- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener,' let's go on tour.

When Joe Clifton and Roger Duncan planned an urban wildlife sanctuary, designers Leah Churner and Holly Gardovsky layered up with native plants.

Preview the Garden Conservancy's Open Days tour with Sarah Yant and Bethany Broussard.

Entomologist, Wizzie Brown answers your questions, and William Glenn's spotlights pocket prairie ideas.

So let's get growing right here, right now.

- [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardeners'" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator] Wanna know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, H-E-B has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking, and Field & Future by H-E-B trash bags.

You can learn more at ourtexasourfuture.com.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - When Jo Clifton and Roger Duncan planned an urban wildlife sanctuary, landscape designers, Leah Churner and Holly Gardovsky layered up with native plants.

- The main idea was that it was gonna be a wildlife garden.

I'm Leah Churner, (birds singing) I am the owner of Delta Dawn Gardens.

- And I'm Holly Gardovsky, I work with Leah.

- My name is Jo Clifton, this is my husband, Roger Duncan.

This is really more his brainchild than mine.

- (chuckles) We acquired our helm here about 30 years ago, and developed the garden in, actually, a couple of stages.

Several years ago, we have a small swimming pool in our backyard, and we weren't using it, and so I worked with Taylor (fountain splashing) at Taylormade Waterscapes, and converted the swimming pool into a koi pond, built a waterfall.

It became a very active little ecosystem.

We have frogs now, and dragonflies, and- - [Jo] Lots of birds.

- Lots of birds.

And then a couple of years ago, the house next door to us came up for sale, and we were able to purchase it and develop this lot into a terraced flower garden.

- The house was torn down in the, I wanna say, spring of 2023.

Then Seedlings came in and did the construction of the hardscape summer of 2023.

Then we planted October of 2023.

That's when the first round of planting was, and it's currently 2025 spring right now, so this is a pretty young garden.

- Well, the house was built on a very steep slope, and they had put in a bunch of fill in order to make the house level.

- We saw that the foundation of the house was eight feet tall, there was a eight-foot slab in spots, so we knew there was gonna be a big grade change, and we knew there was gonna have to be quite a bit of terracing involved to keep the ground from eroding.

We got Seedlings involved to build the hardscape and to help us figure out how to do it, and then for the stairs, it's sandstone, because sandstone is a little bit better for walking on.

It doesn't get that slippery.

- [Roger] And then I wanted a central walkway up the center and two side walkways.

- There was another garden where we had worked that there was a pathway with a stair that had two anacacho orchids flanking it, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, I have to do that-" - [Holly] We loved it.

- "In a design," and so that was one of the first things that we knew we wanted to do.

And I had been reading a lot of Doug Tallamy, and got really into the idea of focusing on starting a wildlife garden that starts with insects in mind, because insects are kind of the base of the food pyramid, you know, because the caterpillars feed the baby birds, and you know, it all is this great cycle.

- [Roger] We were very aware of the problems with bees and butterflies, and pollinators, so we wanted to focus on it being a pollinator garden.

- So we kind of came up with this idea for creating plant communities, creating a matrix planting of plant communities.

Each area has a ground cover, and then like, a small grass, like a sedge, and then some, like, lower perennials, and then there's some shrubs in each.

So there's different plants of different heights that create a plant community, and what that does, that kind of planting, it's very densely planted, and that helps keep weeds down, and it helps preserve the moisture in the soil.

So it's different layers of plants, different heights, and they do different things.

For Texas, Central Texas, the kind of idea of doing a matrix planting, you might wanna incorporate more evergreen things, things like Salvia greggii is great because it's a bloomer, but it's also evergreen.

I love Nolinas, it's one of my favorite plants.

In this garden, we've got the Nolina Texana and the Nolina lindheimer.

The Nolina Lindheimer is blooming right now.

Yarrow, the coreopsis, the lanceleaf coreopsis, and the purple coneflower have evergreen rosettes.

- Yeah.

- For the most part.

- [Holly] And the red yucca stays green.

- And sedges, for sure.

- Yeah.

The sedges, yeah.

- The sedges become very visible in the winter.

The gopher plant is not native, but I just love it, so.

(Holly chuckling) - It's cute.

(laughs) - It's just such a great dependable winter evergreen plant, because it does not mind cold at all.

- Yeah.

- And it blooms in the winter, which is great for bees.

I really like the woolly stemodia, because it is so silver, and it drapes beautifully.

Oh, one thing I wanted to say about the Mystic Spires sage, it's a cultivar, or a nativar, whatever you wanna call it, so it's, it's not strictly maybe the best, if you were a native plant purist.

- Yeah.

- But it is so pretty, and the bumblebees just go crazy for it.

- [Leah] There's just dozens and dozens of bumblebees that come to visit them.

- And then another thing that the bumblebees love is the soft-hair marbleseed, - Marbleseed.

- The bumblebees go crazy for that, too.

It's good for dry shade, but it also could take sun.

There's a lot of fencing here, which, you know, - Yeah.

- The clients wanted privacy to be able to meditate and, you know, hang out and have some feeling of enclosure in this garden.

And so the whole place is fenced, and we wanted to try to find ways to hide the fence, hide the fences with plants.

Up at the top, we've got vines, crossvine and coral honeysuckle.

And so the idea is that eventually, those vines will cover the fence.

- For the ground cover selection in, like, the lower beds, we kind of started with some of the frogfruit and yarrows, and then we kind of just started popping other random little things in there.

I know I dug the heartleaf out of my own yard, and we popped it into some holes where some other things weren't quite filling in.

- I would say, ground covers are less showy in terms of bloom.

Their real aesthetic feature is their colors.

There's so many different shades of green, and silvery green, and blue-green, and lime-green that you can get with the different ground covers.

- And the leaf texture is different, too.

- Yes.

- Like, you have the soft heartleaf, the kind of rigid yarrow, and the rigid on the mistflower.

- [Leah] The mistflower and the heartleaf skullcap is a great color contrast.

- Yeah.

- They really pop against each other, and I just love heartleaf skullcap.

It is one of my favorite plants.

- Comes up early.

- It blooms in May, and then it goes away, it's summer dormant.

That's another thing that we talk a lot about, Holly and I talk a lot about, is picking plants that have opposite dormancies to share the space.

It's primarily a perennial garden, but there are some annuals in here.

There's a bunch of wildflowers.

We've got a pocket prairie in the front yard, but in what we call the hummingbird garden, which is at the top of the terraces, there are a bunch of annuals that kind of line the former garage area, where it's commonplace to walk.

And so, you know, you walk by them, and you see these annuals, and they're just really good filler for space when the perennials are filling in, and I like cut flowers a lot.

- Yeah.

- I love having flowers to cut, and so that's why, you know, it's fun to have some annuals, and they're great for pollinators, too.

You know, the bees love that nectar, 'cause they bloom like crazy.

- And we had a lot of gomphrena last year, and we have even seen where some of the gomphrena have seeded out, and there's tiny seeds are starting to pop up, so it's coming back (chuckles) in its own way.

- Part of the plant selection or the plant palette here (birds singing) is not just buying plants and bringing them in, or finding plants and planting them, but also seeing what comes up, and letting things volunteer, 'cause there's some very cool things that have volunteered in this garden.

I think we have thrown some parsley seed out or something like that, and we had planted dill and fennel for the swallowtails, and we got this great parsley that just volunteered, and just, it was another thing.

It's just, let it be there.

It wants to be there, and it's a cool plant.

- And we've already seen caterpillars.

- It's been a wonderful joy and educational opportunity to watch the seasons change here, and we've attracted so many more different species of birds and insects and such since we developed this.

- I'm especially excited about all the birds that come here and, you know, they also probably are enjoying some of the insects that we're attracting.

(Roger chuckling softly) That's just a lot of fun to see.

- Have a fox that goes through occasionally, and armadillos come in, of course, and it's a wonderful place to spend our time.

- And you can see Jo and Roger's garden in person on the Garden Conservancy tour this November.

Visiting local Gardens is a fantastic way to gather design ideas and how-to tips from our neighbors.

Today, we will Sarah Yant and Bethany Broussard from Twistleaf Land Design for a preview of this year's Travis County Open Days tour.

Sarah and Bethany, how are you doing today?

- Fine, thank you.

- Fine, good morning, John.

- Wonderful, so first off, what is the Garden Conservancy?

- The Garden Conservancy is a national nonprofit that celebrates and shares unique private gardens across the US, and we've been excited to volunteer as their regional ambassador for the last two years.

- And I gotta note, the Garden Conservancy, what tour was held in, what, 1998, - That's right.

- And "Central Texas Gardener" was there.

We've been involved since the beginning.

Bethany, what is the Open Days tour, and when is it this year?

- Open Days is a national garden visitation program that allows folks a rare chance to see beautiful private gardens, and the opportunity to meet the designers and the gardeners behind them.

- This year's Open Day tour will actually be held on Saturday, November 8th from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and we've curated five exceptional gardens across Central Austin for the tour this year.

It's a one-day, self-guided tour, and you can visit as many of the gardens as you'd like to.

We encourage people to see them all.

- [John] The first, we've got Belmont Parkway.

Tell us a little bit about this one.

- [Sarah] Yeah, Belmont Parkway is a gorgeous, modern woodland garden designed by landscape architecture firm, Studio Balcones.

- Oh yeah.

- This garden is really the perfect blend of structure and wildness.

It's nestled in a wooded hillside overlooking Shoal Creek with native grasses and perennials, like little bluestem, fragrant mistflower, and Mexican bush sage that really shine in the fall.

There's also an herb garden and a dipping pool with an incredible view.

This particular garden was planted in about 2018.

- About 2018, okay.

- Yeah.

- So a couple of years.

So I assume with these, are most of the gardens a few years along?

Or they're new, or is there just sort of a mix of some of these?

- There's a great mix.

Yeah, there's a great mix of ages of gardens on the tour.

- Before we look at the next one, I think it's really key that we talk about this, how in the world do people go about getting tickets?

(Sarah chuckling) - You can buy tickets gardenconservancy.org.

Tickets are on sale now, and they're $5 per garden for Garden Conservancy members, and $10 per garden for non-members.

- There's a chance that some of these might sell out, right?

- That is true, so if one of the gardens is sold out, you can add your name to the waitlist.

- Next, we're gonna be looking at Este Garden, and this is one that we featured here on "Central Texas Gardener."

- [Bethany] Este Garden was founded in 2020, and it's run by farmer, Anamaria Gutierrez.

They use holistic practices like low-till farming and cover cropping, and supply local restaurants with fresh produce.

Este Gardens cultivates thousands of pounds of organic veggies, herbs, and flowers year round.

This garden is a really powerful example of how gardens can serve both the community around them and fine cuisine, too.

- It sounds like y'all have a really good mix of different types of gardens.

It's not just formal gardens.

This seems like this one's really emphasis on community and productivity.

- That's right, that was one of the goals of our tour, is to offer attendees several different types of gardens to visit, from designers and architectural gardens, and to urban farms, and gardens by the homeowner as well.

- Let me tell you something, I am definitely not the most advanced food gardener here in Texas.

(Sarah chuckling softly) It's difficult.

- Yes.

- They'll have some really great tips on how you go about planting some of these crops, right?

- That's right.

- Which would be helpful for folks.

- Absolutely.

- The next one we're gonna be looking at is the Artist's Eclectic Eden in South Central Austin.

What are we looking at there?

- [Bethany] In this garden, you're gonna find a lush, Bouldin neighborhood space designed and built entirely by the homeowner, Steve Twigger.

Steve started this garden in 2004, and was able to do all of this work himself.

This garden has a surprising evergreen tropical vibe, and also so much creative charm.

This is the most established garden on our tour.

- Okay.

- So it's gonna show attendees what's possible over time with vision and a lot of patience, and a deeprooted love for plants.

So I think attendees are gonna find inspiration here, and our hope is that they leave feeling empowered to take on gardening and even hardscape projects at their own homes.

- You know, you see renderings, or you see the intention there, and you know, it's sort of like planting a tree.

It's gonna take a few years to get there.

I assume he'll hopefully talk about some site preparation, and what it takes to sort of get there, not just, "Here it is."

- Yes, Steve Twigger has actually documented his whole journey- - Oh wow.

- From start to finish, and has photos, and is gonna blow up posters for attendees to look at.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

He's a great source of information.

(chuckles) - That sounds amazing.

Well, I'm looking forward to that one.

Now, we're gonna head a little bit west of Austin, and we're going to Canyon Vista.

What about this one?

- John Hart, Canyon Vista is the work of Heather Lyle with Native Knowledge Landscape Consulting.

And over the last 10 years, Heather has created a flourishing five-acre wildlife sanctuary at her residence in West Lake Hills.

What began as a barren rocky slope is now a thriving ecosystem that takes advantage of big, beautiful canyon views, and some of my favorite fall plants that will be in bloom or in berry during November, (John chuckling) our American beautyberry, cowpen daisy, and plateau goldeneye.

- Excellent, well, this sounds really exciting, because I think so many people, especially transplants in this region, think that the soil, they'll hear the soils are terrible, you're not gonna be able to grow anything unless you import a lot of top soil, and this sounds like just a wonderful opportunity to understand that's just not the case.

It's right plants, right place, and working with the soils, you can really have a diverse planting of native species.

Final one here, we've got Pollinator's Paradise.

This video was shot in May, and visitors will be able to see it in its full fall glory.

- Pollinator's Paradise has such a cool origin story, and we've really fallen in love with this space.

This is the youngest garden on our tour, but we don't think attendees are gonna be able to tell when they're there.

It's a really dynamic space that changes, and every time you visit, you'll discover something new, which speaks to Leah Turner and her team's ongoing maintenance of this place.

- [John] And what is sort of the design intent or concept here with this one?

- I think the overall goal was to have a community space and a space for pollinators to live.

Some of the fall features that you're gonna see are big muhly grasses and frogfruit, which is a lovely ground cover, and purple coneflower.

You can learn a lot about native plants and about pollinator, yeah, attractive plants.

- [John] That's a great another point, too, is the maintenance plants, 'cause people tend to think - Yes.

- Of that as a janitorial endeavor, boring, but that's really how we sustain our gardens, and that's a key point, so I think that's gonna be great - Yes.

- For folks to be able to interact with the designers there.

Well, once more, where are we getting tickets?

- Gardenconservancy.org, and again, the tour is on Saturday, November 8th from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

Tickets are $5 for each garden for members of the Garden Conservancy, and $10 per garden for non-members.

So you can also join as a member of the Garden Conservancy at gardenconservancy.org, and again, you can sign up on the waitlist if one of the gardens is sold out.

- Thank you, Sarah and Bethany.

I think this really sounds exciting, and we're gonna see a whole bunch of gardens that really, people can sort of pick their flavor, and really understand what it takes to create a beautiful, holistic space here, right here in Central Texas.

Entomologist, Wizzie Brown debuted on "Central Texas Gardener" in June, 2006.

Here's a clip with Tom Spencer from May, 2017.

- Some of these sucking insects, the smaller ones, are going to exude honeydew, which is a sweet, sticky substance.

- Yes.

- If you've ever stood under a tree in the summer, and you think it's raining, but it's not, you're being peed on by insects.

(Tom laughing) - Well, now, let's check in with Wizzie Brown.

(soft music) - Purple coneflowers are a great native perennial in our drought-tolerant gardens.

The flowers attract many pollinators, and small birds love the seeds, but last summer, Doris Acevedo sent us this note about her plants.

"Every year they start doing great, and then the flowers start getting some type of dirt on them.

I cut every flower that shows this problem, but it doesn't stop.

It keeps growing on every flower, on all plants."

Doris, it's difficult to tell what might be causing the problem without actually seeing pests, but there could be several options.

Caterpillars can create webbing, and many times, their frass, or poop, can look similar to dirt.

Some caterpillars are active at night, so you may need to go explore with a flashlight after dark.

Another possible option is some type of mite.

Spider mites can create webbing on plants, and tend to be more active at hot, dry times of the year.

Spider mites can usually be seen with a good 10x hand lens, and often start populations on the underside of leaves, and expand webbing to cover the plant as their population increases.

Coneflowers may also get very tiny, weird-looking mites, commonly called coneflower rosette mites, which is a type of Eriophyid mite.

Eriophyid mites require more magnification to be seen, and may often look like dust collecting on the seed heads.

These mites have elongated, spindle-shaped bodies and only two pair of legs, where most mites have four pair of legs and oval-shaped bodies.

Coneflower rosette mites live inside developing flower buds, and can cause flower distortion from their feeding.

Unfortunately, there isn't much information on efficacy of miticides against these mites, so they're best managed with sanitation.

It's important to cut off and destroy flower heads before the mites disperse to new flowers.

Make sure to throw away infested flower heads and not put them in the compost pile to ensure there won't be reinfestation.

Find out more and watch online at centraltexasgardener.org.

- [John] William Glenn first appeared on "Central Texas Gardner" in 2010.

Here's a clip from April, 2014.

- There's a lot to talk about with regard to compost.

There's a lot of different types of compost.

- [John] Today, he showcases pocket prairie ideas.

(soft music) - Hello, I'm William Glenn with Greensleeves Nursery, and today, we're gonna talk about a problem that some gardeners come across with some degree of regularity, and we get questions about it, and that is, "I've got a corner of my yard, I've got an area of my garden that doesn't drain well.

It's a poor soil, it holds water after big rain," and we know here in Central Texas, we have these feast and famines, deluge and drought.

So preparing for those eventualities is a way that we can actually kind of make lemonade out of the lemon situation of the poor soil.

So I would like to share a few of my favorite plants for those types of situations, both the shady ones and the sunny ones, but also just remind you that when you have a situation in the garden that is a poor soil thing, always a good idea to incorporate some compost.

We're never gonna suggest you do anything but that, it's really the key, and then sometimes using a some kind of an angular or a very voluminous kind of air-filled rock, expanded shale, lava rock, granite.

Some of those things can really help with drainage as well.

When we have areas that are prone to, let's say, erosivity, and you get these little rivulets, these little channels, that's an indication that you are getting runoff, right?

That means that due to compaction in the soil, due to other kind of issues that can arise maybe on the backside of construction, the water's not landing in your property, going through your soil, getting to the roots, and ultimately, getting into our aquifers.

Any of the grass-like plants, this here is Leersia, Leersia monandra, (leaves whooshing) sometimes called cut rice grass.

This is a wonderful choice, as are some of the sedges.

This one here is a Cherokee sedge.

There's many native sedges.

What we're gonna be talking about today are all natives, by the way, but what they do is their simple biomass will actually, above ground, stop water from moving, right?

These are acting like a net, but more importantly, these have fibrous root systems, which means they're gonna hold the soil in their immediate adjacency better, allowing for water to get through, down, and also benefiting other plants that are nearby, because that soil is stable, right?

So this is a sedge, very grass-like plant, but it's evergreen, and it can handle a lot of shade.

This is a true grass, and unlike a lot of our other grasses, this one does best in shade.

Leersia monandra, Cherokee sedge.

Then I'm jumping over here to where we have some more kind of shady, but can handle some sun.

These are both Physostegias.

This one here is commonly referred to as obedient plant.

It's about to bloom here, and you'll see some purple-pink blooms that are absolutely astounding.

It loves those sort of wet spots that dry out, that get wet, that dry out.

A little bit of compost, again, is gonna help it, but this Physostegia obedient plant is well known and beautiful.

Its cousin here, this is a Physostegia correllii, sometimes called Correll's false dragonhead.

It's a gorgeous, lesser-known native, but also has this plumes of just gorgeous, like, purple and pink.

I got this from Pat McNeal, master plantsman.

Beautiful plant.

And we get over here, and we're gonna get into our mistflowers.

This here is a well-known mistflower.

It can handle a little more sun than some of these others.

This is Gregg's mistflower, known as a monarch magnet.

Bees will visit it, good ground cover, easy to grow, and it likes those same situations.

This one's a little lesser known, this is a pink mistflower.

This isFleischmannia incarnata, and this one, as the name implies, is just another mistflower, wonderful for insects and pollinators, and it's gonna bloom pink.

Now, let's jump into the sun stuff.

This here is one of my absolute favorites.

This here's a giant mistflower, the absolute king of the monarch magnets.

No question that this one is gonna bring so many monarchs that your neighbors are gonna be impressed, and you're gonna just really love it.

Now, we're getting over into a grass where there's tons of native grass, this is just one example.

This is a prairie dropseed.

Gorgeous grass, flows in the wind, dances, especially when planted at mass.

You want to have a bunch of these if you go with it, but you can also use Mexican feathergrass, little bluestem, blue grama, lots of beautiful native grasses.

And then this one, if you can take a look at those blooms, just stunning.

This is one of our native bee balms.

This one here is Monarda punctata, sometimes called spotted bee balm.

Okay, from Greensleeves Nursery, I'm William Glenn.

We'll see you next time.

(clicks teeth) - Be sure to check out centraltexasgardener.org for tips, resources, and to watch online.

Until next time, adopt the pace of nature.

Her secret is patience.

(soft bright music) (soft bright music continues) - [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener's" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator] Wanna know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, H-E-B has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by H-E-B trash bags.

You can learn more at ourtexasourfuture.com (bright flute music)