Mediterranean Garden
We were contacted by the owner of a Houston, Texas home who asked us to design a series of gardens and landscaping features that would complement and expand the Mediterranean theme of his house into the surrounding landscape. This house sat on a large lot of several acres in a secluded Memorial Drive neighborhood near the 610 Loop. Despite its two-story build, the home featured a symmetrical, linear appearance, and our client desired a landscape and garden design that would follow these principles of self-contained regularity and subtle linear motion.
Creating a Mediterranean theme in a Houston garden and landscape is more complex than it might seem. The southern coast of Europe—particularly in Italy and Greece—is mountainous, with homes and gardens built on steep angles and sharp vertical rises. Gardens and fields are often terraced due to the limited planting area and rough, rocky terrain. Limestone, predominant in Italy and Greece, has become iconic of this region. Mediterranean homes and gardens are historically famous for their white stucco walls, olive groves, and carefully sculpted greenery embedded in a rugged limestone backdrop.
The challenge lay in transferring this essentially three-dimensional landscaping style to a flat Houston property. Using a combination of symmetrical forms, linear progressions, and innovative garden materials, we mimicked several aspects of seaside European terrain.
The key was to establish a combination of circular forms and linear patterns in the garden elements. French and Italian gardens emphasize order and symmetry, often utilizing right angles to establish form. We planted a variety of low-level growth around the house and rear swimming pool patio to emphasize its walls and corners. We then added three keynote forms to the landscape to create a Houston equivalent of a Mediterranean garden.
The first form was a knot garden centered on the front door, located just in front of the home’s motor court. We planted boxwoods in three circular rows, resembling terraces on a hillside. In the center, we planted Loropetalum, punctuated with a lone Crinum lily as the centerpiece. The rich purple of the Loropetalum catches the eye, and the vertical dimension added by the lily draws it upward to the front entrance.
Next, we transformed a substantial portion of the yard into a parterre garden centered on a large glass room extending from the west wing. This garden was populated by low-growth rose bushes, ideal for parterre gardens due to their amenability to constant trimming and colorful blooms. The garden borders were made of boxwood hedges, and the central pathways were laid with European limestone gravel, mimicking the color of the limestone cliffs of the Aegean and Adriatic Seas. We completed the design by adding dwarf yaupon, a small shrub resembling clouds, along the gravel walkways’ borders, creating the impression of a hilltop garden near the sea with clouds rolling across the shoreline.
One of the most appealing attributes of this Houston property is its superb location. The backyard borders a 50-foot ravine carved by a major tributary of Buffalo Bayou. This natural feature seemed a perfect destination for garden guests after strolling around the west wing of the home to the pool. To encourage this, we planted an alley of crepe myrtles leading from the pool area to the woods along the ravine. We built a walkway of limestone aggregate blocks starting at the parterre garden, running alongside the house to the pool, and extending through the alley of trees to the scenic overlook of the forest and stream below.
For more than 20 years, Exterior Worlds has specialized in servicing many of Houston’s fine neighborhoods, bringing unique and elegant landscape designs to life.
