Garden Design: Plant Communities for Wildlife

When Jo Clifton and Roger Duncan bought the old property next door, they envisioned an urban wildlife sanctuary. Enter Leah Churner and Holly Gardovsky of Delta Dawn Gardens. Working with Seedlings Landscape Design Build, they layered a matrix of Texas tough plants in tiers of raised limestone beds for year-round beauty and wildlife food pyramid.

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– The main idea was that it
was gonna be a wildlife garden. I’m Leah Churner, I’m the
owner of Delta Dawn Gardens. – And I’m Holly Gardovsky.
I work with Leah. – [Leah] Mm-hm. – My name is Jo Clifton. This
is my husband, Roger Duncan. This is really more his
brainchild than mine. (Roger chuckling) – We acquired our home
here about 30 years ago and developed the garden in
actually a couple of stages. Several years ago, we have a small swimming
pool in our backyard and we weren’t using it. And so, I worked with Taylor
at Taylormade Waterscapes and converted the swimming
pool into a koi pond, built a waterfall. It became a very active
little ecosystem. We have frogs now and
dragonflies and… – [Jo] Lots of birds. – Lots of birds. And then, a couple of years ago, the house next door
to us came up for sale and we were able to purchase it and develop this lot into
a terrace flower garden. – The house was
torn down in the, I wanna say spring of 2023. Then, seedlings came in and did the construction of
the hardscape summer of 2023. Then, we planted
– [Holly] That fall. – [Leah] October of 2023. That’s when the first
round of planting was, and it’s currently
2025 spring, right now. So, this is a
pretty young garden. – Well, the house was
built on a very steep slope and they had put
in a bunch of fill in order to make
the house level. – Well, we saw that the
foundation of the house was eight feet tall. There was a eight
foot slab in spots, so we knew there was gonna
be a big grade change and we knew there was gonna have to be quite a bit of
terracing involved to keep the ground from eroding. We got Seedlings involved
to build the hardscape and to help us figure
out how to do it. And then for the
stairs, it’s sandstone because sandstone is a little
bit better for walking on. It doesn’t get that slippery. – [Roger] Then, I wanted a
central walkway up the center and two side walkways. – There was another
garden where we had worked that there was a
pathway with a stair that had two Anacacho
orchids flanking it, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I have to do that.”
– [Holly] We loved it. – [Leah] In the design, and so that was one
of the first things that we knew we wanted to do.
– [Holly] Yeah. – And I had been reading
a lot of Doug Tallamy and got really into the idea of focusing on starting
a wildlife garden that starts with insects in mind because insects are kind of
the base of the food pyramid, you know, because
the caterpillars
feed the baby birds, and you know, it all is
this great, great cycle. – [Roger] We were very
aware of the problems with bees and butterflies
and pollinators, so we wanted to focus on it
being a pollinator garden. – [Leah] We kind of
came up with this idea for creating plant communities, creating a matrix planting
of plant communities. Each area has a ground cover, and then like a small
grass, like a sedge, and then some like
lower perennials, and then there’s
some shrubs in each. There’s different plants
of different heights that create a plant community. And what that does,
that kind of planting, it’s very densely planted and that helps keep weeds down and it helps preserve
the moisture in the soil. There’s different layers of
plants, different heights, and they do different things. For Texas, central Texas, that kind of idea of
doing a matrix planting, you might want incorporate more evergreen things.
– [Holly] Mm-hm. – [Leah] Things like
Salvia greggii is great because it’s a bloomer,
but it’s also evergreen. I love Nolinas. It’s one of my favorite
plants in this garden. We’ve got the Nolina texana
and the Nolina lindheimer. The lindheimer is
blooming right now. Yarrow, the coreopsis, the
lanceleaf coreopsis, and the purple coneflower
have evergreen rosettes. – Yeah.
– For the most part. – [Holly] And the red yucca stays green.
– [Leah] And segdges, for sure.
– Yeah, the sedges, yeah. – The sedges become very
visible in the winter. The gopher plant is not native, but I just love it. So, you know. (laughs)
– [Holly] It’s cute. (laughs) – It’s just… It’s such a great dependable
winter evergreen plant because it does not mind cold at all.
– [Holly] Yeah. – And it blooms in the winter, which is great for bees. I really like the wooly
stemodia because it is so silver and it drapes beautifully. Oh, one thing I wanted to say about the Mystic Spires sage.
– [Holly] Oh yeah. – It’s a cultivar or a nativar,
whatever you wanna call it, so it’s not strictly the, maybe the best if you were
a native plant purist. – [Holly] Yeah.
– [Leah] But it is so pretty and the bumblebees
just go crazy for it. – There’s just dozens
and dozens of bumblebees that come to visit them. – [Leah] And then, another
thing that the bumblebees love is the soft-hair marbleseed.
– [Holly] Marbleseed. – [Leah] The bumblebees
go crazy for that too. It’s good for dry shade,
but it also could take sun. There’s a lot of fencing
here, which the… You know, the clients
wanted privacy to be able to
meditate and you know, hang out and have some feeling
of enclosure in this garden. And so, the whole
place is fenced and we wanted to try to
find ways to hide the fence, hide the fences with plants. Up at the top, we’ve got vines, crossvine and coral honeysuckle. And so, the idea
is that eventually, those vines will cover the fence – For the ground cover selection
and like the lower beds, we kind of started with some
of the frogfruit and yarrows and then we kind of
just started popping other random little
things in there. I know I dug the heartleaf out of my own yard. – [Leah] Yes.
– [Holly] And we popped it into some holes where some other things
weren’t quite filling in. – I would say ground covers are less showy in
terms of bloom. Their real aesthetic feature is their colors. There’s so many different shades of green and silvery green
and blue green and lime green that you can get with the
different ground covers. – And the leaf texture is different too.
– Texture. – Like you have
the soft heartleaf, the kind of rigid yarrow and the rigid on the mistflower. – [Leah] The mistflower
and the heartleaf skullcap is a great color contrast.
– [Holly] Yeah. – They really pop
against each other. And I just love
heartleaf skullcap. It is one of my favorite plants. – Comes up early. – It blooms in May
and then it goes away. It’s summer dormant. That’s another thing
that we talk a lot about, Holly and I talk a lot about, is picking plants that
have opposite dormancies to share the space. It’s primarily a
perennial garden, but there are some
annuals in here. There’s a bunch of wildflowers. We’ve got a pocket
prairie in the front yard, but in what we call
the hummingbird garden, which is at the top
of the terraces, there are a bunch of annuals that kind of line the
former garage area where it’s commonplace to walk. And so, you know, you walk by
them and you see these annuals and they’re just really
good filler for space when the perennials
are filling in. And I like cut flowers a lot. – [Holly] Yeah.
– [Leah] I love having flowers to cut and so, that’s why, you know, it’s
fun to have some annuals. And they’re great
for pollinators too, you know, the bees
love that nectar ’cause they bloom like crazy. – And we had a lot of
Gomphrena last year, and we have even seen where some of the
Gomphrena have seeded out and their tiny seeds
are starting to pop up, so it’s coming back
(laughs) in its own way. – Part of the plant selection
or the plant palette here is not just buying plants
and bringing them in or finding plants
and planting them, but also seeing what comes up and letting things volunteer, ’cause there are
some very cool things that have volunteered
in this garden. I think we have thrown
some parsley seed out or something like that, and we had planted dill and
fennel for the swallowtails, and we got this great
parsley that just volunteered and just, it was another thing. Just let it be there. It wants to be there, and it’s- – And we’ve already seen
– It’s a cool plant. – caterpillars. – It’s been a wonderful joy and educational opportunity to watch the
seasons change here, and we’ve attracted so
many more different species of birds and insects and
such since we developed this. – I’m especially excited
about all the birds that come here and you know, they also probably are
enjoying some of the insects that we’re attracting. That’s just a lot of fun to see. – Have a fox that goes
through occasionally and armadillos
come in, of course, and it’s a wonderful
place to spend our time.