I went to the Hill Country Natives open house today. I had a great time, visited with friends and met some new ones as well. The owners, Mitch and Kathy Mitchemore, are the nicest people you would ever want to meet and oh so knowledgeable about native plants. The nursery is around their house and extends out under the big oaks in every direction. There are trails winding through the trees and little alcoves and sitting areas are plentiful. With little ponds and creeks and garden art, it is just a very enjoyable place to spend some time. Even though it is mainly a whole sale nursery, I think us commoners can still buy from them.
I have done several projects for them through the years and every time I go they have added new additions to enjoy. This is a gate I built for them several years ago.
As you can see it's still swinging just fine.
This year I added some metal picket fence, a drive through gate and a walk through gate on the other side of the house. They were starting to have deer coming into the nursery here so a fence was needed. They wanted it to look nice and I think we pulled it off nicely. I built the big gate with a sun flower medallion in the middle and built sun flowers to go in the middle of the fence panels as well. In a normal year there are sun flowers that come up all through the nursery and they just let them grow. It's way cool.
I built the small gate to match the rest of the fence but I built a grape vine climbing up the open end of it. The grape vine is actually the latch for the gate as the top two foot or so is not welded and flexes side ways to pull the leaves away from the vertical of the big gate. It came out well and they really like it a lot. I'm just glad there are people that are willing to let me build things like this.
While the gates look good, they are only accents to a beautiful nursery. The rock work, by Larry Hullems, is just stunning. The man has serious skills. But again, accents to the whole of what Mitch and Kathy have done. Here is some pictures of a beautiful self made nursery.
The tall plants in this picture are some kind of canna that likes shade. I want some.
Just this last year they added a creek system and it is something. I really liked it a lot. All the plants were native and were just perfect for a little stream in Texas.
There were little ponds tucked into the gardens every where and they were all beautiful.
It was just a wonderful day all around. If any one needs native plants I would certainly give them a call. It's kind of hard to find but so worth it if you need native trees or plants.
http://www.hillcountrynatives.biz/
