Smart, water-saving landscaping at UT’s Dealey Center

December 08, 2015


On a chilly, rainy Saturday in mid-November — a quiet traffic day — I headed to the University of Texas campus and actually found street parking at the G. B. Dealey Center for New Media (renamed from the Belo Center in 2021), whose landscaping I’ve wanted to see ever since landscape architect Christine Ten Eyck told me about the innovative design.


Formerly a parking lot, the street-front property at the corner of Dean Keeton and Guadalupe is now, thanks to Ten Eyck’s design, a water-conserving, native-plant garden surrounding a small lawn and plaza with multiple seating areas and a performance space.


A solitary paleleaf yucca (Y. pallida) planted in a soil pocket adorns a concrete table.


Opened in 2012, the garden is LEED Gold certified. Near the street, poured-in-place concrete benches furnish a spacious sunken patio, which is buffered by a wide planting bed filled with native hollies and grasses…


…as pictured here from the street.


A few steps up, the lawn offers green space for students to lounge when the weather is warmer and drier. Humble honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa), formally planted as an allee along the length of the lawn, offers filtered shade in summer. Instead of the usual river-rock mulch or blower-scoured earth, native skullcap (Scutellaria suffrutescens) makes a pretty groundcover under the trees.


Using all natives in an urban, semi-formal setting is unusual. But the most impressive aspect of the design is a water-collection system that harnesses rainfall and air-conditioning condensate from the building, which is then used to water the garden. No city-treated water is used on this garden. None. Zip. Instead, the condensate water is filtered through a biofiltration fountain that runs, rill-like, through the garden on a perpendicular axis with the building. Here’s where it starts, planted with grassy bog plants, which help cleanse pollutants out of the water.


The water sheets down a spillway as it enters the sunken patio garden.


A bridge of perforated metal allows foot passage across the stream, where, surprisingly, a few water-loving shrubs add height amid the flow.


Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis). (Thanks for the ID, Michael.)


The water feature terminates in a rectangle of chunky river rock near the street, where the water drains underground to be recycled into the watering system or, I’m guessing, stored until needed.


The garden is planted naturalistically along the street. But closer to the building, natives are planted in linear masses, like this row of Yucca pallida


…and, behind the yuccas, flame acanthus (Anisacanthus quadrifidus var. wrightii), which blooms orange-red all summer but is done now. Red-berried possumhaw hollies (Ilex decidua), rhythmically planted between the two, add height and will eventually screen the street.

You could easily copy this combo for a traditional foundation planting using low-water native plants, so long as you have full sun and good drainage. The possumhaws like a little water in the summer, but the yucca and flame acanthus are supremely drought tolerant, and the acanthus can even be hedged, if you like a formal look.


Leaving the plaza and walking around the building reveals a nice swath of ‘Brakelights’ hesperaloe planted atop a retaining wall. I bet this is stunning in summer, with dozens and dozens of red flowers held on long wands above mounding foliage.


In back, a row of enormous cisterns hold rainwater collected from the roof. I’d love to have one of these at my house!


Streetside again, on the other side of the plaza, a block planting of Wheeler sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) is simple and effective in the (typically dry) planting strip between sidewalk and street.


More Yucca pallida paired with sedge (Carex texensis?) carpets the ground at the side entrance. The handsome, gray trunks of Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana) offer a native substitute for the ubiquitous crepe myrtle, without the summer flowers, of course.


Nolina, either Lindheimer’s (Nolina lindheimeriana) or Texas (Nolina texana), is a little tall for the sign bed. Perhaps Texas sedge or skullcap would be a better choice? I do, however, love the fossil-pocked limestone used for the retaining wall.

It’s exciting to see a water-saving garden like this in a campus setting, adding plenty of Texas character and wildlife habitat in an urban area. Traditional lawn and shrubbery have got nothing on this. The fact that it requires no drinking water or well water to maintain makes it even better.

For additional reading, check out desert designer David Cristiani’s post at It’s a Dry Heat, from his visit earlier this summer. Also, several of the hyperlinks early in this post will lead you to published articles about the garden.

All material © 2006-2015 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

13 responses to “Smart, water-saving landscaping at UT’s Dealey Center”

  1. Nice landscape. Those are the largest Brakelights hesperaloe I have seen so far. I have wondered how large they will get.
    I think the mystery plant is buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis.

    • Pam/Digging says:

      Thanks for the ID, Michael. Yes, the Brakelights are good-sized, although still only half or a third the size of the species Hesperaloe parviflora. I wonder if they’re full-sized yet. —Pam

  2. Shirley says:

    A good test of a landscape is to visit on a gray day. Well done, the massing and linear plantings translate to residential gardens.

    Buttonbush blooms are pretty but it needs more water than most of my plants, so I enjoy it near the pond in the gardens where I volunteer each week.

  3. Lori says:

    I really need to visit. I love how this is all laid out and the forethought of planting trees that will shade the lawn once they grow just enough to take some heat stress off of it. Plus a lawn is just more inviting to me with a little bit of a roof over it.

    Whoever’s doing the maintenance on this is doing a great job showing restraint while pruning. It’s so refreshing to see Texas sage that hasn’t been tortured into awkward meatballs.

    • Pam/Digging says:

      Yes, the plants are being maintained more naturally than most landscaping crews tend to do, to their credit. I’d like to go see it again in a year or two, as plants fill in along the street and the possumhaws and honey mesquites fill out a bit.

      Remarkably, there was a fire that damaged the landscaping along the street in January 2014. But it seems to have completely recovered since then, so someone’s obviously taking good care of it. Hope that continues! —Pam

  4. Another inspirational Texas garden.

    • Pam/Digging says:

      I’m always inspired by Ten Eyck’s work. She’s designing a new entry for San Antonio Botanical Garden that I can’t wait to see. —Pam

      • Diana Studer says:

        looking forward to your photos of the next garden too! It is so encouraging to see a garden planned for today’s realities of low water and a need for habitat.

  5. BFair says:

    Thank you Pam for all these beautiful pictures and captions. Would love to be young enough to be your traveling companion, but the pictures are a great giftto me. BFair

  6. TexasDeb says:

    This is great leadership by example. I wish UT would do even more to promote similar efforts around campus and that the City/State would do more of the same with the grounds around their buildings. Even if people aren’t actively aware of the plants used and why, seeing these native plants used so well sinks in and helps folks understand what native Austin “looks like”.

    Thanks for the tour!