As summer heat lingers, now is the time to consider these changes to your Texas yard
We’ve all looked back at old family photo albums and noticed those among us who have changed and those lucky ones who have not. Fun. Amazing. Alarming. Sometimes downright frightening. These looks back in time bring back lots of memories of where we were and what we were thinking — and realizations of how our circumstances have changed.
If any of those photos happens to show your landscape and gardens, you’ll see the same kinds of changes out there as well. Our needs change as families change, so what we expect from our landscapes will, by necessity, be different. Plants will certainly change, especially after the drought of 2011 and record cold of 2021.
This is a good time to take a look back at where we were, think a bit (since it’s too hot to do much more than think), and make plans for what we’d like to do in the near future. Fall is a great time to implement major improvements. Nurseries will be well stocked and waiting. Landscape designers have time now. Let’s consider some options.
If shade has become excessive …
If the past 10 or 20 years since your landscape was planted have found your large shade trees thriving, it’s probably time to make the switch over to gardens that can handle heavy shade. Groundcovers like mondograss (monkeygrass), liriope, English ivy, ferns, Asian jasmine and purple wintercreeper tolerate total shade. But St. Augustine does not. Shade isn’t punishment for success. It merely opens new opportunities.
By the same token, shrubs that need full sun may not be thriving now that your trees have grown large. It’s time to trade them out for hollies (there are dozens of types), oakleaf hydrangeas, aucubas, Japanese maples, American beautyberries, viburnums, leatherleaf mahonias and other shrubs that are “made for the shade.”
When we built our home in a pecan forest 45 years ago I had a bermudagrass lawn. There were enough sunny areas to permit it. Within 10 years the trees had grown and I had shifted over to the more shade-tolerant St. Augustine. It wasn’t more than 12 or 15 years later before the St. Augustine had begun to thin and die out. All of those changes happened as the pecans and oaks grew taller and their shade grew heavier. For the past 15 years we’ve had nothing but groundcovers, shrubs and understory trees. The shade came out victorious.
If the shrubs have grown too tall …
It’s OK to admit it when the shrubs are too tall for their surroundings. Odds are that the builder planted them anyway. Whoever’s to blame, they’ve overgrown their space and they’re up to the eaves and flopping out into the lawn. What’s a gardener to do?
One option, if they’re a high-quality species and if they’re not totally out of hand in their surroundings, would be to prune them dramatically. That’s a task for late winter, just before the big burst of spring growth.
That kind of go-for-broke pruning is like a suicide squeeze in baseball. That’s when the runner on third breaks for home plate as the batter tries to lay down a bunt. If anything goes wrong (batter misses bunting the ball or the pitcher intentionally throws the ball a bit to the third base side of home plate, etc.) — well, that’s the source of the name “suicide.” That runner is tagged out by a mile.
Trimming an overgrown shrub back by 50 or 60% on the hope that it will send out vigorous sprouts could actually kill the shrub. It would certainly be the end of junipers and arborvitae. But hollies seem to bounce back quite well, at least the first time that this technique is tried.
Upright nandinas handle heavy pruning quite well as long as they are cut back completely to the ground. Select the tallest half or two-thirds of the canes and cut them back to within 1 inch of the soil line. They’ll send up vigorous sprouts from the ground and will look great by late May.
The one precaution in this kind of dramatic pruning is that it can’t be done routinely. It’s a heroic attempt to salvage plants that otherwise might have been deemed too large for their landscapes. Genetically they’re still the wrong plants for the places, but maybe this pruning would allow you to buy a little extra time before you had to replace them.
Family needs change …
When our family was young I had space to play football with our sons. I had a large garden. Our kids are grown and married now, and my football days are behind me. I’ve moved on to less-threatening sports like board games and cards. I raise the vegetables my wife and I enjoy the most, but the long rows of radishes have gone by the boards.
I’ve converted many of my former vegetable gardens into simple flower gardens and even groundcover beds. I’m busier than ever with work and volunteer activities, and I’ve just decided that I needed to do a better job of prioritizing. It’s made life a lot easier.
Life changes as time passes. Our expectations of our surroundings change, too, and it’s the wise gardeners among us who interpret those changes carefully and adopt them into their lifestyles accordingly.
Summer, with a glass of iced tea and sitting in a comfortable chair inside, is a great time for such reflections — when it’s 102 degrees in the shade. Simply contemplating becomes a wonderful pastime.
You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 p.m. and on WBAP 820AM Sunday mornings 8-10 a.m. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.
