Contemporary Courtyard Makeover

FIn a ground-level makeover, Sarah Nemec and Roice Nelson scrapped the lawnmower for outdoor living and wildlife habitat. Sarah broke up the plain backyard with inviting nooks linked by colorful blossoms, fragrance, and evergreen enclosure. Just as Sarah’s designs evolved through trial and error, so did she as a gardener.

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– We knew we didn’t want grass. We didn’t want a lawn to mow. I had the idea to put
all the limestone gravel, almost like some of the
beer gardens around town, essentially making the yard an extension of the
house, a hangout area. And it has definitely evolved. The beds were more
perimeter, very narrow. And over the last few years, they’ve expanded and
expanded and expanded for more planting area. And so now we’ve
got specific places for different activities. I’m Sarah Nemec, and we ended up here
in 2014 actually. We moved into a
little tiny bungalow and lived in that
for five years. We had to tear it
down, unfortunately, because it was beyond repair. It was just deferred
maintenance, disrepair. So we completed the
new house in 2020, and that’s when the yard
and garden really took off. – My name is Roice Nelson,
I’m Sarah’s husband, and she’s the queen bee
and I’m the worker bee. (Roice laughs) And it’s just been really cool watching how much this
backyard has changed over the last few years and
what she’s done with it. And I love sitting
back here too. And just enjoying
the time out here is my favorite thing about it. – The pergola area: initially
we had a stock tank pool because, you know, it’s
nice to have an area to stay cool in the summer. But decided we didn’t
wanna keep up with the care of the stock tank pool, wanted an area that was still
a place where we could gather. And so I came up
with the pergola idea and employed Roice to
help me execute it. – [Roice] Worker bee.
– Yep, worker bee. And some neighbors
and some friends. It’s really ended up being
a lovely hangout spot. The table bases came from
a overstock yard sale from a local restaurant company. And then I found a stone remnant of a really exotic,
striking piece of stone so that I’d have a
gorgeous focal point. The fence actually was a chain
link for years and years. We added the privacy
fence a couple years ago, and I knew that I
wanted to paint it black because I knew that the plants would be very striking
against the black, that they would pop
off of the black and the fence would recede. And I think that
that’s been effective. Separating the pergola
area from the fire pit area so you really do have
these separate moments was unintentional plan. The bed between them used
to be just a little strip, but we widened it. The prickly pear was actually
here when we bought the house, and now this year it’s huge and it’s just
gonna keep growing. – She’s really, yeah,
sculptured that. She shaped it. Surprisingly, yeah. – Yeah, I didn’t
realize that, you know, this is something
that you could do, and I can’t remember
how I figured it out or if someone told me. And so, yeah, now I’ve just
been snapping the limbs off, and then I have stuff
to share with friends, which is really fun. Well, I’ll let you
talk about the fire pit because we’ve actually
had the fire pit… – [Roice] For 10 years.
– [Sarah] For 10 years. – It was our ninth anniversary, which was 10 years ago
’cause next year is our 20th. It has nine sides, and the welder, the constructor
that made it for us, he was enjoying the
math aspect of this, and so he wanted to make
the bottom part of it in the golden ratio to the top. Well, it turns out there’s
different mathematical ratios associated with each polygon and there’s a different
one for a nonagon than there is for a pentagon. So there is the analog
of the golden ratio of this fire pit is the ratio of the
bottom to the top, associated with a nonagon. – And then the area
around the fire pit, again, like we started
with smaller beds. We actually were
on a trip in Marfa, and we were in a fire pit yard at a bar that we were
enjoying one evening, and were surrounded by plants. And we both were like, “We
wanna duplicate this feeling. “We wanna feel like you’re
lost in the plants.” And so it’s been a journey
adding more plants, bringing the beds in to the area and finding the right plants. So I still am working towards getting the height that I want, and it’s getting there, but I’ve got a few more years on some of the
plants that are in. – I want to call that out too because my phone
the other day did, you know, the For
You photos showed up, and a photo from that
inspiration spot in Marfa sitting around the fire
pit showed up again. And I was sitting out
here and looking around, and I actually like what
Sarah’s ended up creating here even better than that
inspiration stuff too as well. So even though she always
wants more, it’s beautiful, and it has even already
surpassed the inspiration that we saw in Marfa,
you know, five years ago. – The look is different because it’s definitely
desert plants there. I started out wanting
a tropical paradise. I like tropical trips. I wanted to feel like I was in
a tropical paradise at home. There have been lessons learned about what will
work and what won’t. So that’s an evolution trying to find things
that will give that look and approximate a
tropical paradise but can handle our freezes
and can handle our summers. I wanted to put in plants
that would be evergreen so that it’s bright or something cheerful to
look at in the winter. But also there’s a
lot of fun with color, and the color in
the different blooms also helps contribute
to that tropical feel. – The bamboo has been
really cool to watch ’cause it was just four
clumps and they were little. And I didn’t have the vision. Sarah had the vision. So like what it’s
turned into now kind of blows me away. And it really did. After year three, it really
took off this past year. I wanted to talk
about Sarah’s mom too, because it’s been cool. So Sarah and I have been
together for over 20 years, and watching Sarah in
the house she grew up in when we first started dating, watching her mom garden there and now watching Sarah just like next generation
of it has been… – [Sarah] It’s true. – [Roice] Really, really neat. – I didn’t identify
as a gardener until
the last few years, but she was
definitely an example. She was a teacher, and in the summers
she was off from work. She would be out there in the
yard before we even woke up, and that’s where she would
spend a lot of her days. So yeah. Hi, Paulette. – Yeah, when we built the house, well, a lot of what
we talked about and how we were gonna do it
was with the cats in mind. – We had a catio. It was like a kit on the little
house that was here before. And then when we were designing
and building this house, we figured that we could use the screened-in
porch for our use. And we do, we love it. We use it all the time. But, yeah, it’s a catio also. – We work hard so our cats
can have a better life. (Roice laughs) – I wanted to be able
to see out to the yard, so I picked trees that were
gonna have open structure that you can see through. The Sweet Bubba is lovely because it gives me
beautiful flowers and I love the way it smells. And then the Palo Verde was
the most recent addition to bring height to that side. One of the other things
that I considered was: how could you stimulate
all the senses in a space? So sight is obvious,
you’ve got the plants, but distinction
in texture, color, I’m a sucker for
anything variegated. And then for taste, we’ve got… Well, we’ve got edibles, and then of course the herbs. And sound? Well, the birds go crazy. And I see the hummingbirds flit
from the sage to the cannas. It’s really fun to
watch what they do. The plants have
been an evolution figuring out what
works in the heat, what works in the
cold, and what doesn’t. And it’s gonna keep changing. (light upbeat music)