The second garden I visited on the Wildflower Center-sponsored Gardens on Tour last Saturday was, like the first, located in south Austin’s Barton Hills neighborhood. The contemporary home on Westridge Drive, which is embraced by a wood of native trees and understory plants (many invasive exotics have been eradicated since the house was constructed in 2011), says hello with a jazzy cactus and succulent planter along the front walk. Here’s touring companion Cat of The Whimsical Gardener taking a few pictures.

Towering bloom spikes of manfreda and yucca lifted spiky and bell-shaped flowers up to eye level, giving the low bed extra height and dimension for a short season. Silver ponyfoot filled in around the plants and spilled over the edges of the steel planter like a frothy, sea-glass-green wave.

Faded purple flowers on the small cacti showed us that we’d just missed a beautiful show.

Still, we were glad of the yucca and manfreda blooms.

This textural composition contrasted with…

…a quiet expanse of buffalograss on the other side of the front steps. This carpet of native lawn grass is set off in tiered steel planter beds, which frame it nicely.

Winecups and gaillardia are allowed to invade the lower tier, adding a little spring color.

Buffalograss makes an irresistibly touchable, blue-green carpet. I’m not sure how much use this lawn would get, as it’s set below the level of the main entry to the home and the pool deck; it was not even clear how you could step down onto it. So maybe it’s meant to be a lawn for looking at only — a visual negative space to complement the minimalist design of the adjoining pool deck.

Off to the side, a few feet below the level of the steel-edged lawn, a gravel patio contains a casual seating area of motel chairs surrounding a firepit. I like the intersecting straight lines that define the various spaces.

The front steps lead up to a pool deck between the main house and a two-story garage/garage apartment. The wooden decking, still puddled from the previous night’s rain, was open save for a minimalist seating arrangement. There was a complete absence of potted plants or any other decor. Instead, what commands your attention is the unique awning that stretches across the space, offering shade from the Death Star and creating a fascinating pattern of shadows on the walls.

At first glance I thought it was made of chains. It’s actually rebar — enormously long pieces of rebar sagging over the space, attached on one end to the garage roof, on the other to the house.

Such a graphic display! I did wonder, though, how they keep the rebar from rusting onto the pool deck below.

Three concrete slabs seem to float across one end of the pool and invite you to cross.

A naturalistic garden on the other side rambles up a hill and offers views of the home and the full drama of the rebar awning.

Heading back to the car, I admired these purple coneflowers growing in a pocket garden alongside the home’s walled and gated entry.

A quarter-mile nature trail that I opted not to explore descends from the house to a vegetable garden and naturalistic water feature at the bottom of the hill. Touring companion Shirley of Rock-Oak-Deer wasn’t as lazy, so check out her post for pictures of the lower garden that I missed.

Next up: A quick peek at the unstructured and easygoing Placid Place Garden. For a look back at the canyonside Kathy Cove Garden, click here.

All material © 2006-2013 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Garden tour season in central Texas kicked off last Saturday with the annual Wildflower Center-sponsored Gardens on Tour, which this year featured five Austin gardens in which native plants play a predominant role. I toured with three other bloggers — Cat from The Whimsical Gardener, Shirley from San Antonio’s Rock-Oak-Deer, and David from Albuquerque’s The Desert Edge — and if you check out their blogs you may get additional perspectives on the gardens I’ll be posting about this week.

We began the tour with the Kathy Cove Garden, a remodeled property in south Austin’s Barton Hills neighborhood. Perched on the edge of a canyon overlooking the Barton Creek greenbelt, the home and garden enjoy spectacular views of both the greenbelt and downtown Austin. The front garden, as you see, is still a work-in-progress, with rock work by Environmental Survey Consulting in place and just a few plants situated.

A vibrant clump of standing cypress (Ipomopsis rubra) captured attention out front.

Moving around to the back garden, you pass this monumental sculpture, which looked vaguely Mayan to me.

Picking your way down a rugged limestone stair, you pass a teak hot tub nestled alongside limestone boulders and the entrance to a mid-level deck that stretches along the back of the house. Continuing to the bottom of the stone steps leads you to…

…a beautiful swimming pool surrounded by a pieced-limestone pool deck. Check out that view of the greenbelt.

You’d never know this home is 10 minutes from Zilker Park and downtown Austin.

The tightly fitted rock work is a trademark look by Environmental Survey Consulting that we saw echoed in two other gardens on this tour.

Under the deck, a surprising water feature — a stacked-limestone wall trickling with water (refreshed by A/C condensate) and colonized by maidenhair fern — adds visual cooling and creates a green view in place of the usual shadowy under-deck eyesore.

It reminded me of the natural cliffside waterfalls that can be found along Austin’s greenbelts.

A wider view shows the under-deck water-wall at left, with the cobalt pool extending the length of the terrace.

The garden is very naturalistic overall, in keeping with the rugged hillside setting. Red yucca and salvia were in bloom, attracting hummingbirds that zipped around us.

The homeowner has a large sculpture collection, which includes this bird (a raven?) perched atop a boulder, a glass orb in its beak.

Religious sculpture also finds a home here. I can’t help wondering — is the cactus collection at Christ’s feet a reference to his crown of thorns?

A Lady of Guadalupe with a spark-plug aura illustrates a similarly playful/ironic take on this traditional Catholic icon.

A pieced-stone path leads along the back of the house, hugging the top of the canyon. Amid the naturalistic plantings, a series of turquoise pots — each a miniature container pond — adds necessary rhythm to the scene.

A charming pond in miniature

Rugged paths lead down into the canyon, but I didn’t follow them. Instead I climbed up to the deck, past naturalistic garden beds. Red-blooming Texas betony spilled over limestone terracing.

Pausing to look back down the stone steps, I enjoyed a view of downtown Austin and a cardinal that shot across my field of view at just that moment.

The deck wraps the back of the house and provides several intimate seating areas to enjoy the treetop view.

I admired this simple trough with multi-colored succulents. The succulents are still in their nursery pots, rather than planted into the trough, making for a quick and attractive display.

More succulent troughs create a linear centerpiece on a dining table nearby.

They almost look good enough to eat!

Looking down at the path traversing the back of the house, you can see that the garden is still very new. Many of the plants have not had time to fill in yet.

When they do, this will be an even more spectacular space.

Next up: The contemporary Westridge Drive Garden, with a unique rebar awning and yucca and manfreda in full bloom.

All material © 2006-2013 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

I’m singing the blues with majestic sage (Salvia guaranitica)…

…with a blue bottle tree, purple skullcap (Scutellaria wrightii), and ‘Whale’s Tongue’ agave (Agave ovatifolia)…

…with Texas bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis)…

…and with more purple skullcap and bluebonnets, plus velvety mullein.

Another view of the purple skullcap and mullein, with winecups beginning to creep in

My new garden bed alongside the driveway even has a little blue in it thanks to Mexican beach pebbles that top the steel ring planter.

Well, it’s a work in progress. Currently I have three ‘Burgundy Ice’ dyckia and a ‘Blue Haze’ euphorbia planted in it, with a handful of beach pebbles on top.

Diana of Sharing Nature’s Garden passed along this beautiful, blue Agave franzosinii pup with me. I just gave it a fresh potting, with new aquarium pebbles as mulch for a neat finishing touch. I think I’m going to start refreshing my rock mulch on my xeric planters each spring. It makes such a difference to have all those leaves and pollen catkins removed, with clean gravel on top.

Leaving the happy blues…I’m actually feeling truly blue about this development: a plague of leaf-footed bugs on my softleaf yucca (Y. recurvifolia) bloom spike. All those creamy, white bell-shaped flowers are infested with nasty, copulating, plant-sucking bugs. I sprayed them with an organic pesticide spray (Captain Jack’s), but it didn’t do a thing. Any ideas? When I try to hand-pick them off, most of them fly away, only to return in a few minutes. Ugh.

Well, let’s avert our eyes and look at another white-flowering plant that’s perfectly lovely and unaffected by pests: star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides).

Its sweet fragrance wafts up to the upper patio, making that a perfect spot to sit and enjoy the bluesy garden right now.

All material © 2006-2013 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.