For a beginning gardener, what kinds of plants do well in Central Texas? Maintaining your garden will be much easier if you know what kinds of plants grow well in your climate. There's a very large palette...
There's a very large palette of trees, shrubs and perennials. It's a pretty varied list, but definitely working with native plants is easier. One thing you have to watch out for in Texas is the term "native Texas plants." Climate wise, East Texas is totally different from West Texas. So just because it's a native Texas plant doesn't mean it's necessarily good for your area. But there are several oaks that do well here and there are some elms that do OK. The Texas sage is a great plant, as well as wax myrtles and several other shrubs. There's a huge palette of perennials that do well here in Central Texas - several different types of salvias, lantanas, penstamens, the list goes on and on and on. I hate to sound like I'm saying it over and over, but again, go to an independent nursery and work with the people there that know the area.
Here in Austin, we have a wonderful resource called Grow Green. It's a cooperation between the City of Austin Watershed Protection and the Travis County Extension Agency. The biggest part of their job is to promote the least toxic methods of dealing with plant problems, disease problems, bugs and things of that nature. They also publish a small book of what they call "native and adapted plants." It's a list of plants that are native to this part of Texas or are native to other parts of the world, but adapt very well to our environment. Our environment is very similar to the Mediterranean region in Europe, parts of South Africa and parts of Australia. So there are plants that come from the other side of the world, but they come from a relatively similar environment - a relatively hot place that does still get decently cold in the winter and has a relatively alkaline soil - basically the same kind of conditions we have here in Central Texas. So even if a plant is from the other side of the world, it may like the kind of conditions we have, so it would work very well here. That's one of the things we try to carry a lot of - native and adapted plants, so that they will work well in most gardens here.
