SHARON LOCKETT FOR SPRING LAKE GARDEN CLUB Mature landscapes are common in older San Marcos neighborhoods, but sustaining plant variety and interest while contending against drought and deer is an unusual result. Homes in Willow Creek estates date from the 1970s, but weather events have left many properties with mainly live oaks and spotty lawns. In contrast, the home of Barry and Vicki Brittain on Willow Creek Circle offers a remarkable variety of plants and integrated garden art, as Spring Lake garden club’s December yard of the month.
As transplants to Texas (from Wichita, Kansas), the Brittains arrived in 1980 and bought a home convenient to Texas State University (then Southwest Texas State) where Vicki’s legal and teaching skills were employed, and to New Braunfels, where Barry was general manager of the first Coleman manufacturing plant in Texas. After raising two daughters (and expanding their house), both Brittains now enjoy active retirement and nearby family, but also hosted relatives from Kansas at Thanksgiving, who gratefully traded snow for sunshine.
Barry recalls the couple’s initial at-
Variety of deer-resistant plants welcome visitors at Brittain home entrance.
Photos courtesy of SLGC tempt at landscaping, bringing in a truckload of “topsoil” and buying grass sod and a few shrubs. After a rain, the imported soil was “black gumbo” that stuck to a shovel and could not be spread to lay the grass sod. Then when Barry tried to dig holes for the shrubs, he realized they weren’t in Kansas anymore: his next garden tool purchase was a rock bar for digging holes. Barry soon recognized the value of native plants such as mountain laurels, which seed themselves and are ignored by deer. In beds near the house, other plants resistant to deer thrive, including lantana, palmettos, a Burford’s holly, Japanese yew, and sago palms.
When plantings failed, Barry called on creativity as well as replacement. A tall metal saguaro cactus near the driveway took the place of a shrub bookending a line of palmettos, and a juniper topped by a storm was trimmed back and stripped of bark to become a striking natural sculpture near the street. Other garden art includes a metal reindeer sculpture, which almost disappears into the foliage background. At one side of the house, a garden gate with cutout design is a metal copy made by local crafter Mark Lambdin of a an original plywood gate honoring the San Marcos Suns, a group of families who enjoyed visiting Gulf beaches together.
While developing a home landscape, Barry’s other outdoor interest is directing San Marcos’ annual Summer in the Park (since 2011), once featured on the TV series Texas Music Scene. Unlike programs designed for profit or year-round participation, Summer in the Park focuses on providing free evening entertainment for families when children are on summer vacation. Barry, who identifies as a “garage band guitarist,” agreed to direct the program if he could choose shows, and strong attendance indicates approval of his picks.
Back in his own park-like yard, Barry is still planning what comes next in the home landscape. He envisions a lawn area on one side of the front yard but more deer-resistant plantings on the other. His model is the Price Center landscape, established by Dianne Wassenich, and in fact a previous Spring Lake Garden Club yard of the month.
