Xeric landscape high on year-round interest

By S. Virginia De Herdt
Correspondent

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First there was mud, then a professionally installed landscape and finally a revised plan compatible with the extremes of Colorado climate conditions.

My husband and I knew nothing about Colorado vegetation when we moved into our new home and hired a professional landscaper to install the usual trees and lawn. We were quite pleased with the results, but there was more lawn than we ever needed, and I grew bored with mowing it. So it was that, after a winter of researching, dreaming and roughly sketching ideas, in 1997 I took a deep breath and set Rick loose with a sod stripper.

Gradually, we've eliminated roughly 80 percent of that brome-fescue mix lawn. Our goals were multiple: reduce mowing, reduce watering, provide more year-round interest and discourage children from playing football and Frisbee on our front lawn.

I've tried to integrate our modifications into our original landscape design and the yards of immediate neighbors. To accomplish this, I created bed lines and curves to complement existing ones and repeated already present materials and plants in new areas.

Over the years, some plants have died; most have flourished. I try to stick with plants rated to USDA zones 3, 4 or 5. Plant Select winners haven't disappointed. I've used plants that are more xeric than those in our original landscape, but others do better with moderate watering. When selecting plants, I consider the wide range of sun exposures and the different watering zones we have. Our property has a slope, which seems to provide acceptable drainage most of the time.

Sunlight conditions vary from full sun to full shade. The neighbor's trees provide dappled to full shade on our southwest bed, but part of the bed gets blasted by heat from full afternoon sun, our concrete driveway and the asphalt street. Three snow (sterile) crabapple trees provide shade in the northwest bed, but other sections of this bed get full afternoon sun. Varying degrees of shade cover different areas of our courtyard, yet, for a few hours, plants growing between flagstones must also cope with blistering afternoon sun.

Watering with reason

Modifications to our sprinkler system were critical to our new landscape design. We now have two drip zones and five spray zones. While we would have preferred to provide lawn, bed and flagstone areas with their own sprinkler zones, we didn't want to completely dig up our landscape to accomplish this. Instead, in two areas, spray zones water multiple areas, and I'm using plants I hope will tolerate overhead watering in the amounts selected for those areas.

In one flagstone area, we kept the original L-shaped arrangement of pop-up spray heads, which also watered the small brome-fescue lawn that remained west of our house. When I watered this zone to keep the north plants happy, however, the brome-fescue lawn was scorched brown by summer sun and too little water. Therefore, we installed two additional spray heads and Rick removed the brome-fescue grass. In its stead I planted plugs of buffalo grass and bulbs of species tulips and crocuses, which should require less watering.

The bed at the southwest corner of our yard had a similar challenge with a slightly different solution. Two rows of spray heads run from the back of the house through this bed to the street. These water the only brome-fescue lawn that remains and the bed. Given the shade gardening opportunities here, I stuck with the same overhead, moderate watering needed by the brome-fescue grasses.

I kept this last section of brome-fescue lawn because it connects directly with our neighbors' lawn. Buffalo grass would look awkward here, since it stays brown longer than cold-season grasses like bluegrass, brome or fescue. Our new buffalo grass lawn, however, is an island in a sea of beds; it won't clash with neighboring lawns in spring.

Courtyard a favorite

Our fenced-in courtyard is the area that Rick, our cats, neighbor cats and I enjoy most. Last year, to create the courtyard, we simply laid down thick, overlapping, corrugated cardboard directly on the grass, followed by a layer of topsoil mix to level the surface, and finally large flagstones and small moss rock boulders. To water plants growing between the flagstones, Rick raised each spray head using risers. In the raised bed in the courtyard, we installed a small water fountain using a plastic insert intended for use in a half-whiskey-barrel. Behind the fountain stands "Tortoise Lady," a clay garden sculpture created by Madalyn Kae of LaPorte.

Despite all the changes, landscaping never ends. I've spent this past winter pondering how to better fill the beds we now have. Plus, there's plenty of field out back.