Watched over by nesting screech owls in springtime, Tecolote Hill is a garden designed for strolling and exploring, with paths that wind through deer-resistant plantings in front and terraced beds and patios in back. Pam, author of Lawn Gone!, The Water-Saving Garden (due out in February), and the blog, Digging, began the garden in the fall of 2008 by ripping out one section of the St. Augustine lawn that surrounded her family’s ‘70s ranch house. The first patch to go was in back, by the swimming pool. Pam replaced it with a circular garden (echoing the circular patios at each end of the pool) anchored in the center by an 8-ft diameter stock-tank pond encircled by sunburst-style stone paving. From there the garden spread in all directions, with new sections of lawn and old, overgrown foundation shrubs getting the shovel each year, new paths laid, and a tough mix of native and adapted plants tolerant of dry shade and a few patches of sun enticing strollers around each curve.
Pam has a taste for agaves, yuccas, and other spiky architectural plants and uses them as dramatic focal points as well as in pots throughout the lushly planted garden. Evergreens play a key role in the garden’s design, providing strong “bones” that look good in winter as well as in summer and require little maintenance aside from a yearly grooming. Plants with seasonal interest – flowers, berries, fall color – are treasured too, both for their beauty and for their attraction for wildlife.
The 1/3-acre property, level with the street out front, slopes sharply behind the house toward a forested greenbelt. Management of runoff has been an ongoing issue as the gardens have evolved. The garden is designed to slow and hold runoff as much as possible through terracing, a dry stream, rocky “gutters” along paths, and stone baffles in a mulched path. (Pam would like to add gutters to the house one day, enabling her to collect and store rainwater in cisterns.) The back garden steps down via terraced patios and garden beds toward a rustic cedar coyote fence that hides an old chain-link fence and keeps hungry deer at bay. Out front, deer are constant visitors, so every plant choice must be grassy, fuzzy, fibrous, fragrant, or otherwise unpalatable. Pam relies heavily on grasses, sedges, yuccas, and salvias for deer-resistant garden beds. Aside from trying to make it fun to explore, her goal, she says, is for her garden to be low-maintenance and cat-like: “Not needing me as much as I need it.”
For a PDF containing a plant list and links to plant profiles, click HERE.
For more pictures of Pam’s garden, please click on any gallery picture to make it larger:
You must be logged in to post a comment.