Inside Austin Gardens Tour 2009: Gail Sapp's garden
My favorite garden for plants on Saturday’s Inside Austin Gardens tour was the Westlake garden of Gail Sapp. Her plants are big, bold, and architectural, and she crams them in with abandon, making a visit to her garden the delighted exploration of a strange new world. Her entry garden, above, starts off with a bang: a large variegated American agave, burgundy-leaved canna, yucca, and ‘Cosmopolitan’ miscanthus grass, with clipped boxwood to contrast with all those bold forms. Deer visit Gail’s garden, so everything out front must be resistant.
Quite the opposite of Cheryl’s delightfully artistic garden, in Gail’s garden the plants upstage any art or even the house, which recedes behind a screen of palms and other bold, evergreen plants. In her garden, the plants are the art. I loved both gardens, and tours like this give you a chance to enjoy many different styles.
A closer look at the variegated miscanthus ‘Cosmopolitan’, canna, and boxwood.
The beauty of a fall garden tour is seeing the ornamental grasses in bloom.
A large blue pot anchors the end of Gail’s entry garden, with a stand of bamboo behind it. Perhaps this is a recirculating fountain when Austinites aren’t under water-use restrictions that prohibit running fountains unless they support aquatic life. (Personally, I think this restriction is unreasonable, since dry-climate residents are most in need of the sound and sight of water in their gardens. And how much evaporation loss really occurs?)
Heading back toward the drive, an enormous brugmansia in full bloom competes with a stunning palm for your attention.
In a sunny spot tucked alongside the back-garden gate, ‘Heavy Metal’ switch grass pairs beautifully with spineless prickly pear.
In the long, narrow back garden, two plants wowed me above all others. A stand of giant timber bamboo was one. Here it is underplanted with bamboo muhly, an ornamental grass.
The timber bamboo screens a see-through metal fence and creates a backdrop for a wide stretch of garden. Moving gently in the breeze, the culms knocked together, creating a restful, musical “tock-took” sound, like a bamboo wind chime.
And it really is gigantic. Look how it looms over the house! Bambusa oldhamii is a clumping bamboo, not a runner, but you’d still want to be careful about where you plant it, obviously. This is a very large plant.
Delicate-leaved plants make an appearance in Gail’s garden too, including this Japanese maple.
The other showstopper in her garden is a silvery blue Bismarck palm (Bismarckia nobilis). Its gigantic fan-shaped leaves reach out from behind a section of hardy, fragrant roses in a longing embrace. Yes! I love you too, palm!
What a stunner. I came straight home to look up its growing conditions and learned that it is cold-tender for zones above 9, making it a risky choice for our zone 8b. It is very drought-tolerant, but this baby gets huge: up to 60 feet high with a spread of 20 feet. It may not get that large in Austin, with our cooler-than-zone 9 winters, but still.
And yet if anyone can manage to make it work in her somewhat small garden, it’ll be Gail. She has a marvelous design sense, with a flair for drama and scale. And because her garden relies on foliage not flowers, it surely looks wonderful year-round. What a fantastic garden she’s created.
For a look back at my visit to the garden of Cheryl Goveia, click here. Tune in tomorrow for a tour of Eleanor Pratt’s garden.
All material © 2006-2009 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
This was our first stop on the tour. We were wowed by this lush garden. You got some great shots.
This was a beautiful garden. Philo loved the timber bamboo and everyone that saw it seemed to covet that blue palm. Thanks for finding the botanical name, Pam – guessed it wouldn’t be truly hardy but read that people in California tout its hardiness because it lived through some unusually cold 26°F nights. My garden gets colder than that every year so no blue palm for me!
I noticed black mesh added over the beautiful black metal fencing that surrounded the back garden – guess the deer would stick their heads through the bars to chomp!
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
Everything looks so bright fresh and green, not at all like it just suffered through a hot dry summer. Thanks for the tours Pam!
I loved this garden too and you describe it perfectly. Gail has a flair for combining plants with color. Did you notice the planting on the right as you went through the gate. I would love to know what that bush was. The combination of colors there, as with in other areas, was outstanding. Every plant was as healthy as I have ever seen in Austin and she is gardening on the plateau. One thing we decided was that this garden probably receives some benefit from being close to the river. Warm air will rise from the water and the shelter of the bamboo. This must make marginal plants a better bet.
but dry climate residents really understand that they need to save water, so they can see some, right?
Oh my gosh, those huge palms are outstanding. She is very brave to plant that huge bamboo in her garden. I would love to hear it knocking about.
So much drama in this garden, Pam, what a different style from the first garden you showed us. The size of the plants and their placement is gutsy and beautiful. The bamboo is somewhat scary, the height if not the running. The sound of tock tock that you describe is perfect. The blue palm is quite impressive too.
Frances
Wow, that bamboo is so tall! I enjoy clipped boxwood paired with big wavy grasses and other wild-looking things. Is the ivy on the house growing on a north-facing wall?
What! What a different garden world than the one I live in! I love all the architectural plants and elements of the garden. Must have been a fabulous tour!
My miscanthus ‘Cosmopolitan’ is my favorite. It makes a great backdrop for red blooms.
Cameron
Nothing gives me more drool inducing zone envy than Bismark Palms. We were in Florida several years ago and saw a semi-circular plaza ringed with them. They had to drag me from the spot.
I’ll bet if you polled all the bloggers who went on the tour, they’d all agree that palm was the single most striking plant they saw. We are zone 9, now, you know! (plant one, plant one, plant one!)
Wow! A fall garden tour. What fun. Love the bamboo, but agree it can get out of hand…
Want to hear something crazy? A guy who frequents the garden center where I work part-time brings all of his tropicals inside his basement for the winter… including two large palms that last year grew to 15+ feet. He ended up ball-and-burlapping the roots and laying them across several sawhorses with additional support for the rootball. And he turned the a quarter turn every two days so they got even amounts of light from the growlight system he has rigged up down in the basement.
Obviously, I totally want to invite myself over to see this. (Crazy and cool all at the same time!) But I mention it to say… any chance that you have room inside for one potted palm? 🙂
I loved that garden so much, and I can’t lie– I spent the entire time I was outside moving dirt this afternoon with most of my mind ticking away at the puzzle of what I would move and where in order to be able to plant one of those gorgeous blue palms.