You’ve all been very good this year, and Santa says there’s time for one more garden tour before Christmas, so here you go. I visited this garden in late October, at the invitation of owner/designer Tait Moring, who had it all spruced up for a busload of folks from the Garden Club of America. Lucky (pushy) me—I arrived early, before the bus rolled in, and was treated to an unhurried personal tour. What a relaxed host! Some of you may remember that I posted about Tait’s garden in the spring of 2011, when it was on the Wildflower Center-sponsored Gardens on Tour. He’s made some changes since then, of course, and it was also a treat to see the garden in a different season.

Pictured above is the front entry of Tait’s home, which is located in Westlake right off busy Bee Caves Road. Tucked behind a tall screen of cedar posts and greenery, you’d never know the home (and design office) is hidden away just off the road, a surprisingly spacious property that overlooks a forested canyon. The modest, painted-brick ranch has a clean-lined, concrete front porch set off by a raised pond and fountain cloaked in fig ivy.

On the front porch, a collection of pots attracted my attention. The largest was appealingly top-dressed with colorful glass beads.

These smaller pots, made by local artist Rick Van Dyke, resemble dinosaur eggs. I’ve seen Van Dyke pots for sale recently at The Great Outdoors. (Adding to Christmas wish list…)

A wider view of the front of the house. Tait has a generous decomposed-granite parking area for guests and clients. The rock wall at left of the house has a gate that leads to the private back garden.

A trio of giant hesperaloe in tall, bronze pots balances an asymmetrical window, and a fourth pot concludes the line just past the window. A meadowy mix of two species of ornamental grasses softens the base of a low wall.

I really love this and am tempted to steal the idea.

The rock wall includes a triangular niche.

Found objects and rocky treasures are tucked among the mortared stones, becoming part of the wall too.

Step through the gate and you enter the back garden, which includes a lawn leading to a new swimming pool. Previously a ramada-shaded patio stood at the end of the lawn, but Tait decided a swimming pool was needed to get through Austin’s long, hot summers. (I totally agree, whether you swim in your own back-yard pool, Barton Springs, or one of the many city pools; cool water up to the neck is essential.) Tait told me he got a little grief during one of his garden tours about having a lawn, but he likes it for the entertaining space and says it’s pretty low maintenance. To my mind, these are perfect reasons to keep some lawn: you’ve reduced it to what you use, you keep it for a definite purpose, and you’ve planted a lawn grass that doesn’t need coddling. His lawn is a soothing, cooling counterpoint to the rest of the property, which is either planted heavily with natives and adapted plants or, along the canyon’s edge, left wild and natural.

A fall-blooming daisy tumbles around a birdbath in one of the planted borders.

Looking back, I stopped to admire the curved cedar post that arches over the gate. Such interesting touches add so much delight to the exploration of Tait’s garden. On this side the wall shelters a small seating area.

Tait told me an interesting story about his stone columns (he has several; for a front view of the carved detailing, scroll up a few pictures). He and his crew were digging around in an old quarry on a Hill Country ranch where they were doing some work when one of his crew spotted the carved stone lying amid the rubble. They pulled it out and found this treasure—well, several of them. Who knows how long they’d been lying abandoned in the quarry, and he wishes he knew something about their history. But now they adorn his garden, standing like door posts on either side of the lawn, topped with terracotta bowls of agave and silver ponyfoot. The pink vine climbing the column is mandevilla, a tropical vine that needs winter protection.

From the middle of the lawn, looking back, you see the side of Tait’s house, with a row of native Lindheimer muhly grasses softening the foundation.

A closer look

And a wider view

Tucked into the shady border alongside the lawn, amid Salvia coccinea, holly fern, river fern, and ivy, a fountain bubbles up out of a drilled stone.

The rectangular pool is backed by an irregular stone wall topped with staggered-height cedar-pole fencing and softened with lush, tropical-looking plants, giving the space a Mexican or South American vibe.

A tiki-style stone-head planter atop another carved column from the quarry adds to the sense of tropical mystery, as do bromeliads atop the wall.

Some of the tropical-looking plants along the wall are actually quite hardy and drought tolerant, like feathery bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa) and giant hesperaloe (Hesperaloe funifera).

Just past the pool (you can see the house in the distance), cedar-mulched paths lead through the trees along the canyon’s edge, and down into the canyon too, as far as Tait’s had time to work on them. This small clearing provided a place for a colorful hammock strung between two cedar (juniper) trees.

Seven-foot-tall mounds of native daisies were in flower along the path, especially where the tree canopy was thinner. It was amazing to walk through these golden berms.

This trail led past one of the special features of Tait’s property: a beautiful, old Texas madrone (Arbutus xalapensis), more commonly found in the Hill Country to the west. Its smooth, white trunks seemed to glow under the leafy canopy. Texas madrone is picky about where it grows in ways not fully understood. Tait said that although he’s cleared out a bunch of cedar (juniper) trees in this area, he left the ones around the madrone. He’d heard of a rancher who cleared out the cedars around a colony of madrones only to watch the madrones die as a result. Perhaps there’s a symbiotic relationship underground, in the roots and the living soil?

I had to reach out and stroke the madrone’s smooth bark.

Just past the madrone, at the canyon’s edge, the trees open to this—a stunning Hill Country view. With rock found on his property, Tait built a stone circle with a fire pit in the middle, which overlooks the canyon. Because of the ongoing drought and burn ban, he hasn’t used it once, he said. But he built it, he explained, as an expression of hope that one day the drought would end and the rains would return. Fire or not, the stone circle is a lovely place to sit and take in the view.

I spotted a pretty cluster of frostweed (Verbesina virginica) on the walk back to the house.

More trails lead from the gardens down into the canyon.

A stone retaining wall marks the boundary between garden and wildscape. A berrying yaupon holly straddles the wall.

Moving around to the other side of Tait’s garden, an ornately wrought, nature-themed gate set between stout cedar posts leads to…

…a vegetable garden that stair-steps along the canyon’s edge. Beautiful stonework defines raised beds…

…and stairs back up to the house. Behind the cedar-pole screen at the top of the stairs is a rustic outdoor shower.

At the back of the house, a patchwork path made up of paving samples leads past the outdoor shower to a back deck.

The small deck overlooks the canyon and looks back to the lawn garden too.

Another Rick Van Dyke pot, planted with pencil plant (Euphorbia tirucalli), sits on a table.

A wider gate, matching the one that leads to the vegetable garden, separates one end of the driveway from a work area in back.

Snake detail

A fountain made of an industrial-looking steel pipe and a stock tank helps to drown out traffic noise along the street-side of the garden.

And a focal-point pot in the center of a small, circular lawn backed by bamboo and cedar trees offers an interesting vignette right before you leave.

I’m grateful to Tait for this tour of his beautiful and fascinating garden. What a treat! For more images of Tait’s garden click for my spring 2011 visit.

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

My sixth and final stop on November 3rd’s Open Days tour was the garden of my friend Jeff Pavlat, located in the Westlake area. Jeff is vice president of the Austin Cactus and Succulent Society, and he’s kindly invited me to visit his garden before (click for my 2009 visit to Jeff’s garden and my 2010 visit to the Pavlat paradise).

Aside from the fact that Jeff’s garden is a succulent smorgasbord, one thing that always impresses me is that he and partner Ray Clayton also designed and built the extensive stone terracing that tames their narrow, steep hillside and enabled Jeff to turn this formerly unusable space into a traversable garden.

Plants are tucked into the terracing, creating a vertical garden effect. The terraces, along with the long street-level garden and house-level garden, come alive with exotic-looking aloes, agaves, dyckias, sotols, yuccas, and cacti—all manner of spiky and fleshy plants.

Jeff does go to certain lengths to preserve his more tender plants when it freezes, but he also uses many hardy succulents and cacti. Which ones are hardy in the Austin area? Check out the pdf list of cold-hardy plants on the Austin Cactus and Succulent Society’s website.

Potted plants placed in the garden beds add height and focal points. I particularly like these terracotta bowl planters, set atop homemade concrete pillars tinted with a terracotta mix-in color.

A trio of them includes a cactus landscape…

…a small agave, rock, and succulent dish…

…and a collection of aloes.

Variegated American agave writhes atop one of the terrace walls, overlooking a dizzying view down to the driveway.

Jeff’s garden is all about verticality. Limestone stairs lead up to street level from the house-level garden.

Desert Southwest cacti and succulents share garden space with tough, native flowering plants like four-nerve daisy (Tetraneuris scaposa).

Small vignettes entice a closer look, but watch out for those spines.

Speaking of which…a proliferation of golden barrel cacti, like so many pincushions

A beautiful, frosty dyckia

Curvy-armed squid agaves (A. bracteosa). Jeff masses his succulent collection to great effect.

Halfway up the terraced hillside, Jeff and Ray carved out space for a small patio anchored in the center by a millstone fountain (not pictured) surrounded by Mexican beach pebbles. A yaupon or possumhaw holly anchors one corner of the patio, along with a vignette of potted barrel cacti and a squid agave.

A built-in bench along the wall offers the perfect spot to stop and enjoy the view.

Barrel cactus

Fleshy, spiny aloes bloom in cooler weather, sending up candelabras of tubular, coral-red flowers.

A tiny aloe in bloom

Variegated Agave desmettiana and silver ponyfoot make a dramatic gold-and-silver combo.

Yucca ‘Tiny Star’ adds its own golden gleam.

Even a metal agave finds a home here.

A silvery green dyckia carpets the ground next to an Asian-style sculpture, one of the many Zen touches in Jeff’s garden.

At the bottom of the driveway, at house-level, a limestone-bordered garden bed mulched in Texas Black gravel amps up the drama with a collection of golden barrel cactus, prickly pear, and other cacti, plus Texas sotol and two enormous Yucca rostrata standing sentry on either side of a stairway to the back of the house.

Next to the front walk, a fish pond adds the welcome surprise of water-loving plants in a dry garden.

Even here the property’s difficult slope is turned to advantage with the addition of a small waterfall.

Jeff is an avid plant collector and propagator, and his greenhouse houses hundreds of tender succulents and cacti. I suspect he’ll need a second greenhouse soon.

That wraps up the Austin Open Days Tour 2012. I hope you’ve enjoyed my virtual garden visits. For a look back at the art-collectors’ Rockcliff Road Garden, click here.

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

My fifth stop on last Saturday’s Open Days tour, the Rockcliff Road Garden, was really more of a sculpture garden. Lots of open space on this lakeside property, graced with a home designed by Lake Flato Architects, gives prominence to many large works of art placed on the grounds. But I couldn’t help noticing a devotion to Japanese maples in the entry garden. There were dozens, not all in the best of health, but clearly they were part of a collection, like the art. This one is a beauty, its rusty leaves set off by the chartreuse foliage of the tree behind it.

Some glowed red…

…and some greenish yellow along a curving limestone path. So many Japanese maples lent an Asian vibe to this part of the garden…

…played up even further with this courtyard combo of pines, junipers, and boulder.

Overall, however, plants seemed chosen for their sculptural qualities more than anything else, like these weeping blue atlas cedars, bent like wizened, gray-haired women and framing a boulder set on a concrete pad—art or nature? And are the plants part of a garden or pieces of art themselves? It was hard to tell.

Moisture-loving leopard plant (Farfugium japonicum) brightened a shady spot. Many of the plants in this garden were water lovers, but since the garden sits on the banks of Lake Austin it may well be naturally moist.

Leaving the entry garden behind, you step onto a railing-less boardwalk edging a small canal. The boardwalk leads in a straight shot toward the main house, set closer to the lake.

As you near the house you see this fascinating sculpture of crouching men stacked in a vanishing line atop the shoulders of an Atlas-like figure.

Each figure is blinded by the one above—a somewhat disturbing effect. Talk about a monkey on your back! Now that I think about it, all of the sculptures on the property had a vaguely ominous or unsettling mood, or so it seemed to me. Many were so visually off-putting that I didn’t photograph them. The owners obviously have a particular taste in art, and it doesn’t involve beauty but provocativeness.

Beauty was to be found in the design of the home itself, the natural lake view, and dramatic accents like these hanging, bare-root orchids.

I’m not usually much of an orchid fan, but I found these quite appealing.

Looking back down the boardwalk we just crossed—long vistas, straight lines, and vanishing points.

A soaring porch was open to garden visitors. In fact, we passed through the porch to see the rest of the garden along the lake.

Succulents in organically shaped pots and saucers

Another look—beautiful framing and craftsmanship

A wider view

I admired the interior for a bit, and then I noticed that a stone-block side table was engraved with some unsettling declarations. Later I learned that they are from Truisms (1978-1983) by Jenny Holzer. Hmmm. “Murder has its sexual side” is not something I’d want to read every time I set a drink down.

Stepping outside, a green-and-blue vista of lawn and lake greets you.

But uh-oh, here’s another vaguely creepy piece of art, like a swirling whirlpool, or a black hole ready to swallow you up.

Another look

Ah, I much prefer the view of water and green hills.

Chairs at the end of the lawn overlook the lake…

…but mischievously, some of the chairs are cleverly disguised pieces of art, placed in unsettling positions—one leg hanging off the edge of a deck or tilting to one side or, like this one, strewn into the lake as if a really good party had occurred the night before. Well, it was fun to see! This was definitely a garden with a sense of humor and a dark side.

Up next: The cactus and agave collector’s garden of Jeff Pavlat and Ray Clayton. For a look back at the contemporary Bonnell Drive Garden, click here.

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