My favorite Live Oak in our front yard, and my view from my porch.
It all started with relocating two patio chairs to the east-facing front porch and a metal orange stool serving as a side table. It was nothing fancy, but all of a sudden, we had a quiet place to watch our dog play, see neighbors walking by, read, listen to music, and enjoy the view under our largest and most serene live oak trees.
With much of the gardening work moving to the front. The front porch is now a place for garden supplies and tools as well as sitting and resting.
I have always been a believer in creating sacred spaces, but they were mostly focused toward the interior. After we decided to fence our front yard after living here for a year, it was a game changer for me. It allowed me to adopt a companion dog and keep people and their trash out of our yard.
After the fence was added, I spent the next two years complaining about the noise from the hourly church bells that ring from nine to nine, traffic roaring down the adjacent busy street, and the nearly constant noise and chaos from the apartment complex just behind my west-facing back garden. It was hard to imagine that any kind of sacred space could be created to block any of that away, and so I grew an unruly garden out of raised beds and containers serving as another barricade from the back west and south sides of my yard.
As a beginner gardener out of my nearly perfect California element, I struggled with understanding the heat, freeze, water limitations, and most of all the unrelenting mosquitoes and other pests. So now it was my fourth year, and I felt beaten. I had accumulated close to 20 raised containers, along with every stick and trellis imaginable. My garden was basically a mess. By moving those two patio chairs to the front, I just put the garden failures behind me while I took a breather and licked my wounds.
Sitting on the porch gave me space to breathe and enjoy what I had built thus far: a fairly tidy xeriscaped front and some surviving patches of grass and cactus. From the surface, our house looked somewhat tended and cared for. Some visiting friends and neighbors thought it felt calming walking into our front yard and didn’t notice all the broken bits or the fact that half my plants had died in the last freeze. All they felt and saw were the enormous oaks looking down on us.
I had a dream once before I left California that my future home would be surrounded by live oaks. My original thought was somewhere up in the mountains of Northern California, but one day after my move to Austin, I stepped outside to the sway of five live oak trees and saw that my dream had been realized here in Austin. But I still felt off and a little foreign even in my own yard.
Dreams are a funny thing. They serve mostly as resources for answers when my conscious self can’t hear, and where only the quiet of sleep allows me to see clearly. But I wasn’t looking for an answer when the oaks came to me. It was more of a foretelling of what was to come, and the meaning would show up years later in my garden—a garden I had to create before I could understand the meaning of that live oak dream.
The first year we arrived, our yard was grass with a small xeriscape, and our L-shaped backyard was mostly dirt with a bit of grass here and there. It was essentially a clean slate. I instinctively freed three of the oaks’ roots buried by giant slabs of concrete. One tree, nearly dead, has been growing new branches since. I landscaped on the cheap, trying to create what I thought was a Texas version of an English garden. I had rocks where there was once grass or dirt of all shapes. I thought it was a good idea to use them around the newly acquired raised beds. It looked okay for a year, but the first humid, rainy season turned every lovely stone into a slippery, moldy mess. I began tripping on the rocks and the slimy pavers. I cleaned, I scrubbed, and I swept all the unrelenting leaves that fell twice—and in a year, my young garden looked like it was 100 years old. The annual yellow pollen, and then the flying inchworms that inevitably ended up tucked somewhere in my hair, didn’t help either.
I tackled my disappointment by planting more and setting up trellises wherever there was an opening of sun. By the fourth year, my garden was no longer producing anything edible. Considering the space, time, cost, and water, I was lucky to find one baby tomato for our salad. I took a planting break in my fifth year and let more things die. I stopped tending the garden, and I also stopped spending time in the backyard—until I discovered the front porch.
My once Texas English garden overrun, and where most of the plants died by mid Summer. I am hoping this will return to its glory in the new front garden.
This is our sixth spring. I decided to do a small test of fall planting last year, and it turned out better than expected. Some of my moveable containers could stay on the south side of the yard, where they could get plenty of sun and shade, making it more conducive overall. But I realized one morning, looking out from the porch, that I wasn’t going to spend any time in the back because I really hated those spaces. I had built something based on cost rather than practicality, and after a pretty severe knee injury last summer, I knew that my garden was not meeting my aging needs.
My husband and I took the plunge and turned over our project to professional designers and landscapers. Their goal was to create a minimalist backyard space that enhanced the oaks and removed any flooring that could be a danger in years to come. We removed the uneven steps and built a nice ramp to wheel my barrel easily between the front and back gardens. We created more walking space and sitting nooks. I decided to leave three four-by-four short planters as my permanent year-round herbal and medicinal flower beds in the southwest corner where there is lovely sun. These beds are easy to cover, be it during a heatwave or a snowstorm. We also updated our drip system in the back to meet the oaks’ and new plants’ water needs.
My back Live Oaks. Once I move the firewood storage, I will have a clear view of both trees from this back sitting area. This is how it looks now cleaned up of the above garden mess into a tidy place to relax.
What we ended up with was more sacred spaces to enjoy, and all the things that irritated me about our location started to fade. I moved my vegetable garden to the front northeast-facing corner, where it will get the early morning sun, and by the time the Texas heat arrives, the plants will be shaded. Just changing directions and seasons made all the difference. The front garden is a work in process, but I will start with what I know grows here. The summer choices are few, but maybe that’s okay because fall comes quickly, and winters are relatively mild—perfect for my Chinese leafy greens to survive up until the second frost. Expanding through life doesn’t always mean having more; sometimes it’s just about doing less—but with more enjoyment. I can ponder the changes ahead, or not at all, on those lazy mornings, sipping tea and watching my dog chase squirrels while nestled under my favorite oak.
Most of my raised bed containers are here in the front part of the yard at the South West corner. I am hoping the softer sun and late afternoon shade will give my plants a chance to breath, and stay strong and resistant to the pests. But I am only growing melons, beans, okra, and corn this Summer. Come fall, I hope to grow the rest of my bounty where the temperature is milder.
Do you have a sacred space in your garden—or are you still figuring out where it is? I’d love to hear about your own gardening journey in the comments.