Three Gardens - Twenty Years

Sometimes I confuse people, especially new readers, by bouncing from past to present, first talking about the house we live in now, then switching to a past garden in either Texas or Illinois. I thought you might like a post with dates and descriptions of the last three places.

ILLINOIS

The Former Illinois Garden [1987-1999] was a 60' wide X 300' long rectangle on flat land in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. We'd spent years playing in the dirt at other houses by the time we moved there in spring 1987.
We lived at this house for 12 years, long enough to make a large front garden with mixed borders of flowering trees, shrubs, dwarf evergreens, perennials, bulbs, and annuals surrounding an amoeba-shaped central lawn. The photo above is from late summer, and that's the same birdbath you see in current photos! This garden was enclosed by a low fence with roses and vines growing on it, with a 'hot' border along the driveway.
The photo above was taken on an April day in the mid-1990's. By then I'd spent time at Trudi Temple's Hinsdale garden . Her deep, curving borders had a big influence on my style, and Ann Lovejoy gave this style a name: The American Mixed Border. Gardens in the back included a Square Sitting Garden off the patio, vegetable beds, patches of both red raspberries and black raspberries, fruit trees, native woodland borders and shrub borders. There were also lots of lilacs, tulips, peonies, daffodils, iris, daylilies, oriental lilies, clematis and hostas!

TEXAS ONE
The First Austin House, sometimes referred to as our first House in Texas [1999-2004] had just a few saplings and some overgrown foundation junipers in the flat front yard when we moved there in late summer 1999. The sides and back yard were a steep, rocky canyon covered by decks.
I took a few classes in Hill Country Gardening, realizing that Midwest experience was not always useful here. Deer nibbled everything, so we planted a deer-resistant, drought-tolerant landscape in the front. In the photo above there are santolinas, artemesias, Salvias greggii, leucantha and 'Indigo Spires', various lantana, dwarf yaupon, Vitex, Texas Mountain Laurels and Copper Canyon daisies.Gates kept the deer out of the SW-facing Deck Garden in back. We experimented with all kinds of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, vines and bulbs, enchanted with the sub-tropical plants that don't grow in Illinois. That's my beloved Loquat in the photo above, still a sapling tree next to the brick column.

Above left is an 'Acoma' Crepe myrtle in 2003, barely surviving and seldom blooming in the container. The lavender at center did fine on the deck, along with the Pineapple sage, Indian Hawthorn, Oleander, Dianthus and oregano. Once we learned that deer eat native wildflowers like Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush, we grew them in pots on the deck, too.
We lived at this first Austin house for 5 years, enjoying the views from the decks. Above are the Lady Banks rose and Confederate Jasmine waving wands of yellow flowers over the deck rail from their container.

TEXAS TWO

At the end of July 2004 we moved to our current Austin Garden in a wooded neighborhood built in the late 1970's.With help from our family, we hauled the one hundred containers [and that birdbath] to this gently sloping, trapezoid-shaped yard with our first-ever privacy fence. It took a couple of years to get the Loquat, Camellia, Cenizo, Indian Hawthorne, Crepe Myrtle, Sweet Olive, Beautyberry, Fig and Boxwood out of containers and into Texas soil. The two 'Acoma' crepe myrtles have been trained into trees and are finally higher than the privacy fence.

We once knew something about Illinois gardening, and then learned something about gardening in rocky, hilly Austin deer country, but we had to relearn gardening once again. Although our present garden is less than two miles from Austin house # one, instead of a blank rectangle of rocky caliche, we're dealing with heavy clay soil inhabited by dozens of existing trees.

We're still learning.