Tricia and I have just returned from a xeriscape garden tour. Some of the members of our garden club were included on the tour, so we plotted a route that would take us past each one of those and then added a couple more that were conveniently along the route. We couldn’t possibly see all of the gardens on the tour but five made a nice day’s outing.

Several of them were front yards that had recently been converted from lawn grass into installations of native wildflowers and drought-hardy shrubs. They were definite improvements over an expanse of St. Augustine, but more what I would call exterior decorating than gardens. They did not seem like places I would want to spend much time in.

The two that appealed to me were both small backyards, private spaces rather than public spaces, and both were shady. Those are features that I appreciate but they were not the main reasons I liked them. One was a simple stone courtyard extending the length of the backyard surrounded by garden beds with mature plants chosen by the owner who was a landscape designer as well as a gardener. It appealed because it was such a comfortable space for outdoor living and entertaining.

My favorite though was behind a tiny cottage. Beneath a giant cedar elm, certified as the largest in Texas, was a fairyland of ferns, groundcovers and small understory trees and shrubs. There was a winding brick path and interspersed among the plants was a variety of small sculptures and old musical instruments. It was all very quaint and whimsical, but every one of the woodland plantings seemed so naturally to belong where it was that you could easily believe that it had just grown up that way by itself.

It had not just grown up that way, however. This turned out to be the only one of the gardens that had not been designed by the owner. In fact it was designed by the well-known author Sally Wasowski, although the owner had added the musical instruments and made other changes.