- [Richie] Each year we would like re-conquer a certain section of our garden and then suddenly, okay, we're cultivating this now.

- Right.

- I'm Richie Gelles.

- And I'm Nkiru Gelles.

- We bought our house, this house in 2017, and it was a completely bare space except for the trees.

- And neither of us had a previous experience tending to something that was so big and wanted to create something that was a place for our boys to play.

And ultimately, we just worked on it section by section.

I was going to Home Depot and getting very low cost cardboard sheets and covering over large areas of the weeds to just suppress their growth.

And anytime we'd get deliveries, we'd bring the cardboard out and just cover the ground.

- [Richie] We were at home during the pandemic and we needed space.

- I found a company called Rock and Dirt, and I asked them for the smallest limestone rocks that they could deliver.

Wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load, we wheeled it around to the back and shoveled.

- [Richie] It was tons of weight that we moved from the front to the back.

And not only the gravel, but all of the limestone stones we inherited.

And the paths help define areas that could make it more manageable for us to like, okay, we can plan out the planting here, we can weed this bed.

- We are both architects before everything else, we both studied architecture, we both adore architecture, but we also really enjoy gardening.

And so with all the planting, we've always been aware of creating a profile, which I think is a sort of an architectural move, I guess, where we are careful to think about what's gonna be high in the middle, what's gonna be low around the edges, but then also the textures of the plants, the shapes of the leaves, if they're sharp and pointy or rounded and soft and always trying to create a very frothy feeling that you can not really see the end of, it sort of curves around and you're not quite sure what's at the back of it.

- My dad and my grandfather were great vegetable gardeners.

They always had amazing vegetable gardens, but I never really understand perennial gardening until we started this one here.

Nkiru lived in the UK for quite a while, and I think that was a big impact on how you've approached gardening.

In the UK you see so many, I think there's so much more diversity in the gardens.

And even interestingly when we met, the language itself is different.

So when we met, we would speak about the garden.

Like she would always say, "Oh, in the back garden or the front garden," the same way we would say yard, right?

In American English.

It's like the default, the default in England is to say garden.

So you're already thinking in your head, this is like a space I should be doing something in.

Whereas yard is basically a unit of measure.

It's like, I feel like we've made the land into a commodity so much so we're literally referring to it as a unit of measure that can just be sold interchangeably.

What we've tried to do conceptually is we have formal aspects, I think, of English cottage garden style, but none of those plants.

So we've adopted the native and adopted palette of the plants that grow well in Central Texas.

And that's something we learned partially the hard way.

We had so many, in the beginning when we tried to grow things, we had a lot of plants just die on us because they're not adapted, they're not meant to grow here.

- And also low water needs was very important to us.

We didn't wanna plant anything that would just use up too much water.

The previous owner had cut down a tree and stacked the cuts of the tree trunk and we put them around the garden to just naturally degrade.

And they've been a great spot for bugs and other creatures to come into the garden.

- Another really prominent aspect of the garden is we have hackberry trees all along the fence lines on all sides.

Hackberry are often maligned here in Austin, but they are a native tree and they do provide a lot of habitat- - [Nkiru] They're great for the birds.

- Food for the birds.

And the other thing they do is they drop a lot of wood as they're famous for.

And we have tried to repurpose that throughout the garden.

- Following the winter storm, we had a lot of dead wood in our garden, and that's when we had the idea to build the arbor with that wood.

So all of the wood in the arbor is from that year, the year of the great winter storm where all the icicles were hanging from the branches.

- A lot of the time was spent just collecting the right pieces.

One thing about hackberry that is annoying is the branches tend to be pretty twisty.

And so finding ones that were straight enough, especially for the main post, was a challenge.

And then one weekend, I just constructed it and put it up there, and we were looking for a place for our crossvine.

Which is one of my favorite plants in Austin.

I love it, it does so amazingly well here with like essentially no upkeep.

And every spring, it explodes in these tangerine flowers.

It's such a classic image of English gardens.

You'd have like an arbor with the roses.

And I feel like we were able to do that with a native plant.

If you put them in the right location with the right conditions, they will reward you tremendously, like without very little upkeep.

But the wattle fence kind of arose out of the same concept as the arbor.

And this idea also I think of making a sense of place.

The hardest part about the wattle fence is just collecting the right material.

And then once you get it, it's quite fun actually to put in the stakes and then start weaving.

It belongs to the land here, like these trees surrounding us, it fits into this context.

We complain about the weather and how hot it gets in the summer.

And it is challenging.

It can be difficult and it's sad to the plants not doing well because it's so hot and having the vegetable beds not reproducing anything because it's too hot for any fruit to set.

But I do think that there's a positive way to look at it, which is this climate and this environment for growing is quite challenging, but it's created a very kind of distinctive palette of plants.

Our boys find it quite engaging.

Like they will climb into the Mexican buckeye and just love shaking the seeds off and like running through the garden having sword fights, or Nerf battles.

Like imagine we have so much cover and things like compared to an empty flat space, like there's so much kind of- - Places to get lost.

- Interesting places, and places to get lost, which is something that we have always been interested in.

- And we want more bugs and we don't use any pesticides to try to avoid disrupting any of the small creatures, even though the mosquitoes are a pain.

But we don't go around and spray and try to get rid of them that way.

And because of that, we've been seeing lizards live in the garden, and that's great.

I love that my sons can see the lizards, and we've had rabbits, we've had bunny rabbits coming from the back corner.

- I think you underestimate the impact you can have like in your property, like this for us, it's not a huge area, but for the insects, it is a huge area.

Like the impact is immense.

And like even just in these years where our garden's really started to grow into itself, we have so many fireflies this time of year at night.

And you look at the neighbor's yards and they might not have any, and like they're clustered around here because we've created habitat, even if it's not a flowering plant, but just one that grows in the understory, it provides habitat.

One thing we've done in this garden, which kind of became by accident, it wasn't all intentional, but we had so much to manage is we have enough space to allow things to decay in place.

And one of those things is the leaves.

We have lots of leaf litter.

- In that line of thinking, our compost heap has been an incredible help.

So we take all the fruits and vegetables from the kitchen, we put it in a compost, we put those on the vegetable beds, then we get the vegetables and bring them in, and then whatever's left over goes back into the compost.

So it's just sort of sustaining.

We are very happy that the boys, they get to see a change.

If your garden's the same, it's the same all the time.

But with this, it always feels and looks different, and I'm happy they can experience that change from winter to summer to spring and observe what is different, that I think is beneficial for them.

(upbeat music)