plants combined with plenty of filler groundcovers and mid-size shrubs. Those of us gardening in the dry shade of live oaks should especially take note. And anyone contending with restrictive HOAs can also learn from Curt’s example of how to substitute creatively—in this case, a hedge for a wall—and still fulfill your garden dreams. Thank you, Curt, for the tour and for your continual inspiration!

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