Yard of the Month:

“Between the deer and the environment” is Charlotte Evans’ description of challenges facing their front-yard landscape in Willow Creek. Designed and built by her husband Cecil, the landscape project was intended to control water runoff over an extensive lawn after heavy rains. Like any serious gardener in Central Texas, Cecil is still experimenting with plantings and their preferences, while managing browsing by the neighborhood deer. The Evans home, on Rolling Oaks near Stagecoach Trail, is Spring Lake Garden Club’s yard of the month for December 2020.

The Evanses have enjoyed their home for 20 years, with a back yard adjoining Willow Creek itself, but water runoff from higher elevations on the far side of the street and the street itself needed to be tamed. So Cecil used rectangular stones to construct a series of connected freeform planting beds across the middle of the lawn, to redirect rainwater around the house and down the driveway. These new planting areas, under large trees, were initially covered with 30 yards of mulch, but one extreme storm with eight inches of rain washed mulch out of the beds and downhill toward the creek. Cecil planted ground covers to stabilize soil in the beds, but local deer developed a taste for the low-growing vinca and Asian jasmine, and now a single clump of Carolina jessamine still survives. (Note that unlike Asian jasmine, Carolina is not actually a true jasmine and is in a different genus.) Other plantings still growing in the beds are feather grasses thriving near large, decorative rocks found on the property. These wispy grasses look delicate but are tough and can endure drought. Other bedding plants include an unusual white flowered sage and a number of rosemary plants. Although resistant to deer, rosemary may refuse to thrive in some locations, sometimes because it prefers a sunnier spot or its roots are too wet. Sections of the planting beds receive more shade than others, so finding locations for different plants is part of this landscape experiment.

One standout plant filling the end of one bed is Gregg’s mist flower, whose lavender blooms have been a magnet for butterflies until mid-November. When first planted, the flower buds were nibbled off by deer before they could bloom, so Cecil surrounded the plants with a low wire enclosure, which deters deer (and ironically appears to keep the plants from escaping). Cecil found these highly successful native plants at C&J Greenhouses in Martindale. A long planting area near the front porch also hosts swarms of butterflies, attracted by blooming clumps of deep red salvia greggii and blue sage, both ignored by deer.

Other plants undisturbed by browsers are shrimp plants at one side of the house, so named because of the shape and color of their blooms, a gray-leaved cenizo (Texas sage) shrub near the entrance and a sago palm at the opposite side. Note that this plant is poisonous to animals (and therefore shunned by deer), so pets should be dissuaded from contact with it. Several small mountain laurels, all started from seed, are filling in an area near the driveway and will offer perennial green against the pale rock of the house. Other year-round green is provided in a line of sheared boxwood plants along the front porch perimeter near the house entrance. Against all odds, including neighborhood deer, Cecil Evans continues to improve and adjust plantings in front yard beds designed to manage water runoff, but which also showcase adaptable native plants in all seasons.