Creating A Garden Within a Garden – Part II

My last post introduced the idea of a walled garden or in Latin, hortus conclusus. Creating a walled garden or any garden in the limestone beds of the Texas Hill Country requires a steadfast effort, an iron will, and a love and respect for nature.

Here is what our land looked like when the building was completed. Notice the wide tire tracks in the foreground. Because so many trucks drove here to unload we would call the garden we built on this part of the site, “the Road Garden”.

This is a view down the stairs from the covered terrace to what would become the courtyard or walled garden. You can see the limestone rock ledges in the foreground. We exposed them  as you might unearth an archeological site and used them as the foundation of the walled garden.  In the years since, we have continued to protect and highlight the “native” aspects of our land.

When in the San Antonio area, a visit to the Japanese Tea Garden is a must. This garden was built from an abandoned stone quarry and much of the garden’s structure is formed from local stone, including the terraces and large vertical planters. We have been using rocks gathered from the land in our garden as well; building low walls and garden edges and surfacing gravel gardens. Limestone rock is an excellent medium on slopes and terraces to prevent erosion.

This is a photo taken this year on January 9^th. Sadly, we lost almost everything in the courtyard as the result of an Arctic blast.

On days when it’s too cold to garden you might catch up on your reading. My winter readings of Bringing the Mediterranean into Your Garden: How to Captivate the Natural Beauty of the Garrigue and Nicole de Vesian-Gardens: Modern Design in Provence were providential. As this was the second consecutive year we had lost a large number of new plantings it was inspiring and motivating to read and study these works.

Olivier Filippi is a French garden designer and expert on adapting to climate change. He describes the garrigue garden as “…a landscape dominated by shrubs and lower sub-shrubs growing in arid conditions where the stony soil, usually limestone, generally remains partially visible between the plants.” This is a photo of a self-seeded garden in the remains of walled fields. The Phoenician junipers here remind me of the cedars or ash junipers self-seeding here in the Texas Hill Country.

In her garden at La Louve in the Provence region of France, Nicole de Vesian used strong, garrigue plants clipped tightly and low to the ground to protect them from the punishing winds of the mistral. Nicole de Vesian retired from her work as a designer for Hermes in Paris and bought this land . She designed and worked in the garden which is reputed to be one of the most beautiful in the world. The serenity and order of the garden was greatly appealing to me.  We were already growing rosemary, yaupon, and various sages and salvias successfully. It made sense to consider our climate, both dry and hot with temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in summer, and below freezing in the winter, with winds of 30 miles per hour, as well as our soil – rocky, when planning for a resilient, restful, and sustainable garden.

In February we began to gather dwarf yaupon and boxwood, both drought tolerant and cultivated to withstand colder temperatures. Later we would add Brodie juniper and variegated privet which were thriving elsewhere on the land.

Our new planting palette would consist of the plants that had survived and thrived in our first two years here in the Texas Hill Country. These would be drought tolerant, deer resistant plants zoned two levels down from what we had previously planted and thus, able to withstand colder temperatures than normal for this zone. My particular favorite is a garden of several shades of green spiked with lavender colored perennials to attract butterflies, birds, and bees.

Here is an indispensable garden tool in the limestone of the Hill Country; the electric powered jackhammer, helpful when breaking into solid limestone or to dissipate the softer, but still pesky caliche sedimentary rock.

Let’s go inside the walled courtyard of today and have a look around…This is a native Texas redbud. In February It blooms with pink clusters. Following this, the palm sized heart shaped leaves will burst forth.

These photos show the original rock ledge in the courtyard with a wall made of boulders collected during excavation for construction of our house. We had professional help moving and placing these boulders!

This is a heart-shaped boulder moved to rest on a limestone ledge. The smaller limestones create a raised bed for a redbud tree. We had to create the raised bed when we hit solid rock with the jackhammer. White Salvia Greggi and creeping thyme grow near the rocks.

Here is a view from above showing the newly planted boxwoods and dwarf yaupons.

Our star jasmine adds a beautiful scent to the garden. After freezing to the ground it is slowly beginning to climb back up the walls.

Further down in the courtyard are the more resilient plants that have survived the first few years; Russian sage, dwarf yaupon, and miscanthus sinensis Adagio.

Here is a view of our herb gardens inside the wall. A recent article in House and Garden (‘On gardening and mental health’ by Lottie Delamain, 9-25-2023) provides a bit of history of the private garden. The Roman garden was an outdoor room filled with sounds and scents to stimulate relaxation and quiet thought. Gardens in monasteries were places where enclosed gardens provided food, medicine, and a way to ensure “…the life of the spirit [was] grounded in a relationship with the earth.” During the pandemic there was a resurgence of engagement with gardening and nature in general. Recent research renews understanding of the connection between gardens and good health.

For me, there is no greater happiness than to be out on the land caring for the native Texas persimmons, sotols, walnuts, or cherries…walking down rock paths, running my fingers over rosemary and sage plants and smelling their beautiful scent in the air. It seems as if the native plants are thriving and continuing to emerge, insinuating themselves gracefully into my plans for the land or inspiring me to center my plans around them. There is always more to be done! Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote of this in the exchange between Mary and Dickon in The Secret Garden:

There’s a lot of work to do here.” He said once, looking about quite exultantly.

“Will you come again and help me do it?” Mary begged…

“I’ll come every day if tha’ wants me, rain or shine,” he answered stoutly.

“It’s th’ best fun I ever had in my life – shut in here an’ wakenin’ up a garden.”