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We were contacted by the owner of
a Houston, Texas home who asked us to design a series of
gardens and landscaping features that would compliment and
expand the Mediterranean theme of his house into the surrounding
landscape. This house sat on a very large lot of several acres
in a secluded Memorial Drive neighborhood located near the 610
Loop. The home featured a symmetrical, linear appearance in
spite of its two-story build, and our client wanted a landscape
and garden design that would follow these same principles of
self-contained regularity and subtle linear motion.
Creating a Mediterranean theme in a Houston, Texas garden and
landscape is a bit more complex that it might appear at face
value. The southern coast of Europe—particularly in Italy and
Greece—is a mountainous area where homes and gardens are built
on steep angles and sharp vertical rises. Gardens and fields are
often built in terraces that climb the mountains due to the
limited planting area and rough, rocky terrain. Limestone is the
predominant rock type in Italy and Greece and has become iconic
of this part of the world in our collective consciousness.
Mediterranean homes and gardens are historically famous for
their white stucco walls, olive groves, and carefully sculptured
greenery embedded in a rugged limestone backdrop.
The challenge lay in taking an essentially three-dimensional
landscaping style and transfering it to a Houston property. As
we all know, this part of Texas is very flat, so a hillside
garden is out of the question in the literal sense. However,
using a combination of symmetrical forms and linear
progressions, along with some innovative garden materials, we
were able to mimic several aspects of seaside European terrain.
The key to doing this was to establish a combination of circular
forms and linear patterns in the multiple garden elements we
designed. French and
Italian gardens place a heavy emphasis on order and
symmetry, and both tend to utilize right angles to establish
form. We planted a variety of low level growth around the house
and rear
swimming pool patio to emphasize its walls and corners. We
then added three keynote forms to the landscape to create a
Houston equivalent of a
Mediterranean garden.
 The
first of these forms was a
knot garden centered on the front door, located just in
front of the home’s motorcourt. We planted boxwoods in three
circular rows that looked like terraces on a hillside. In the
center of the knot garden we planted Loropatalum, punctuated
with a lone Crinum lily as the center piece. The rich purple of
the Loropatalum draws catches the eye, and the vertical
dimension added by the lily draws it upward to the front
entrance of the house.
 Moving
then to one side of the house, we transformed a substantial
portion of the yard into a
parterre garden that centered on a large glass room that
extended from the west wing of the house. This garden was
populated by low-growth rose bushes whose amenability to
constant trimming makes them an ideal plant material for
parterre gardens, and whose colorful blooms a made them stand
out from multiple vantage points throughout this Houston
neighborhood. The garden borders were made from of boxwood
hedges, and the central pathways were made using European
limestone gravel that mimics the color of the limestone cliffs
of the Aegean and Adriatic Seas. We then completed the design by
adding dwarf yaupon, a small shrub that bears a curious
resemblance to clouds, all along the borders of the gravel
walkways. This helped create the impression that the garden was
located on a hilltop near the sea, and that the clouds were
rolling across the shoreline.
One of the most appealing attributes of this Houston, Texas
property is its superb location. The back of the yard borders a
50-foot ravine carved out of the earth by a major tributary of
Buffalo Bayou. This seemed to us a natural destination spot for
garden guests to visit after strolling around the west wing of
the home to the pool. To encourage them to do so, we planted an
alley of crepe myrtles leading from the pool area all the way
back to the woods along the ravine. We then built a walkway out
of limestone aggregate blocks that started at the parterre
garden, ran alongside the house to the pool, then ran straight
out through the alley of trees to the scenic overlook of the
forest and stream below.
For more the 20 years
Exterior Worlds has specialized in servicing many of Houston's
fine neighborhoods.
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