Frisco’s Texas Demonstration Garden Shows How Hot and Dry Can Be Green, Too

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Photo: friscogreenliving.com

Everyone wants to have an attractive garden, even in the withering months of summer, but making that happen can be frustrating, expensive and — worse yet— a strain on the overall environment.

Pick the wrong plants and shrubs, and you’re doomed to black-thumb failure. Go for items that require excessive watering, and you’re placing a burden on both your budget and the water supply of a growing city with growing needs.

What to do? Check out the Texas sustainable drought-resistant garden, adjacent to the Frisco Public Works building at 11300 Research Road. There, you currently can find 46 examples of plants, shrubs and trees that can spruce up your yard – even in the hottest months of the year — without draining either your bank account or a nearby lake already being taxed by other demands.

The garden, maintained by Frisco’s Environmental Services and Water Education divisions, opened in 2006, with a goal of educating Frisco residents about environmentally-friendly landscaping plants and practices. It is open to the public daily from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m.

“Our garden is a tool for homeowners, a place where they can learn about sustainable gardening and plant choices they can incorporate that require far less water,” says Melody Emadiazar, Water Education Coordinator for the City of Frisco. “In the end, it’s not as demanding on our resources.

“If we can find ways to promote how we can curb our water appetite, we can encourage homeowners to incorporate that plant material, those flowers, bushes, trees, and herbs. They’ll have a garden that thrives in triple digit heat.”

As part of the ongoing education process, the City is developing a “WaterWise” Web page that will include a garden gallery. Visitors will be able to get details on each plant – size, water requirement, sun or shade.

For now, residents can access a current plant list, complete with gardening information. The goal of both the garden and the Web site is to help residents make informed decisions before they visit a nursery or garden store.

With an office just a stone’s throw from the garden, Emadiazar can attest to the undertaking’s success.

“My first year here, I’d go out and walk around, and I was always impressed by the fact that we might water once a week and we’d have plant growth that just spread all over,” she said.

Over time, the landscape has evolved, with some of the plantings proving more aggressive than others.

“It’s changing every year,” Emadiazar says. “Some plants become a little more dominant and spread, and we have to trim those back.

“It’s not a “forget-it” kind of garden. “We’ve been trying to document a lot of the growth through photos.”

To illustrate the garden’s effectiveness to a visitor, Emadiazar uses a moisture meter, a stake attached to a sensor that measures water presence below ground level. Even during the hottest, driest periods, the meter indicates a healthy water source in the garden from which plants can draw.

“We had some Boy Scouts who came by for tours,” she says. “They were able to see that, even though we hadn’t watered, it was moist about 3-4 inches down.”

If you’re interested in how all this works, printed tours are available at the entrance gate. If you have questions about the garden, call Frisco Public Works at 972-292-5800, visit the Web site, or e-mail publicworks@friscotexas.gov.

Meanwhile, check out a few pages of pictures of the garden in the summer of 2010: