There is something to say about Central Texas with less formal approach gardens, I think, is a lot more interesting because you really do experience how they adapt to weather.

[cheerful music] When I married Glen, he wanted a place with a view.

And so we got the view.

We got the dramatic weather because we live in Central Texas.

And Glen got to build his house that he wanted to build.

This is challenging because there's a cliff right there and there's two live oaks right there.

We have a very small building area.

So this house is sort of shoehorned in.

The pandemic hit.

And he created this structure to the yard.

I built the boardwalk and I put the pond in the digging of the pond, became a free gym membership because all the neighbors would come and dig.

It was a big hole to dig.

What's the diameter of the pond?

Oh, it's seven feet by little, over two feet deep.

So we made it deeper so that the raccoons hopefully would not, you know, have a feast.

But we had no idea the ecosystem that would just appear out of nowhere where we've had frog choruses doing their mating calls and we've had leopard frogs.

And I even did some design work for planting beds in areas for sculpture and a place for some grass for the dog to sleep.

But I realized that what I was doing was architectural and rectangular and geometric rather.

I started worrying it wasn't going to be Lori's yard, and I wanted to be a Lori and Glen yard, not just Glen's yard.

Barton Creek's our backyard.

And so I think we both love nature and love the creek so much that we want it to feel more like that instead of like a sculptured formal yard.

So that's where we found Leah, who works really organically.

When Leah came on board, she noticed that we have water that's diverted from the back of the house, that goes beneath the house and it pours out into the yard.

And she was the first person that thought about a dry creek.

The dry creek adds this other element when those storms come through, it's awesome.

In addition to, you know, building the dry creek, we also added some terracing with eastern cedar logs.

They really helped to stabilize the slope because they're very, very slow to disintegrate.

Those are down below the pond and kind of all over the place to prevent more runoff.

There was erosion because this is built on a steep cliff.

The soil is pretty heavy clay.

It's a mix of clay and rock and it's something that I see a lot kind of near creekside properties in Austin where if you're up slope from a creek, there will often be a weird kind of soil that is a mix of really, really heavy gumbo and limestone all mixed together.

So it can be kind of tough to dig.

But the good news is we had an unlimited number of rocks to use to build a dry creek bed and edging and everything like that.

There's all these animals that show up and putting new plants in can be a struggle because you want them to establish.

The armadillos can come and just pull them up.

So we placed some of those rocks strategically around the plants so that they won't come and dig them up.

But we do have a dog named Grover that puts an armadillo outfit on sometimes.

And we've discovered he or the neighbor's dogs will also pull them up.

So the rocks have been really helpful to get the plants established.

So what we did was we kind of mapped out visually where we wanted to have focal points.

There was a beautiful view that we want to emphasize in another spot.

There was some houses down the down the hill that we kind of wanted to screen off.

So we were thinking of of the of the vantage point viewed from inside the house.

His office looks out into the garden and their living room looks out into the garden.

So this this yard is their backyard, but it's really their the primary focal point from inside the house.

Glen and Lori had the boardwalk in place.

They had the pond in place, but they really needed to soften the lines of the boardwalk because it had some very hard edges.

And so we thought about, you know, how can we soften the these these hard lines and these right angles with some plants?

I'd like for it to be more like a boardwalk in a natural environment that's there to preserve the the planted areas around it.

The light here is its dappled shade for the most part.

And on this side of the garden, it's pretty heavy shade actually.

And so we just incorporated a bunch of plants that that can handle some clay soil and also that can handle the dappled shade, which is so many native plants here, you've got a lot of mistflowers.

We wanted to create a a good balance of the warm season and the cool season.

So we wanted to have plenty of things that would be evergreen or at least summer dormant Lantana, bunch grasses, chrysant There's a bunch of bulbs.

It was a fun idea to plant the Grecian pattern plant next to the Hoja santa, because the Grecian pattern plant goes dormant doing the summer and the Hoja santa goes dormant during the winter.

We brought in some native ground covers like heartleaf skullcap, different kinds of sedges and yarrow, and those are all really great for year-round interest.

We have some some blooming perennials that bloom in the spring, in the fall for, you know, to give some good food for the butterflies and bees and everybody.

And I've noticed that in so many people's yards, they're starting to have like more community spaces out in their yard.

And so this provides a really nice space to visit.

Working with clay soil, you can do you can amend it and you can do a lot if you keep adding compost.

But there are some plants that are just never going to do well in clay soil.

So you need to accept those limitations.

And so certain things like blackfoot daisies, four-nerve daisies, rosemary, lavender are just not going to do well in the ground here.

So if you want those, maybe put them in a pot.

But it's surprising how many of the native plants that we have really just do fine in the clay soil.

I feel like mountain laurels are such a beautiful, you know, tree plant for this area.

And I always love watching the seeds, how they transform.

And so I started collecting mountain laurel seeds.

It's fun, you know, placing those seeds in something that's different, a different kind of vessel where that color shows up.

The teapot was my idea.

The teapot drips into the birdbath.

It looks like it's dripping on its own like a magic teapot.

It's sort of a fun personality profile because people walk up here and they'll look at it.

Every now and then somebody will go, Well, how do you get up there to refill it?

It goes back to a hose spigot.

It's turned down really low.

This is at least the third house in a row I've had an outdoor shower.

They're really a pleasure to use.

I love being out there to watch the moon rise.

And we have little frogs they'll serenade at night.

Cliff chirping frogs.

The canyon wrens just love scaling that that limestone that's behind the house.

And they I've seen generations of wrens where they're just teaching their little babies to fly around.

The staghorn ferns.

You know, I think they're living sculpture.

I think of myself as an art collector with them.

The first one I saw was in a, you know, public botanical gardens years and years ago.

And I just thought it was the most beautiful thing, really.

You need a greenhouse.

They got to be protected in the winter.

They need a fair amount of light, a lot of the easier varieties you could grow outside, but you got to deal with it in the winter.

In my case, I had the retaining wall there, which was required to hold the cliff back.

And so originally it was a screen porch.

And then I realized I could put up plastic panels.

And I realized this really is a greenhouse.

There's another thing about two artists coming from different perspectives in our homestead, and so we kind of merged some of the collections that I do and his his structure that he provides.

It's kind of fun.