SPRING BRANCH – Diana and Jasper Brown bought their 1.1-acre property in Mystic Shores just before the pandemic began. At the time, the backyard was little more than a narrow patch of land that sloped steeply into a stream bed far below. It was almost completely unusable.
The front yard was mostly dirt and rocks, cut in by a handful of brittle cedars and some cacti.
Wanting to expand their outdoor recreation options, the Austin-based couple tackled their backyard first in spring 2020 and then their front yard this summer. The result is a low-water landscape that looks authentic to the area with plenty of landscaping to create areas for recreation.
“I have a large Hispanic family, including our three oldest children and six grandchildren,” Diana said. “When they come, we take inside the house and all the backyard as well. We will have music here and we will show movies on the back wall of the house.”
The new landscaping features many types of gravel, limestone floors, large boulders, and even larger boulders. But thanks to the blending of textures and colors, the judicious use of flowering native plants, and the way the landscape designer took advantage of the natural changes in elevation, the result was a warm and inviting yard.
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There are now several seating areas, including a fire pit area, dining table, bird watching area, and porch off the back of the house. Much of the ground is covered with Mexican stone floors laid in sinuous courses with small bluish-black pebbles, sometimes called shadow stone, filling the space in between.
“We chose Mexican plastered stone because it has a smoother surface and cleaner look than the rustic, jagged Texas limestone,” said designer Cooper Henk, owner of Skyline Landscaping in New Braunfels. “It also contrasts well with the darker shade stone.”
The courtyard has many changes in elevation, and Henk has built thick and heavy stair steps using limestone waterfall boulders, which have an inviting undulating texture created by eons of water flowing over them. To help direct the rainwater, he laid out 3- to 5-inch river rocks in various shades of brown as borders along the concrete driveway and as a flowerbed.
Hardscape dominates the landscape of Deanna and Jasper Brown’s Spring Branch home. But thanks to the combination of stone textures and colors and judicious use of native flowering plants, the home is warm and welcoming.
Jessica Phelps / Staff PhotographerBrown said each stage took about three weeks to complete and they all used 150 tons of stone and cost about $44,000 – all worth it.
Diana said the lighting installed in the large oak trees that surround the backyard casts a soft, magical glow on everything. “It is beautiful, like a full moon,” she said.
But before any of the design work began, Henk had to build a backyard height of up to 8 feet. The new yard now extends out of the house by about 25 feet.
“I’ve been doing this kind of landscaping for about six years now, and I love that kind of work,” he said. “We brought in clean shovels – rocks, dirt and grit – to raise the ground and we have to do some nice work.”
While most of the hardscape had to be brought in, Henk made use of many of the rocks already on the ground for many of the lower rock walls on the slope to control erosion and used the larger rocks for retaining walls and as walkway edges.
The fire pit surrounded by chairs is one of the many outdoor seating areas in the back of Spring Branch Home.
Jessica Phelps / Staff Photographer“Do you see it there?” he asked, pointing to a rock that was about 5 feet high and 4 feet wide. “Move something so big up a hillside, you fear it will move away from you. He made things so much fun.”
In the front of the house he used large cuts of different colored stones, with a long and wide border in between, to great effect. “We wanted something as beautiful in the front as it is in the back,” Diana said. “And we didn’t want it to look like something everyone else in the neighborhood had.”
However, when Henk first proposed the design, Deanna had her doubts. “I thought, mixing different colored rocks?” “Yekes, that’s crazy,” she said.
Henk said, “I seldom say to a client, ‘Believe me.’ But that’s what I did.”
The street-facing patio is covered in 1-inch washed limestone pebbles, a white that connects the landscape to the house while also contrasting nicely with the river brown and bluish shade stone that Henk also used. These, in turn, highlight the wide strip of green lawn that runs directly in front of the house.
“When it rains, the white rocks turn a different color, and more gray,” Diana said. “She’s so beautiful. I love him.”
Many of the original mountain cedars, trimmed to look like trees, provide some vertical interest while allowing the house to appear from the street. And the front yard is planted with a variety of drought-tolerant native greenery, including red yucca, agave, muhalai grass, several species of cacti, Texas sage, some succulents, garlic, rosemary, and salvia.
“We see a lot of hummingbirds and butterflies and all the birds you can name,” Brown said. “It is exceptional. We are very happy.”
rmarini@express-news.net | Twitter: @RichardMarini