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Variations in a Theme: Opposites Attract in Houston Couple's Lush Urban Environment

Posted on: Saturday, 8 April 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Kathy Huber, Houston Chronicle

Apr. 8--He likes gnarly and pointy plants, twisting trees, an overgrown look.

She likes flowers for cutting, grasses, vegetables, a more refined look. "I tend to like it too neat. Edgar's wild and woody," Graeme Marston says of her husband.

But a mutual fascination with natural diversity allows the Marstons to have it all in their Memorial Park-area garden of surprisingly gregarious opposites. Agaves and Louisiana irises, dyckias and daylilies, Texas ebony, Mexican oak and magnolias coexist here.

This is not the first time they have successfully married a wildly varied plant collection. The Marstons, who received the 1994 Park People's Grass Roots Award for their efforts to preserve green spaces, also were recognized for the multifaceted acreage at their previous home in Dickinson.

In 2002, they bought two houses on two small lots on a dead-end corner in Houston, tore down one house and transformed the other into a contemporary ranch design. They added a lanai and a lap pool with shimmering white tiles inlaid on the bottom to suggest two fish. And they called on Mark Fox of Mark Fox Landscape Co. to help them bring the feel of their former garden to their new city home. Their goal again was to attract birds and butterflies

Fox, who has worked with the Marstons for 12 years, saw the need for a strong design to accommodate a broad plant palette. He has provided that underlying order, given the garden a sense of clarity and movement, and made sure no plant fights with another.

Well, maybe he's allowed a little brawl every now and then. Keeps the interest up.

Wonders come in small and large packages here. There's the subtle surprise of clusters of rainlilies at the street's edge, and the big, bold aha of a rotund fertility goddess, a dark-gray stone sculpture from Zimbabwe at a bend in the front walk. An appropriate introduction to the garden's abundance, the statue also symbolizes the couple's love of art.

Framed by graceful Mediterranean Aleppo pines, the statue rises near the mounding, plump, needlelike foliage of rosemary and the finely cut foliage of 'Powis Castle' artemisia -- a nice textural vignette. Cobalt-blue edging lobelia peeks from beneath the silvery foliage.

The Marstons wanted the privacy of an enclosed garden out front, but without a fence. Larger plants, such as a stand of 'Little Gem' magnolias, and Skinner's banana shrub, a billowy shrub with fragrant, creamy blooms, provide green screens.

Unexpected plant groupings fill the front garden. Chinese evergreen sweetspire, yellow star grass, winecups, carex and a thorny, tiny-leaf Texas ebony mark a path near a rain garden that nurtures spiderwort, lizard's tail, blue rush (Juncus), Louisiana iris and a Drummond red maple.

Pools of 'Melody' white dianthus, violas, lavender petunias, bright yellow 'Indian Summer' rudbeckia and bluebonnets sprinkle color along the front walk. A collection of daylilies will soon come into their own. The fleshy green foliage of Agave celsii, a humidity-tolerant Mexican native, and the sturdy, blue-gray rosettes of A. americana var. protoamericana intermingle with the rich purple flower clusters of creeping 'Homestead' verbena.

Stiffly arching clumps of narrow-leaf dyckias, a more drought-tolerant member of the bromeliad clan, accent a low brick wall that emphasizes the horizontal lines of the home. And there's a treasured, daggerlike A. dasylirioides, perhaps the oldest living agave.

A blur of bamboo muhly, a wispy ornamental grass; prostrate plum yew (Cephalataxus harringtonia drupacae), an evergreen shrub; a cedar elm with corky winged growths along its branches; and a redbud planted for nostalgia's sake share a curbside bed with 'Little Buckeroo,' an upright shrub rose with small, bright-red blooms; and manfredea, the curious snake plant.

Across the drive, an abstract red metal sculpture sits among soft clumps of Lindheimer muhly, a native grass, and Aloe saponaria, a succulent with tubular pinkish-orange blooms atop 3-foot-tall slender stems.

The botanical library in the side garden includes viburnums, carex, Mexican begonias, fuchsia firespike, Philippine lilies, Mexican beautyberry and erythrina, or coral tree.

In the back garden, calendula, dill, verbena, arugula, mustard and tomatoes congregate with Mexican sage in beds at one end of the pool. A welded-brass statue of a mother and child rises above a fountain that spills from a low brick wall into a dark-blue lap pool. Mustard-colored French pots with succulents help set the stage.

The Marstons enjoy breakfast in a texture-packed pocket garden that sits off the kitchen. The corrugated leaves of grass palm, variegated 'Sparkler' carex, finger-friendly dyckias and variegated kadsura, a well-behaved shade vine, are key players here.

From here they can follow the gravel walkway/dog run that winds along the back of the property past an art-festooned wood fence, sculptures, gingers and a bamboo screen before stopping to admire the cabbage in Graeme's raised vegetable plot.

kathy.huber@chron.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, Houston Chronicle

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Source: Houston Chronicle

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