Living and Growing in a Hill Country Garden

From my first glimpse of the blue leuder stone grotto near the bottom of our piece of land I imagined sitting in this quiet space and contemplating nature. A dead tree formed half an arch and one day we tied it to a native sumac to form a natural arch at the top of the grotto.

When native spiky sotols took up residence and Texas wine vines crept over the boulders it occurred to me to revise the original plan of sitting in the grotto to viewing it from a perch on the level above.

For those of you who haven’t encountered them, Texas sotols are classified as Dasylirion texanum. These native evergreens have a central trunk with spiky firm leaves radiating in concentric circles from the trunk. They are visually stunning, but not the sort of plant you want to touch without your leather arm shielding gauntlet gloves!

There are three different types growing on our land. Evidently you can’t successfully transplant them, but they seem to come up in just the right places, often clustering on the top or side of a ledge of rock or a rocky slope. The first photo is a sotol that was covered in construction debris when we moved in. As a result, it had branches that were turning black and others that were flattened and curved into erratic twisting spikes. It took me a full day, stretched out on the rock slope wearing safety glasses and elbow length leather gloves to pull away the debris and clip all the dead and deformed spikes from the core. This is now one of our most beautiful specimens. The second photo is of a smooth edged smaller sotol, similar to a large liriope plant. The third, is a short, wider leaved sotol, one of several now in bloom.

When you build a house or dig down to plant almost everything here in the Hill Country you may hit caliche (a calcium carbonate material that binds with our clay) or limestone. We asked everyone who worked here to leave us with the large boulders and rocks unearthed as we wanted to incorporate them into our landscape design. Similarly, they did not haul away excess or discarded cut stone. This left us with material to form retaining walls or bulkheads and to put rock on slopes to slow the process of erosion. Thus, when it came time to create a seating area in one of the lower levels of the garden we had plenty of material already on hand.

In the back of the first photo you can see a low mound of football sized limestone rocks forming a bulkhead as the neighboring land is of a higher elevation. You can also see the beginning of our flagstone patio, made from slabs of Oklahoma brown flagstone left behind. These pieces enabled us to form up the center area of the patio in the shade of an old oak tree. This is where we planned to put a table and chairs. Here you can see our tape on the weed cloth placed on top of the leveled ground surface. This measurement will be helpful when we go to the landscaping stone yard to choose additional flagstones to complete the patio.

The second photo shows a retaining wall made of dry stacked cut limestone blocks left over from home construction. This wall keeps the higher land above from washing over the patio. In time it will be almost invisible as native evergreen sumac is growing to the right of it.

The Texas Hill Country is replete with rock. As a little back story, I chose Geology as one of the required science courses in college. We made a field trip to the Texas Hill Country visiting outcrops and quarries along the way. Our professor took us to sites where we were allowed to unearth and remove specimens. This is when I discovered my love of rocks and minerals as evidenced by the burgeoning backpack filled with specimens and the overload under my seat on the bus! Once you make this discovery about yourself you may never pass up a unique rock again!

In the Texas Hill Country there are numerous stone yards and quarries; places where you can while away hours on end touching and feeling local and imported rock and stone. So, with measurements in hand, we were off the nearest landscape stone yard. The first photo shows how the flagstones are packaged – on a pallet and wrapped with chicken wire. When you have chosen your stone they send someone out with a front loader to give you a wooden pallet.  The second photo shows the flagstones we chose laid on our pallet. The front loader then lifts your pallet and puts it on a weighing scale; shown in the third photo. The driver writes up a ticket, you go into the office and pay, and you can then load up your truck or trunk. If you choose a great deal of stone you will need to schedule delivery. We made about 4 trips to the stone yard, building the patio a little at a time.

We had to move the stones a few at a time in a wagon, going down a hillside so we paced ourselves. Here is an in-progress photo.

There was a cluster of small native sotols and a Texas persimmon along the ledge at the edge of the patio site. Below them you can see a portion of the blue leuder ledge leading down into the grotto. We gathered some of the loose blue leuder stones in the area to form the leading edge of the patio and divide sections of a garden. These stones should keep our pea gravel from washing off the patio and retain the soil and mulch in the garden area. In the second photo you can see a portion of a broken limestone ledge which will eventually be softened with plantings.

Here is a look at the garden area and completed patio surface. Along with the pre-existing plants are some creeping juniper and gray santolina or cotton lavender.

We bought heavy aluminum granite-colored table and two chairs from the Toulouse line at Restoration Hardware. The color is perfect as it is light and airy and blends in with the surroundings.

The table top is 48” in diameter so there is plenty of room for books, journals, and having a meal, a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine. The stone planter centerpiece we found at Rainbow Gardens on Bandera.  They are hand crafted in Mexico from local stone and drilled in the bottom for planting. This coral sedum is thriving here!

We named this place the Oculus Garden, a round or eye-like opening or design. This seems perfect as the arch at one end of the area is shaped like an eye and the view in all directions is certainly an example of nature’s design!