- The main idea was that it was gonna be a wildlife garden.

I'm Leah Churner, I'm the owner of Delta Dawn Gardens.

- And I'm Holly Gardovsky.

I work with Leah.

- [Leah] Mm-hm.

- My name is Jo Clifton.

This is my husband, Roger Duncan.

This is really more his brainchild than mine.

(Roger chuckling) - We acquired our home here about 30 years ago and developed the garden in actually a couple of stages.

Several years ago, we have a small swimming pool in our backyard and we weren't using it.

And so, I worked with Taylor at Taylormade Waterscapes and converted the swimming pool into a koi pond, built a waterfall.

It became a very active little ecosystem.

We have frogs now and dragonflies and... - [Jo] Lots of birds.

- Lots of birds.

And then, a couple of years ago, the house next door to us came up for sale and we were able to purchase it and develop this lot into a terrace flower garden.

- The house was torn down in the, I wanna say spring of 2023.

Then, seedlings came in and did the construction of the hardscape summer of 2023.

Then, we planted - [Holly] That fall.

- [Leah] October of 2023.

That's when the first round of planting was, and it's currently 2025 spring, right now.

So, this is a pretty young garden.

- Well, the house was built on a very steep slope and they had put in a bunch of fill in order to make the house level.

- Well, we saw that the foundation of the house was eight feet tall.

There was a eight foot slab in spots, so we knew there was gonna be a big grade change and we knew there was gonna have to be quite a bit of terracing involved to keep the ground from eroding.

We got Seedlings involved to build the hardscape and to help us figure out how to do it.

And then for the stairs, it's sandstone because sandstone is a little bit better for walking on.

It doesn't get that slippery.

- [Roger] Then, I wanted a central walkway up the center and two side walkways.

- There was another garden where we had worked that there was a pathway with a stair that had two Anacacho orchids flanking it, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, I have to do that."

- [Holly] We loved it.

- [Leah] In the design, and so that was one of the first things that we knew we wanted to do.

- [Holly] Yeah.

- And I had been reading a lot of Doug Tallamy and got really into the idea of focusing on starting a wildlife garden that starts with insects in mind because insects are kind of the base of the food pyramid, you know, because the caterpillars feed the baby birds, and you know, it all is this great, great cycle.

- [Roger] We were very aware of the problems with bees and butterflies and pollinators, so we wanted to focus on it being a pollinator garden.

- [Leah] We kind of came up with this idea for creating plant communities, creating a matrix planting of plant communities.

Each area has a ground cover, and then like a small grass, like a sedge, and then some like lower perennials, and then there's some shrubs in each.

There's different plants of different heights that create a plant community.

And what that does, that kind of planting, it's very densely planted and that helps keep weeds down and it helps preserve the moisture in the soil.

There's different layers of plants, different heights, and they do different things.

For Texas, central Texas, that kind of idea of doing a matrix planting, you might want incorporate more evergreen things.

- [Holly] Mm-hm.

- [Leah] Things like Salvia greggii is great because it's a bloomer, but it's also evergreen.

I love Nolinas.

It's one of my favorite plants in this garden.

We've got the Nolina texana and the Nolina lindheimer.

The lindheimer is blooming right now.

Yarrow, the coreopsis, the lanceleaf coreopsis, and the purple coneflower have evergreen rosettes.

- Yeah.

- For the most part.

- [Holly] And the red yucca stays green.

- [Leah] And segdges, for sure.

- Yeah, the sedges, yeah.

- The sedges become very visible in the winter.

The gopher plant is not native, but I just love it.

So, you know.

(laughs) - [Holly] It's cute.

(laughs) - It's just...

It's such a great dependable winter evergreen plant because it does not mind cold at all.

- [Holly] Yeah.

- And it blooms in the winter, which is great for bees.

I really like the wooly stemodia because it is so silver and it drapes beautifully.

Oh, one thing I wanted to say about the Mystic Spires sage.

- [Holly] Oh yeah.

- It's a cultivar or a nativar, whatever you wanna call it, so it's not strictly the, maybe the best if you were a native plant purist.

- [Holly] Yeah.

- [Leah] But it is so pretty and the bumblebees just go crazy for it.

- There's just dozens and dozens of bumblebees that come to visit them.

- [Leah] And then, another thing that the bumblebees love is the soft-hair marbleseed.

- [Holly] Marbleseed.

- [Leah] The bumblebees go crazy for that too.

It's good for dry shade, but it also could take sun.

There's a lot of fencing here, which the... You know, the clients wanted privacy to be able to meditate and you know, hang out and have some feeling of enclosure in this garden.

And so, the whole place is fenced and we wanted to try to find ways to hide the fence, hide the fences with plants.

Up at the top, we've got vines, crossvine and coral honeysuckle.

And so, the idea is that eventually, those vines will cover the fence - For the ground cover selection and like the lower beds, we kind of started with some of the frogfruit and yarrows and then we kind of just started popping other random little things in there.

I know I dug the heartleaf out of my own yard.

- [Leah] Yes.

- [Holly] And we popped it into some holes where some other things weren't quite filling in.

- I would say ground covers are less showy in terms of bloom.

Their real aesthetic feature is their colors.

There's so many different shades of green and silvery green and blue green and lime green that you can get with the different ground covers.

- And the leaf texture is different too.

- Texture.

- Like you have the soft heartleaf, the kind of rigid yarrow and the rigid on the mistflower.

- [Leah] The mistflower and the heartleaf skullcap is a great color contrast.

- [Holly] Yeah.

- They really pop against each other.

And I just love heartleaf skullcap.

It is one of my favorite plants.

- Comes up early.

- It blooms in May and then it goes away.

It's summer dormant.

That's another thing that we talk a lot about, Holly and I talk a lot about, is picking plants that have opposite dormancies to share the space.

It's primarily a perennial garden, but there are some annuals in here.

There's a bunch of wildflowers.

We've got a pocket prairie in the front yard, but in what we call the hummingbird garden, which is at the top of the terraces, there are a bunch of annuals that kind of line the former garage area where it's commonplace to walk.

And so, you know, you walk by them and you see these annuals and they're just really good filler for space when the perennials are filling in.

And I like cut flowers a lot.

- [Holly] Yeah.

- [Leah] I love having flowers to cut and so, that's why, you know, it's fun to have some annuals.

And they're great for pollinators too, you know, the bees love that nectar 'cause they bloom like crazy.

- And we had a lot of Gomphrena last year, and we have even seen where some of the Gomphrena have seeded out and their tiny seeds are starting to pop up, so it's coming back (laughs) in its own way.

- Part of the plant selection or the plant palette here is not just buying plants and bringing them in or finding plants and planting them, but also seeing what comes up and letting things volunteer, 'cause there are some very cool things that have volunteered in this garden.

I think we have thrown some parsley seed out or something like that, and we had planted dill and fennel for the swallowtails, and we got this great parsley that just volunteered and just, it was another thing.

Just let it be there.

It wants to be there, and it's- - And we've already seen - It's a cool plant.

- caterpillars.

- It's been a wonderful joy and educational opportunity to watch the seasons change here, and we've attracted so many more different species of birds and insects and such since we developed this.

- I'm especially excited about all the birds that come here and you know, they also probably are enjoying some of the insects that we're attracting.

That's just a lot of fun to see.

- Have a fox that goes through occasionally and armadillos come in, of course, and it's a wonderful place to spend our time.