Pet-Friendly Back Yard, Lighting, and Native Beds

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Priorities: – Prolific Front Yard Beds – Dog Run in Back Yard – Shaded Outdoor Seating
Challenges: – Tricky Sunlight Conditions – Damaged Landscape
Solutions: – Light-Matched Planting – Custom Steel Edging – Resilient Surfaces

Two critical concerns for our client guided this residential project. The first was a marginal frontyard garden bed that refused to flourish — either the side in deep shade or the one in constant sunlight.

The second (and more important) was a high-energy family dog named Fargo. Or, more accurately, what Fargo had done to the back yard.

Over the years, the shepherd mix ran a deep trench into his favorite stretch of the property and had reduced a lot of his humans’ landscaping efforts to dust. The challenge was to create a stable solution that could still accommodate the vigorous pet.

In front, a new bed with robust, custom-welded 3/16” steel edging would need to trace the profile of the house and hold plants better suited to their sun exposure.

A final objective: Create a backyard seating space in the shade of a big pecan tree.

Maas Verde pulled up the existing front yard edging, designed new pattern, and sank the new material.

front yard garden beds

For Fargo’s run, we chose a bocce court filled a heavy layer of 5/8″ granite gravel. A standup limestone patio and commercial-grade low-voltage lighting framed the back yard seating area.

a stone patio

We placed native plants stragetically in the front yard beds. Turks cap (M. arboreus), sea oats (C. latifolium), and beauty berry (C. americana) went into the shady side and flame acanthus (A. quadrifidus), multiple salvia variants, and Gregg’s mistflower (C. greggii), in the sun.

As a finishing touch, Maas Verde revitalized a rear trellis where a maladapted star jasmine had died in the 2021 winter storm. Star jasmine is a non-native species that doesn’t tolerate cold weather especially well, and can be water-consumptive.

a gravel dog run

Instead, Maas Verde installed coral honeysuckle — a native climber that attracts pollinators with its beautiful red fluted flowers.

Rain Capture Sanctuary

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Priorities: Rainwater Catchment – Outdoor Seating – Native Plantings
Challenges: Expansive Grass Lawn
Solutions: Channel Rainwater to Cistern and Rain Garden – Install Patio – Terrace and Grade Area

This cistern, rain garden, and patio project functioned as an example of mutual inspiration. Maas Verde’s nature-centric client helped us reframe our own thinking about rain gardens. And in turn, we helped her vision become a lush, rain-collecting, native planted reality.

A small shady spot below a tall pecan tree overlooked a gently sloping turfgrass lawn. It was a natural seating area, and the install would revolve around it.  

The plan incorporated a 20’ x 10’ rain garden swale with berms, native karst limestone boulders, a 1,000-gallon galvanized cistern, and 317 native plants representing 17 species. This and a honed limestone patio would partially replace the Zoysia grass lawn. Advantageously, we were able to repurpose some materials from the site: ¼” steel edging, and part of a limestone block wall encircling the tree.

Maas Verde built an 8’ x 8’ CMU (concrete masonry unit) pad for the cistern to stand on. To match the block walls to the house foundation, the crew finished the surfaces with stucco. A 5-foot pony wall helps divide it from the side yard. And a galvanized pipe trellis help screen and cool the tank, once native coral honeysuckle plantings establish.

The rainwater catchment system works via collection and cascade. First, piping funnels rainwater from the roof into the tank. When the tank overflows, it disperses into the rain garden below. Finally, a gentle channel cut into the garden and adjacent limestone wall allows any water still moving downhill into the lawn. 

The system handles a surprising capacity of water. Together, the cistern and garden can hold 1,980 gallons. That’s enough to fill about 45 bathtubs to the brim. In a 1” rain event, the client’s roof would collect 840 gallons of rainwater.

Maas Verde’s system only needs to capture a fraction of that to sustain its hearty native plantings. The outdoor seating component adds novel functionality to the space.

“Most people don’t think of rain gardens as landscapes that are particularly geared toward humans. They’re considered more like ecologically-focused elements than practical spaces for people to hang out,” Maas Verde project manager John Harris explained. “But this design proved, any rain garden can be both at the same time.”

Preschool Playground Refresh and Reconfigure

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Project Description:

This North Austin Preschool wanted to redesign and refresh the landscape around their playground. The old playground had rotting timber log borders and uneven loose gravel. Maas Verde was called in to redesign the layout of the landscape using new cedar logs and refreshing most of the area with kid-friendly mulch for safety.

The work consisted on removing a spiral feature on the existing play set, removing, and disposing of existing wood border, replacing wood border with cedar logs and bringing the borders inward by a couple feet, creating two gravel islands; one for the swing set and one for the play set area and mulching the areas around the cedar log border and in the play area adjacent to the swing set.