One of my favorite Austin garden tours occurs this Saturday, May 8: Gardens on Tour, produced by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. I’m pleased to offer you a sneak preview of one of the gardens on the tour, the Reynosa Drive garden, which I’m particularly fond of and familiar with because it belongs to my lovely in-laws, Bobbie Tsukahara and Gil Starkey.

Bobbie and Gil left their beloved Boston about 10 years ago to be closer to their grown children and grandkids in Austin. Their then-new Shady Hollow home backed up to a meadowy preserve that attracted a variety of birds as well as rattlesnakes, some of whom found warm, concrete doorsteps quite to their liking.

Bobbie and Gil weren’t gardeners when they moved here, but as they built their new home they knew they didn’t want a traditional, water-hogging lawn and boring line of shrubs across the foundation.

I wasn’t yet professionally designing gardens then, but I knew enough to help them sketch out a plan that they and their builder used to install a small buffalo grass lawn in front and back as well as large, curving beds of drought-tolerant native and adapted shrubs and perennials. They quickly learned a lot about native plants and water conservation, hooking up rain barrels and saving gray water to use outdoors. But a persistent drainage problem in the back garden bugged them, the rattlesnakes worried them, and they wanted to do more to attract birds and butterflies.

Last year they hired a design/build company, Environmental Survey Consulting, to remove the back lawn, solve the drainage problem, install numerous large boulders, plant a new island bed designed to attract birds and butterflies, and build a coyote fence to hide their compost bin and gardening tools (see picture at end of post). For good measure, they also added some rattlesnake-proofing around the perimeter of their garden.*

Despite the scorching drought last summer, the largely native-plant garden thrived, and this winter’s rains helped it really take off. Today Gil and Bobbie can enjoy the shade of a grand old live oak they took pains to protect during the building of their home, surrounded in spring by a sweep of yellow columbines, overlooking the new butterfly garden on the sunny side of the yard.

Hinckley’s columbines (Aquilegia chrysantha var. hinckleyana)

Damianita (Chrysactinia mexicana)

Shasta daisies

This red admiral butterfly was enjoying the daisies.

I visited their garden on Monday morning after dropping the kids off at school. The morning sun was already fairly intense, making photography a challenge and reducing their two long-haired dachshunds to shadowy blurs. But here you can see the littlest one, Clover, dashing down the decomposed-granite path toward me.

Larkspur

Sundrop (Calylophus berlandieri)

The central butterfly-garden bed is mounded up for drainage and mulched with seedling-friendly decomposed granite. Bobbie and Gil told me that a beautifully designed garden was less important to them than attracting birds and butterflies; i.e., they are accepting of a “messy,” caterpillar-munched, less-groomed garden in order to feed and shelter their winged visitors. As you can see, though, it still looks lovely.

Numerous bird baths placed around the garden offer birds drinking and bathing spots.

Winecup (Callirhoe involucrata)

Heartleaf skullcap (Scutellaria ovata)

Twistleaf yucca (Yucca rupicola)

Gaillardia, larkspur, and Shasta daisies—the late-spring show

Here’s a look at their coyote fence, a screen of sturdy cedar posts wired together and attached to posts sunk into the ground at each end. The coyote fence curves gracefully around a tree and runs the length of their wide side yard, giving them a hiding place for their compost bin, wheelbarrow, and other tools.

Penstemon

By thinking outside the typical suburban box with regard to their landscaping, Gil and Bobbie have created a beautiful, peaceful place for birds, butterflies, and people to enjoy. My thanks to them for letting me share it with you.
Click here for more information about Gardens on Tour 2010, to be held this Saturday, May 8, from 9 am to 5 pm. Update: To see the other gardens on this tour, click on my post about the Sinclair Avenue garden, then follow the links.
*Here’s what Gil told me about the rattlesnake-proofing they did:

We have Western Diamondbacks around here and little else. WD’s do not climb well, and they do not burrow very deeply. Therefore, one can discourage them by sinking a barrier 4-6 inches into the ground and extending it upwards for 18-24 inches (key measurements provided by a consulting herpetologist). Along our back property line, we sank 2x12s about 6 inches deep and attached another 2×12 on top of it, forming a barrier about 6 inches deep and 18 inches high. ESC then added fine-meshed wire fencing about 4 feet high along that line, also burying it, fixing it to our picket fence, and bending the top outward to create an extremely difficult barrier for a snake to climb. We have 6-foot privacy fences along each side of the yard, so ESC trenched 6 inches deep and attached a couple of courses of Trex deck planking to the privacy fence. That effectively sealed those property lines. They also built a short “snake fence” comprised of lumber and fine-wire mesh across the 5 foot gap between our house and the east fence. That left the south-facing fence line and the iron gate on the west side to deal with. They treated the privacy fence along that line the same as the others. ESC and I came up with a way to block the gate itself, combining the fine-wire mesh across the gate itself with “door jambs” I added to the gate to seal that entry point and discourage slithering visitors. All this has worked so far. I continue, however, to garden with my eyes open! —Gil

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