June 1999
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.
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, MY DAD built a fantasy playhouse in the back yard for his two little girls. Two stories high, it had dormer windows, built-in beds, and running water in the kitchen. But despite its perfection, the house remained largely neglected because, instead of playing in it, my sister and I hauled the tables, chairs, and dishes out to the dense wax-leaf ligustrum nearby to set up housekeeping. Fortunately my dad appreciated the irony of our open-air preference. Perhaps he realized we were fledgling participants in a Texas lifestyle that celebrates our state’s 80-degree winter days and frequent balmy nights: namely, outdoor living.
Turning our houses inside out is nothing new for Texans, who in earlier times were forced to consider climate when building their abode and knew the value of a shady, breezy space outside. Then along came air conditioning. We built Cape Cod saltbox houses and thought, “What style!” We shut the door and our tiny windows, cranked up the AC, watched The Beverly Hillbillies, and watered our African violets.
Then we began to miss the natural light. We rediscovered leisure gardening en masse. We thought about saving energy. The sporadic cookout soon evolved into a nearly nonstop al fresco affair, and the outdoor room, an airy extension of our indoor living space, was born. We clamored for objects that would make the wilds of our back yards as decorative and inviting as possible: antique garden ornaments, pots the size of sports cars, vintage lawn furniture, and statuary from the religious to the ridiculous. We dared to get creative. Gates were made into tables, chairs were intentionally mismatched, and anything at all—rusted-out watering cans, headless statues—had potential. (The greatest benefit of decorating outdoors? You don’t have to dust. Let the dirt and moss build up and call it patina.) And lest you think outdoor living is pure indulgence without any redeeming social value, consider this: As people move out onto their porches and meet their neighbors, the sense of community goes up and neighborhood crime reportedly goes down.
In my search for garden furnishings I blithely ignored the dozens of well-intentioned chain garden centers, patio stores that specialize in name-brand casual furniture, roadside vendors selling Mexican pottery, and gift shops festooned with wind chimes. I steered clear of catalog stores and artisans who do mainly commissioned pieces. And I left out grills, outdoor fireplaces, lighting fixtures, and the sturdy but often aesthetically challenged wooden benches—boxy designs of treated pine or redwood—screwed together by guys with more power tools than taste.
What’s left? The unusual, the whimsical, and the extraordinary. Along with architectural-salvage yards and antiques stores specializing in my chosen prey, several nurseries are included in this selective guide, not so much for the objects you can buy there as for the do-it-yourself inspiration they provide. These idea factories aren’t mega-nurseries but individually owned businesses—disguised as peaceful gardens with paths and patios and seating areas—that appeal to the nature lover in you first and the rabid consumer second. (If you crave a more comprehensive selection, check out Great Garden Sources for Texans, by Nan Booth Simpson and Patricia Scott McHargue, a compendium of hundreds of garden-related businesses across the state.)
But even if I had bought Dell stock five years ago and could afford to actually shop at the most expensive of these places, I’d probably still be an incorrigible scrounger. If it’s cheap enough, I swear, I can learn to love it (husbands excluded). When hunting aged garden goodies at reasonable prices, I keep my eyes peeled for any antiques or junk store that appears to have exploded; the flotsam scattered outside is bound to include yard art bargains. At my secret junk emporium (somewhere on U.S. 290 west of Austin), I bought two metal folding chairs of an unusual design and encrusted with many layers of lovely paint for a mere $5 each; I’ve seen similar chairs at antiques shops for ten times as much. If you’re one of the truly cheap (like me), with no sense of shame when it comes to pawing through other people’s discards, prowl city neighborhoods the evening before bulky-item garbage pickup is scheduled. I once scored four great redwood lawn chairs that were destined for the landfill and needed only some glue and a couple of screws to restore them to their former glory.
Despite my addiction to junking, I can still appreciate merchants who will do the sorting for me, who carefully collect and display their wares with contagious passion. Here, then, are fourteen businesses, culled from the seventy or so I visited (a directory of addresses and phone numbers is on page 159). They should inspire you to get out there and start living.
Austin
SEVERAL OF THE COURTYARD SHOPS, a collection of antiques stores housed in a former lumberyard, seem to be competing for the Vintage Garden Ornament Store of the Year award. Although the race is close, the winner in my book is Robuck Antiques, where you can find a life-size cast-iron eagle, dated 1906, that once perched on the roof of a bank ($1,200) or a concrete “log” table reputed to have been made in the twenties by the late, great Dionisio Rodríguez of San Antonio ($2,000). How about one of those classic concrete-basket planters from the thirties, with a tall, arching handle and encrusted with large pieces of broken tile and china ($1,200)? Not funky enough? Then feast your eyes on the round coffee table covered with avocado-colored figure-eight tiles that comes with “matching” turquoise planters ($300). The cache of curiosities goes on and on: a Victorian cast-iron sunflower birdbath ($450), a turn-of-the-century wrought-iron glider bench ($900), even a pair of pink concrete flamingos—yes, flamingos—that inhabited the San Antonio Zoo in the forties ($975 for both).
Garden-Ville of Austin Nursery, long known for its organic expertise and decidedly undecorative products like supermanure, is blooming with creative ideas. Gravel paths wind through rose-covered arbors, past the vegetable garden, the deer-resistant garden, and the formal herb garden, and into corrals containing a variety of pots and concrete statuary. Benches and swings are scattered about, perfect roosts for sitting and studying the possibilities. Lots of yard art by Texas craftspeople is tucked among the greenery, including steel trellises and scrollwork crosses ($49—$60) by Tuesday Welders, two steel-twisting sisters from Dale; leaded-glass sun catchers ($25—$60) by Natural Curve in Leander; and rustic cedar trellises by Dripping Springs’ Tom Denning ($22—$40).
Dallas—Fort Worth
HMI ARCHITECTURAL ANTIQUES AND SALVAGE is located in one of the most surreal settings this side of a Tarantino flick—the former Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, where the atmosphere in the massive walled parking lot is Wild West meets mad muralist. Inside HMi, however, the look leans more to stylish pack rat. Lots of the artifacts come with a little history: circa-1890’s cast-iron planters from an old house in Waxahachie ($1,100 a pair); an 1840’s Javanese Ganesha ($4,000), an elephant-faced god carved from volcanic stone, holding a little cup that—so the story goes—villagers filled with milk each night and was magically empty by morning (couldn’t have had anything to do with the porosity of the stone, could it?); two-headed wooden goats, possibly Persian, that flanked the front walk of a house in Marshall from the mid-1800’s until a few months ago. Every inch of space, upstairs and down, is packed with stuff: a little moss-covered concrete squirrel ($85), for instance, miles of iron railings from England and New Orleans (starting at $30 a linear foot), and stacks of salvaged windows and doors ($20 and up) that, when nailed together, have a second life as whimsical greenhouses. Build your own or HMi will build it for you, starting at around $800 for a four-foot-square, eight-foot-tall structure.
I would’ve bought the six-foot garden bench at Dallas’ Proler Oeggerli Garden Antiques, carved more than a hundred years ago from Italian Vicenza stone ($14,500), but I was afraid it would clash with the family heirlooms already in my garden: three of my parents’ old bowling balls. This swank store does not traffic in kitsch; its European garden antiques are investments in art. Any garden would swap its petunias for such treasures as a two-hundred-year-old water trough chiseled from fossil-pocked Italian tufo stone ($1,900), a century-old stone capital freed from its perch atop a column and currently imitating a curvaceous little table ($5,500), or an 1890’s carved-stone wishing well that belongs in a fairy tale ($14,500). Although it was glaringly apparent that I wasn’t buying, not even an Italian terra-cotta urn with a white glaze that resembled licked icing ($280), co-owner Urs Oeggerli graciously showed me around the yard in the rain, protecting me beneath his black umbrella and treating me as if I were Jackie O.
After visiting a bunch of indistinguishable garden-gift shops, my inner bohemian did the fandango when I walked into Sticks and Stones Garden Market near Highland Park in Dallas. Vintage lawn furniture, such as a metal bench with three springy sunburst-design seats ($795), cozies up to slick galvanized-steel folding armchairs ($225) and brightly glazed ceramic pots in jade or ocher ($189 for a ten-gallon size). A primitive wooden ice-cream cart covered in flaking taxicab-yellow paint ($460); a four-foot-tall, antique cast-iron urn from an estate outside Atlanta ($2,900); and a strap-steel chair sporting Technicolor layers of paint ($49) also caught my eye, a tiny sampling of the treats found here.
