Live oak xeriscape — a front garden built for a San Antonio August

The client did not want to irrigate a front lawn any more, and on this frontage there was no good reason to. Full sun, a wide concrete drive throwing heat back at the beds, and a house that already had the presence to carry a quiet ground plane.

What we did

The whole frontage was taken to a dark basalt gravel with native grasses set through it in a loose rhythm. Muhly and similar grasses were chosen because they hold structure dry and then do something worth watching when they flower.

Beds are cut against the drive on a long curve rather than a straight line, which is what keeps a gravel garden from reading as a maintenance decision.

Detail

Low path lights run the length of the bed on the same spacing as the planting. In a second garden on the same principle we ran a river-rock swale between dry-stacked limestone terraces, so the water that does arrive has somewhere deliberate to go.