Garden Variety
We Texans do a lot of living outdoors, and we like to decorate our al fresco spaces. Here’s a guide to the yard art of your dreams, from antique benches and cast-iron planters to cedar trellises and––what else?––pink concrete flamingos.
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Still can’t quite grasp the notion of the outdoor room? A visit to Weston Gardens in Bloom, on the southeast edge of Fort Worth, ought to clarify the concept. Its retail nursery is a straightforward purveyor of native and well-adapted plants with little in the way of accessories besides pots, steel yard stakes (giant swizzle sticks topped with dragonflies, rabbits, and snails, $15—$40), and gazing balls ($49—$200). But cross the street and pass under a stone archway, and you’ll think you’ve gone through the looking glass. The spring day I strolled around Weston, I watched other visitors succumb to the magic of its intimate green spaces. One woman sat on a teak bench by a waterfall with wisteria and iris blooming around her, knitting away, and another rocked her baby in a secluded cove near the formal lily pond. Each of the five or so “rooms” featured a comfortable seat, a bit of ornament like a yard stake or a concrete cat, and a meditative feature like a pond, fountain, or waterfall.
Houston
A SIX-FOOT-HIGH CYCLONE FENCE SURROUNDS the big, ramshackle house at the center of Adkins Architectural Antiques near downtown Houston. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to keep nighttime marauders out or all the merchandise in. I loved the 1910 patio set, a table and four chairs that must have been fashioned by a metal worker with a doily fetish ($550); the eight-foot-tall white-marble fountain with the tactile allure of a baby’s skin ($6,500); and the vintage green enamel Snack Master cooler (don’t look for it; I loved it so much I bought it for $65). Adkins sells a variety of reproduction Victorian patio sets and streetlights, but it’s the bits of demolished buildings and the European curios unearthed by partner Hervè de Salve that make this such a happy hunting ground. Take the four-foot-square lead panels with two lions’ heads in bas-relief, salvaged from a Chicago office building ($995 each); Hervè suggests mounting one on a garden wall, drilling a hole in each lion’s mouth, and making a fountain. Or the lacy cast-iron floor grates ($20 each; use them for trivets or small tabletops) and the 1901 paving bricks ($1.25 each). You’ll find superstylish tomato cages topped with finials ($10— $50), simple five-foot-tall steel trellises ($22), and carved-stone fountains, like one with a wide-eyed man spitting water ($7,500).
If nineteenth-century Europeans had known how expensive their ceramic chimney pots would be someday ($175—$1,200), they never would have sent smoke up them. In addition to a grand collection of these oddities, which look like slightly sooty chess pieces for the Jolly Green Giant, the Garden Gate sells a wealth of antique garden benches with a-peeling green paint jobs ($1,000—$1,350), antique hip-height ceramic olive jars from Greece that could hold a double-lifetime supply of martini garnishes for Dean Martin ($2,100 each), a concrete birdbath covered with a green and mauve tile mosaic ($600), iron folding chairs (lyre-back $375, bistro-style $149), and a six-sided English dovecote I know my cat would love to live in ($1,089).
San Antonio
THE ALLURE OF THE GARDEN CENTER at Los Patios is twofold. First, the nursery is tucked in a shopping complex so charming that my first visit there several years ago influenced the design of my current house. You exit the congested Loop 410, then cruise down a meandering drive through a tunnel of trees to the stores—homelike structures, connected by pathways and breezeways, that are clustered in the woods by a creek. (The place is still recovering from last fall’s one-hundred-year flood and seems a little deserted now, but it’s open for business.) In addition to its inspiring setting, the garden center offers a few choice accessories, such as euphonious tubular-steel wind chimes by Music of the Spheres ($65—$325) and occasional tables topped with mosaics of handmade tiles by artist Colleen Sorenson in themes ranging from cowboys with cactus to cats with fish bones ($364—$410).
Patrolled by a trio of friendly felines, Shades of Green is a quiet little nursery that concentrates on plants, but deep in the heart of all that flora lurk ornamental dreams: a birdbath-planter combo made of cypress stumps ($475), a bench fashioned from rough branches and two big slabs of wood ($1,375), and cross sections of tree trunk, two feet in diameter, to use as stepping stones ($45). But wait a minute—tap, tap—that’s not wood! That’s concrete, masterfully manipulated, down to the rough bark and wormholes, by a company in Pleasanton aptly named Illusions in Concrete.
Elsewhere
IN AN UNASSUMING MOSS-GREEN HOUSE in a modest neighborhood in Brenham, Margaret Shanks Garden Antiques has a tempting collection of wares. For the past nine years owner Shanks has traveled to Europe—mainly England—and scoured the countryside for old garden furnishings, some dating back to the eighteenth century. Although she and a large chunk of her merchandise were at a Denver show when I visited her shop, what remained behind was still intriguing, like the cast-iron-and-marble table with reclining griffins on its base ($1,600) and the 1930’s French iron chair, all curlicues and whorled leaves, with a cushioned seat and back upholstered in unbleached muslin ($3,000). Shanks has witnessed an explosion of interest in her specialty over the past couple of years. As things like the English glass-and-metal mini-conservatory called a hand light or cloche ($1,100) and the French iron folding tables with small round tops and three flared legs ($900 for a pair) become harder to find, prices have soared. I was smitten with a tiered Victorian plant stand fashioned from wire lumped with generations of paint ($2,000; don’t worry—it’s still there) and a demure octagonal stone birdbath from England (still over my budget at $400). But it’s the memory of the teepee-shaped plant climbers of woven willow, with nary a screw or nail in sight, that has stayed with me—probably because I could afford them ($35—$95).
Long before most Texans considered “distressed” a positive decorating term, the Homestead dynasty in Fredericksburg was perfecting its brand of shabby chic. In its garden shop, Idle Hours, prices reflect the continuing demand for authentically crusty old stuff and the dwindling supply thereof: a white metal chair with a springy sunburst-design seat and back is $395; a hand-carved stone fruit basket on a pedestal, which graced the entrance to a French château around two hundred years ago, goes for $1,495; a small, round green metal garden table is $195; and a tall, narrow iron panel with a grape motif, perfect for a garden wall, is tagged at $395. If you can settle for simulated character, snag one of the new Adirondack chairs in weathered lilac, pink, or lemon (chair $239, ottoman $135) and the oak rocker with a wash of aqua paint ($275). In the fenced yard next to the Homestead Uptown I found some of the most unusual outdoorsy antiques I’ve seen: the business half of an antique ladder, for instance, whose twelve steps each consist of the cast-iron words “Wicksteed Kettering” ($395) and that could be used as a trellis or a plant stand; an endearingly weird wood-and-iron bench whose nubbly frame faintly suggests tree branches ($495); and an antique concrete-log bench ($1,495).
If Walt Disney and David Lynch opened a garden store next door to the United Nations, it would look like Maas Nursery and Landscaping in Seabrook. A staggering collection of yard art, amassed over the nursery’s 47 years in business, is crammed onto fourteen overgrown acres—which are also home to wallabies, an emu, Longhorns, and potbellied pigs (“$10 each you catch ’em. $50 each we catch ’em”). If the four-foot-tall granite Buddha from China ($3,602) is too tranquil for your taste, perhaps you should really push the envelope on your deed restrictions and truck home the three-foot-tall bronze couple that I can only describe as a cranky monkey-dog-man with a naked winged hussy riding on his back ($1,750). If this pair doesn’t scare away those fire ants, nothing will—except maybe one of the nearly life-size primitive wooden figures from Indonesia and Africa ($1,250—$3,950); wow, are those real teeth? Mounted garfish ($72.99), cast-bronze hippo heads ($215), and sleepy-eyed concrete griffins ($130) co-exist with more understated items: a wooden porch swing painted a soft blue ($285), a classic curved concrete bench ($145), blue ceramic birdbaths ($75), and cool little crankshaft side tables made by local artist John Whear ($87).
Resources
Adkins Architectural Antiques, 3515 Fannin, Houston (713-522-6547, 800-522-6547)
Garden Center at Los Patios, 2015 NE Loop 410, San Antonio (210-655-6171)
Garden Gate, 5122 Morningside, Houston (713-528-2654)
Garden-Ville of Austin Nursery, 8648 Old Bee Cave Road, Austin (512-288-6113)
HMi Architectural Antiques and Salvage, 200 Corinth Street, Suite 103, Dallas (214-428-1888)
Homestead Uptown, 302 E. Main, Fredericksburg (830-990-5148)
Idle Hours, 233 E. Main, Fredericksburg (830-997-2908)
Maas Nursery and Landscaping, 5511 Todville Road, Seabrook (281-474-2488)
Margaret Shanks Garden Antiques, 901 Pecan Street, Brenham (409-830-0606)
Proler Oeggerli Garden Antiques, 2611 Worthington Street, Dallas (214-871-2233)
Robuck Antiques, the Courtyard Shops, 5453 Burnet Road, Austin (512-419-1112)
Shades of Green Nursery, 334 W. Sunset Road, San Antonio (210-824-3772)
Sticks and Stones Garden Market, 5016 Miller Avenue, Dallas (214-824-7277)
Weston Gardens in Bloom, 8101 Anglin Drive, Fort Worth (817-572-0549)
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