Heights Shop

Houston Heights Association

2 weeks ago

Congratulations to our September Yard of the Month recipients: Maureen & Lucky Sahualla at 334 W. 22nd Street🎉🌺🦋🏡

Maureen and Lucky purchased their home in 2001. At the time, the front yard consisted of two large bald cypress trees encircled with red brick flower beds planted with purple lantana and some grass, along with other traditional Houston shrubs, and a couple of trees that didn’t survive Hurricane Ike.

The bald cypress trees, home to a lively scurry of squirrels, provided a great deal of shade – so much so that grass would not grow in the front yard, and the purple lantana planted at the base of the trees only bloomed for a week or two during the spring before the branches filled out.

After a couple of years of mowing dirt and weeds in the front yard, Maureen decided it was time for a change. In 2003, Barb Turner, a local Heights landscaper referred by Maureen’s next door neighbor, helped convert the scraggly patch of grass and dirt in the front yard into a “no-mow” front yard flower garden that included a crushed granite path and stone-bordered flower beds filled with Japanese holly ferns, spider plants, flax lilies, Persian shield, purple Virginia iris, bat faced cuphea, orange butterfly bush, and lots of purple, pink, white, orange, and red impatiens.

Over the years, the cypress trees grew ever higher, the shade increased, and the impatiens, which had naturalized and grew back every spring for several years, no longer did well. The bat faced cuphea also died off, and the butterfly bush was transplanted to a sunnier spot in the backyard.

Maureen replaced the impatiens with pentas, which have continuously reseeded over the years. The pentas have gone especially wild this year and have now taken over most of the left and front beds. However, they attract many bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and small children, providing great front porch entertainment.

Other plants added over the last few years to the front yard were a dwarf chenille plant under one of the bald cypress trees, purple shamrock, and several “rescue plants” and cuttings received from friends and family, including shrimp plant, purple angelonia, purple amaryllis belladonna, white spider crinum, white vinca, two recently added “frosty pink” angel’s trumpets from cuttings generously shared by a gardening neighbor, and volunteer white-veined pipevine. An ongoing challenge is finding pollinator plants that can grow and bloom under the ever-increasing shade of the cypress trees.

Originally from the Midwest (Nebraska), Maureen has been amazed at how easy it is to grow flowers in Houston’s subtropical climate and continues to enjoy tinkering away in her garden on weekends. As Rudyard Kipling says, “Gardens are not made by singing ‘oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.” And as Cicero says, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

We would like to thank Joshua's Native Plants for the very nice gift certificate awarded to our September Yard of the Month recipients. ... See MoreSee Less