Adding A Water Feature

This post, "Adding A Water Feature", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Are any of you Social Garden Shoppers? I sure am - happily volunteering when a friend wants company on a trip to a nursery or garden center. What's not to like? Wandering the aisles while talking to another gardener is one of my favorite things! Sometimes I find supplies or a few plants and sometimes I just look and think and dream.

I'd been up to Cedar Park's Hill Country Water Gardens with Philo a few times, looking and dreaming, then last summer I tagged along when a couple of other gardeners wanted to go there. On each visit I found myself gravitating to the same area of the display yard and my dreaming found a focus.

A few weeks ago Philo & I went back to HCWG - not to look, but to buy. This place is fun to wander, with large demonstration ponds, plants, fish, pottery, all kinds of fountains, fun garden art and water-work supplies fanned out for the visitor. They arrange for installation or give advice to those who want to do the work themselves.

I threaded my way back to the stone fountain bases and showed Philo the one that had been calling my name.

At Hill Country Water Gardens we met a very knowledgeable guy named Nicholas. He told us that this interesting stone came from Lueders, Texas. Then he explained the process of making a base into a fountain and we made decisions - delivery or take-with, tub size, the pump, concrete blocks and screens. He went for a forklift and soon the parts were ready to load.

We could have had the stone delivered but my old car has hauled heavy garden supplies and plants for years. Philo decided it could carry the block of Lueders Stone. The door opening was a tight fit but the guys made it work. Our son was glad to help unload the stone once we had it home.

The block sat on the sidewalk for days while I reworked the patio area. We planned to install the fountain in the decomposed granite area right outside the breakfast room window. Some pots and troughs needed to move aside and a lot of self-sown fennel had to be pulled out.

Swallowtail butterflies lay eggs on fennel so I'd let it grow wherever it sprouted for a couple of years. We liked seeing the larvae, but the fennel's shadow was killing sun-loving herbs like thyme, and the space was needed for something else now. (Don't worry about future generations of Swallowtail larvae - I've established a second patch of fennel in the long fence border and have young plants in containers.)

While I puttered with pots, Philo measured and planned. He tacked together a depth gauge from pieces of wood, a useful tool for knowing how to dig the hole for the black plastic reservoir tub. He sketched and took notes and made a cardboard template of the base.

I did not want to rush this part - wouldn't a Dress Rehearsal be a good idea? Philo dollied the burlap-cushioned, heavy stone to the spot we'd chosen. We thought we knew which side should face the house, but wanted to look at it from the patio, from the walk, and through the window before we started to dig. Even without water we really liked looking at that stone!

We needed rocks to hide the black plastic tub and screen - Nicholas told us to check out Jacobs Stone and Landscaping , a wonderland of building materials where we found a medium-size mix of Texas river rocks that we liked. We only needed a few 5-gallon buckets and shoveled them ourselves, reusing 5-gallon sacks from our previous expeditions for compost and decomposed granite to tote them home.

(The story of how we extended our standard rectangular concrete patio by using thick layers of pea gravel and decomposed granite is told in this 2006 post. )

We wanted to save and reuse those layers, so once the stone was moved out of the way, Philo spaded up the gravel onto a screen made to fit across the garden cart. The larger gravel that stayed on top of the screen was scooped into more of our handy sacks and the smaller stuff scooped from the bottom of the cart went into separate sacks.

With the good stuff cleared, he then started on the black heavy clay underneath. He dug and I hauled the soil away with the wheelbarrow, returning to use the Cobra head tool to pry out rocks when he hit them.

It took a long time to get that hole dug, use the depth gauge, get out rocks, add back finer screenings as a base for the tub, level and readjust the base and that tub moved in and out of place a number of times.

I'm not going to detail the fun with concrete blocks or fitting the pipe and motor or describe the access hatch Philo constructed - each installation will be different. The gravel and granite were packed in around the black tub.

The most nerve-wracking part came next - it took strength to move over three hundred pounds of solid rock across gravel or concrete, but now Philo and our son needed precision as well as strength.

They used the dolly and boards, getting the heavy stone up over the lip and onto the plastic grate with the concrete supports underneath.

We filled the reservoir and watched the water come out the top, then I started adding the rocks, hiding the black plastic.

The rock placement has already changed and evolved, and they'll be moved again for cleaning or possibly raccoons will rearrange them. Maybe rocks from other places will be added by visitors.


One recent visitor found out that adding and subtracting rocks where the water emerges from the rock results in different sounds and sprays, and she also improved the arrangement of the rooks at the base.



We can now sit at the table, listening to the peaceful water sounds of our dream-turned-real. Appropriately for a place called Circus~Cercis, the name of this kind of water feature implies that it performs a trick -
Ladies and Gentlemen...presenting for your amusement...

the Disappearing Fountain!

This post, "Adding A Water Feature", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Surrendering to the Pink

Last June I whined about too much Barbie pink in my garden and in my neighborhood, refusing to love the Pink Crepe Myrtle which grows in the area connecting our front sidewalk and drive to the garden gate.

This space was lawn when we bought the house - we Divas of the Dirt started the changeover to garden in March 2006, by transplanting three spiraeas into a group near the front sidewalk.

After my friends left, I used the spiraeas as the frame for a Bat-shaped bed, planting passalong iris, coneflowers, balloon flowers and a pink bat-faced Cuphea among them. The scorned pink crepe myrtle stands at left in the above March 2007 photo. The white trunk in the background is a Yaupon holly.

This spring I chose to embrace La Vie En Rose. Instead of fleeing rosy tones, I'd wallow in Blush & Bashful, Hot Pink & Magenta, and create a Pink Entrance Garden as an extension of the Bat-bed. Using a weed whip, I scribed a deep groove into the lawn, enclosing the pink crepe myrtle as an anchor at the outer edge. Once the shape looked right, Philo and I removed the turf, dug up the whole bed and added compost and decomposed granite.

Hardscape can be expensive and tree removal ate most of this year's garden budget. I'd like to install brick or stone edging some day, but these rocks also qualify as hard, and they were free for the hauling.

[Don't give up .... the photos won't all be beige and brown.]

We chose medium to large rocks with pink or rosy tones and picked up flat ones for stepping stones. Evergreens added green bones to the design - a Spring Bouquet Viburnum and a Texas Mountain Laurel from the Natural Gardener . The souvenir Weigela from Howard's Nursery should do well here.

Then I went shopping in my own garden - digging up pink plants that warred with adjacent flowers, taking divisions of crowded plants and rescuing pink plants that needed more sun.
I wanted everything to bloom in shades of pink, lavender, blue, purple and white, but with lots of contrast in foliage shape and size. I planted passalong White Iris, Pink Skullcaps/ Scutellaria suffrutescens and a small Hesperaloe, also called Red Yucca. I transplanted extra seedlings of Larkspur, Verbena bonariensis and Malva zebrina, teased a small piece of Grandma’s Phlox off the main plant, unpotted pink Chrysanthemums, sneaked out an Amarcrinum bulb from a container, added Liatris/Gayfeather from the plant-rescue table, moved Sedum that was too crowded, and transplanted Platycodon/Blue Balloon flowers & Echinacea purpurea/ Pink Coneflowers from the Bat-bed.

Soon the 'Pinocchio’ Daylily had sunlight again; the 'Champagne' Mini-rose found a home; native white Cooper's Rainlilies were released from a container. Most of what I chose was fairly tough stuff, some of it was native and much of it would be drought-resistant if I could get it established.

While the new bed was being developed, the bridal wreath spiraea in the Bat-Bed distracted the eye and kept the focus on its froth of white flowers in April.
As the spiraea faded, Ellen’s purple iris burst into glorious bloom. Today the liriope edging is filling out while flowers in the Bat-bed include ‘Coral Nymph’ Salvia, pink rainlilies, purple coneflower and the large pink bat-faced cuphea.
Once the too-close coneflowers and Balloon Flowers were moved to the pink bed, the Cuphea had room to grow tall and full.

I opened my wallet and paid for a few plants. Our local grocery store wanted $5 for a one-gallon pot holding three plants of dwarf Pink Gaura. I bought a Rugosa Rose called ‘Therese Bugnet’ described as tough, pink and fragrant. I found Pink Pansies for the hanging basket in late spring, [replaced with Evolvolus 'Blue Daze' for summer] and planted a strain of Heirloom Petunias in pink, white, magenta and lavender.

Garden blogger-turned Mommy-blogger Martha passed along some unnamed Crinum bulbs, which were tucked in on either side of the Crepe myrtle. Pam/Digging passed along a young Mexican Oregano which went in front of the tree. Liriope divisions from another bed are tiny now, but will someday define the back edge. I planted seeds of Amaranth and Cosmos.

We added more hardscape with a repainted old bench from the back yard, placing it between the new bed and the garden gate to act as bait for strolling chlorophyll lovers.

So how did My Life in Pink work out?

We rushed to make the new bed before the heat & drought arrived. A rainier-than-normal spring meant that the native plants like Liatris, Coneflowers and white trailing lantana looked wonderful in May and June and the Cooper's lilies bloomed.
The rains helped settle in the larkspur, balloonflowers, skullcap, 'Champagne' mini-rose, heirloom petunias and malva. I was sure that if the plants looked this good in June, they'd look even better by the time the pink crepe myrtle bloomed.

It's now late in July, the heat hasn’t arrived yet, and Austin is in the middle of the rainiest year ever recorded - we've had another 3 and 1/2 inches just since Monday. Many plants look kind of beat-up and overgrown - like this 'dwarf' 3-foot tall gaura. The Texas Mountain Laurel is not happy to be living here. The Scuttelaria is looking cranky. The bed is looking very shaggy! I'd hoped that keeping the grass edged around the bed would give it definition, but the electric edger can't be used when every day is rain day.

The phlox is alive, but neither the new division nor the original plant bloomed this year. The cosmos has had a couple of flowers, the amaranth never sprouted.

I'm still hoping that the pink garden can bring other gardeners to my garden gate.

But we can sit on the bench and bask in the watermelon pink glow of the crepe myrtle that started it all.

We can also look at that ‘Therese Bugnet’ rose, appointed as the Queen of Pink...she's a beauty, but her name is not Therese.

March Means Hauling & Planting

Last week our tree service informed us that the stump-grinding machine was temporarily broken, so we can't procede with our plans for that area.

We plunked a birdbath on the stump of the Arizona Ash and ignored the front yard to concentrate on the back.

This was a hunter/gatherer weekend for the Transplantable Rose, with stops for a few tomato and pepper plants, several trips to the U-dig place for organic compost and decomposed granite and a trip to pick up more rocks.
Last year we planted a good-sized Barbados Cherry/Malpighia glabra in an existing border, evicting what was left of a corky spiraea. At that time, we cleared out every visible bit of the hideous Asian Jasmine, decided to leave some mini-roses in place and put off thinking about the wooden border edge until some future date.

M Sinclair Stevens had shared some of her Oxblood Lilies/Rhodophiala bifida., She kindly handed the bulbs over to me while they were still blooming last September, which meant we enjoyed the flowers even before the bulbs were were planted here.

There was space at the very front of the border for some Oxblood lilies, a few bargain daffodils, a motley collection of former holiday Amaryllis and small divisions of the purple oxalis from another border.

This doesn’t sound like the kind of project you’ll see in a glossy magazine, does it? So much of our puttering is making small changes, reusing what’s already here, nibbling away at the parts we don't like and doing a lot of things just to see what will happen.
After the ice and cold this winter, I was disappointed but not surprised when the Barbados cherry showed no sign of life. [Both Durantas, some Lantanas and both Tecoma stans/Esperanzas look like goners, too.] So last weekend we pulled up the dead cherry and decided to make the back half of the border into a raised bed, using some good-sized rocks from our stash as walls. But that meant hauling more compost, and a lot of decomposed granite.

Finding what you want in a garden center or material yard can be easy, but buying it can take forever. Over the weekend, some nurseries were fast, some not, and at the U-dig place things did not go well either on Saturday or Sunday. People running registers didn’t know how to enter the prices, and on a return trip we ran into non-functioning computers.

Unfortunately, after too many long lines, I behaved as erratically as the computers. I was inside waiting to pay for compost & gravel while fretting that Philo was doing all the grunt work. At one point, distracted by photos of gigantic, organically-grown Alaskan vegetables, I mistakenly thought that a young man was line-jumping and got quite cranky with him. He was perfectly innocent, and even worse – the guy had on an Austin Film Society shirt, and I’m a member of the same group. At least I didn’t have on a Divas of the Dirt t-shirt, because I wouldn't want the other Divas to be disgraced by my public display of grumpiness!

By the time I got outside, Philo had done all the heavy loading work for a second time, and we went home to finish planting the bed.

Although the Barbados Cherry didn't work out, we hope to make a different native evergreen grow in our garden. In the raised part, we planted a Rhus virens/ Evergreen Sumac bought at the Lady Bird Johnson Winter tree festival. That's a narrow decomposed granite path behind it, so I'll have somewhere to stand when clipping and fighting the wiry, insidious jasmine. The sumac is small, but has an interesting shape and beautiful leaves. I really hope this one survives! And maybe by the time it has gained some height and substance, we’ll be able to replace that clunky wooden border with something better.

This post needs a beautiful flower photo. Last November, Pam/Digging gave me a division of her ‘Amethyst’ iris, and on Sunday it produced this flower. In the past, two other Iris plants labeled purple turned out to be orange. I'm still hoping that another, not-yet-bloomed iris will be somewhere in the promised purple range.
But when Pam says it's a purple Iris you can count on it.

I’m thrilled, Pam! Thank you so much. We had two-and-a-half inches of rain last night, for which I’m also thrilled and thankful.

The Continuing Evolution of the Patio

The Veranda, as described in a September post, was already there, and except for the steps, its evolution didn’t require hard labor. But more than vision was needed for the Patio at the back of the house – it’s taken two years of muscle and materials, and it’s still evolving. If we had a bigger landscaping budget, lived in a colder climate or owned a house from a different era, we might have chosen other methods or materials, but our plan suited this house, this town and two mature people with time and energy.

This is not a How-to-do-it post – more a What-we-did story.
The patio looked like this when our realtor showed us the house – it was the usual 20’ X 12’ poured concrete rectangle, possibly installed by the builder in the 1970’s. A sidewalk starts at the patio and passes in front of the breakfast room window on its way to the gate. A door from the house opens onto the patio. We were pleased to see that we could fit the table & chairs and the grill on the concrete, with room left for a few pots.
A few pots? We moved here with over 100 container plants in the summer of 2004, carried from the deck and porch of our previous home. Some of them were supposed to be patio plants but most of them belonged in borders and beds. Since we hadn’t yet made the borders and beds, the patio was wall-to-wall with furniture and terra cotta, genuine and faux, overflowing onto the grass.

We had perennials: clematis, heirloom daylilies, agaves, hibiscus, balloon flowers and Amarcrinums. We had tender plants that moved inside for the winter like the Plumeria. We needed a place near the kitchen for the burgeoning herb and hypertufa collection.
A forest of young trees and shrubs had started out as one-gallon starter plants but many were approaching landscape size: one Southern Wax Myrtle, a Camellia japonica, a 4-foot Osmanthus fragrans/Tea Olive, two ‘Celeste’ Figs, an heirloom Philadelphus/Mock orange, a couple of Boxwoods, a large double-yellow Nerium oleander, a Callicarpa Americana/Beautyberry, a Lady Banks Rose, yards of Carolina Jessamine/Gelsemium sempervirens, a little Vitex, two Lagerstroemia/’Acoma’ crepe myrtles and 6-feet of Loquat/Eriobotrya japonica. We also had a tall metal arch that could work for the long side of the patio.

The front panes of the breakfast room window looked across the lawn to an old metal shed, smothered in Hall’s honeysuckle. Seedling crepe myrtles grew against one side pane of the breakfast window, with the sidewalk and grass below. All this had to go - we wanted to see flowers, herbs, birds, bees and butterflies.

As the first winter approached, I planned my long border, dollying pots with selected plants to their future positions along the back fence. I crammed the remaining pots together right up to the edge of the patio, hung the plants with mini-lights and called it our Bistro.

While I puttered around, Philo measured and planned. He had figured out how to enlarge the patio, not by pouring concrete but by using a gravel-type product called decomposed granite, a technique we’d seen on tours of well-known Austin gardens.
His plan was to delineate an area adjoining the perimeter of the concrete, remove the grass and dig out 6 - 8 inches of soil. Philo would use edging to contain the area, we’d replace the soil with one layer of pea gravel, then top it with several layers of decomposed granite totaling 4” in depth, packing each layer in turn. In this way we could keep the furniture and foot traffic on the concrete surface, while using the gravel pads as transitional areas where container plants could meld the patio to lawn and garden.

The first gravel bed was a test. In spring 2005 we made an 8-foot quarter-circle on the sunny end, fitting it between patio and sidewalk, so that the rosemary and herb troughs could be seen from the breakfast table. We bought the gravel and granite from a nearby organic materials dealer, shoveling them into reusable 5-gallon bags, and loaded the car with 8 or 10 at a time. The herb bed worked well, drained perfectly and looked good all summer.


When fall arrived, we added a second quarter-circle on the opposite end, where it could function both as a walkway to the far end of the yard, and as a place for semi-shade plants. Earlier in 2005, we’d taken the Loquat out of its pot and planted this broadleaf evergreen tree near the far end. In time, it should add shade and privacy.
We started work on the next stage in March 2006, when Philo decided to add a two-foot band across the front edge of the patio. He set the edging and we began to dig, sure that this amount of space would be enough.


The metal arch was set into the decomposed granite, a large precast concrete square was set in front of the arch and large containers were placed on each side. I bought our Lady Banks Rose in 2000, bumping it up to a larger container every year. That’s Lady Banks in bloom on the left side of the arch. This spring I bought a native Coral Honeysuckle/Lonicera sempervirens for the pot on the right. The honeysuckle was very small, and I wanted some scent so I added a second small plant, labeled fragrant Corkscrew vine. I figured they’d be okay together.

Wrong! Although it looked good at first, the non-fragrant vine, now recognized as a Snail Vine, tried to murder the honeysuckle. Another Snail vine was thriving elsewhere, so this one was expendable. After I cut the Snail down to a clump & potted it for adoption, DivaAnnie, who liked its flowers, let it come to her garden. Philo added two more precast squares to make an entrance walk, the rose and honeysuckle did reasonably well, and an annual Cypress Vine was accepted by the main characters for the rest of the summer. But something looked wrong - the shapes of the pots and the arch resembled security barriers guarding an entrance.
Last week we added more gravel to make a curving sort of apron for the arch and took the honeysuckle and rose out of their containers, planting them directly into the ground. The whole area was mulched with the decomposed granite.
So far, it seems to work. The patio looks less blocky with the arch moved forward, no longer in line with the large containers along the front edge. I like the way the vine shapes join the trellis nearer to ground level rather than at the top of the containers. Both the Lady Banks rose and the Coral honeysuckle had minor damage from the move, but they’re recovering, and should do well.

Now I can rework the large patio containers, make better combinations, and transplant more of the plants into the beds and borders. Having a transitional area can be handy as plants grow and change! The Loquat is already making the far end shadier, but we’ll have options, because the gravel areas are mutable and the containers are moveable.



About the frequently used ‘we’ in these posts… it’s not an Editorial 'We' or a Royal 'We'. No other word seems to work for a couple with years of experience in working together on house & garden projects. In this case, it’s Philo who swings the mattock to break up rock layers, and does most of the heavy digging, the heavy thinking, and puts in the edges. I help to fill and haul the granite at the U-Dig place & do most of the plant wrangling and planting. I also do a pretty good imitation of Lucy stomping the grapes to compact the layers of gravel.