Our gardening effort in Austin
must be a great one. We need to put down the fertilizer bag and quit looking at N P K. Forget the word Xeriscape. Stick your hand in your leaves and see what s there. My recent visit to a green gardening workshop left me willy. Austin is in touch and out of touch with gardening. There is the old gardening which is a bag of fertilizer, peat moss, azaleas, pine bark mulch, plastic edging, weed barrier, square flower beds foundation plantings and asian jasmine. (Hmmmm did I forget anything?) Westlake is the perfect example of this schizophrenia., half of Westlake is left natural and the other is paved over with acres of grass lawns sprinkler systems and asian jasmine. The City of Austin is a fount of this silly Xeriscaping notion and native planting and a cross between nothing. In the Bouldin Creek neighborhood The new round abouts are planted with uncomplimentary plantings like lorapetalum, lantanta, salvia microphylla . Most of the plants died and we have weed infested beds with weed barrier. Anyway back to the subject at hand.
We as gardeners must use everything at our disposal which will help us to be smarter better people. Since we are in such a well read community (the best read community by some estimates in America) lets use everything we know from our long reading sessions. Well we can start with fractals, and and random numbers, or 4 dimensional space.
The point is this there is no reason to make lines in our landscapes. Our houses are square enough. We do not need to get involved in this leveling the lawns. Creativity is the rule of the day. Design is sometimes over rated and I know I m going to get in trouble for saying this. My idea of design is that the design is in the land and all you have to do is remove everything that is not essential much like Michelangelo recommended with a sculpture,which is what is left when one removes the unnecessary stone. The universe is a great vast and deeply interesting place. One wouldn't know it if they have security lights on all night. We should try to connect to the rest of the universe through our gardens. I know and you just wanted some pansies that matched your salvias.

Rule one accept the seasons. The winter is for resting some plants and growing others. The Texas landscape likes to rest. Many of our native trees and shrubs drop their leaves and go to sleep. If you are inclined to grow winter blooming plants from Africa and the Mediterranean that is fine. These plants look good in the winter garden they are usually bright and withstand a good amount of cold. What i am criticizing are the emerald gree lawns of winter grass and the constant raking of leaves. The middle summer in Texas could almost be another resting time. There are perennials blooming but we really do not want to go out and work the garden risking a heat stroke. The summer is a time to harvest and appreciate a lot of work that is being done for us like the sun and the good soil. Our springs are so overwhelming I sometimes feel like not working but getting up in the morning and puttering around my garden taking happy snappys and smelling flowers and maybe visiting others gardens. The fall is a really good time to work in the garden, in my mind in Austin it is the best time to actually work. It’s a good time to plant and transplant and divide and weed and cut back for the next year. The work I do in the fall is what I will see for the ret of the year.

Rule two quit raking the leaves and throwing them away. I have grown accustom to seeing small bulbs and flowers poking out of the brown and yellow leaves. The color of dead leaves are incomparable and speak to us about the demise and shedding away of the
physical form. Leaves add the nutrients to the soil that no bagged compost will ever do. The soil from leaves is fluffy by nature provides a good winter protection for many bugs bulbs and seedlings. I add many bags of leaves to my garden every year.

Rule three Before you start removing plants from your garden think what could Iadd that would benefit my garden just as well. We have a tendency when starting a garden project to go in and start ripping everything out that we think will not be compatible with what we are going to plant. For example we pull all the so called weeds and then have a barren wasteland with a few naked perennials. I recommend leaving a lot of weeds until the other plants start taking over. Weeds often times loosen the soil and add nutrients that are beneficial to your garden worth plants. It is a really false idea that is borrowed from agriculture that we need to remove competition so that our preferred plants will do better. Nature hates a vacuum. The natural process is to always fill empty spaces. Man has gotten really out of step with nature and desires to have his roses singly set apart with a big pile of mulch delimiting the area around the base.