The photo above of the flower beds in front of our house was taken last July. Everything had just been planted by the builder, and it was the middle of summertime. Lots of sun, plenty of late afternoon thunderstorms to keep thirsty plants happy.
This is what they looked like by the beginning of March. Pretty ragged, right? While I don’t expect everything to look as lush and green in February as it does in July, the periods of unusually cold weather have taken their toll. I expect (hope) that most of the plants will make a comeback now that the weather is warming up — along with the stupid crunchy St. Augustine grass that turns brown in the winter — but the large fern-like plant that was front and center was obviously a casualty of the freeze and the monkey grass looked like it had all been stomped on by an elephant. It was time for some gardening.
I know basically nothing about plants and shrubs, so we headed over to Maas Nursery in Seabrook. Multiple people had told me it was the place to go, and it was indeed awesome. We said “show us the low maintenance section” and then picked out a couple different plants to start our experiment. We decided to address the front row of the beds for now, since it looked the worst. (Plus, we think the stuff in the back rows will perk up over the next couple months.) Our main criteria was anything that looked nice, was reasonably drought-tolerant, and liked full sun, since our front yard bears the brunt of the afternoon summer sun. We bought:
(Side note: when I googled yaupon holly, I discovered that the scientific name is ilex vomitoria. Yes, vomitoria. What a pleasant name for a plant.)
This past Saturday was an absolutely beautiful spring Houston day, so we spent two hours outside planting all of the new stuff. It was surprising hard work and we were both sore the next day. But the beds look better already!
We replaced the dead fern thing with the big viburnum. The bright green color is really nice, and it should produce flowers at some point. We also dug out most of the monkeygrass and replaced them with alternating holly and sage bushes. Those can grow pretty big if you let them, so we’ll have to prune them occasionally, but that’s sufficiently “low maintenance” for me.
Before
After
We do still need a new batch of mulch to put down over the whole bed. Any of my truck-owning friends want to volunteer?
Before
After
I still don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to gardening, so who knows, we may be replacing some of these again next year. It’s a learning experience!
sarah, you can’t kill monkey grass. it will come back from anything. in fact, you can just leave it in the garage and not water it and it will still live. cutting it back will usually makes it look a little better but doesn’t have to be done.
mrs. g
Oh, the monkey grass wasn’t dead. But it looked bad, plus I didn’t even really like it when it didn’t look bad. So we decided to replace it. 🙂