- We call it the three B ranch, the bird, bee, and butterfly paradise.

And that's what we've worked to do.

My name's Doug Garrett.

My wife Ann and I moved into this house in 2010 and started the yard then.

It was a pasture, a cow ranch, cattle ranch at the time.

We ran a shredder over it and started putting in four-inch pots of about 1,500 plants later, (laughs) we've got close to three and a half, four acres of native Texas flower gardens, pollinator friendly, native clump grasses, and shrubs.

One of the things that we really were attracted to about this property was, first of all, the pond, which is beautiful.

It's creek bottomland.

And the whole development is a wildlife cooperative, so designated by the fourth generation landowner who wanted to keep this in the state that it was, rather than having it turned into a bunch of little pink houses all in a row.

So everybody in the development manages their land for the benefit of the wildlife.

And you know, bees, birds and butterflies, deer, foxes, bobcats, a cougar, red foxes, you name it, we got it all out here.

It's quite the show.

It's quite a show, a great place to live.

This is wonderful Blackland prairie clay, about two feet deep.

Creek bottom, Salado Creek's right back there at the back the property.

But it is full of rocks.

It's got more rocks in it than chocolate chip cookie dough has chips in it when you make it yourself.

(Doug laughs) We started digging up these rocks, trying to put plants in with a rock bar and a shovel.

We ruined no less than a dozen shovels.

We got embarrassed going back to the Craftsman store to turn our shovels in broke, (laughs) and there were so many we busted.

I bent two rock bars, and we unearthed all these huge boulders that you see surrounding all the beds.

Moved it with, mostly with the big rocks, with two wheeled dolly.

I worked my way through college in a warehouse, and I'm pretty good with a two wheeled dolly.

We kept digging up these really weird globular rocks.

They were just like, formed as perfect circles, anywhere from the size of a softball up to a beach ball.

And they have all kinds of dimples in them.

When you bust it open, we found that it was a form of flint called chert, which is a very, not just regular flint, but the best flint for making tools, knives, arrowheads, spearheads.

And for that reason, this area around here was been found to be one of the oldest, continuously settled parts of North America, right over here in Florence, at the Gault site.

UT has been doing archeology for a decade or so now, and they've gotten back to 18,000 years ago, and there were people living here continuously since then.

As a building science geek, which is what I was for most of my career.

It was about understanding nature, understanding how systems work and just working with them instead of trying to force them to be something they can't be.

And what I understand now is that the plant above ground that we see is very dependent upon a huge culture of fungi and bacteria that do all the real work.

We believe in just kind of listening to the plants and letting them decide where they want to grow.

A lot of it's trial and error.

You know, we planted all this area with lantanas at one time, and then we found out when it rains hard water stands there, comes down the slope of the property and stands there three inches deep for five days.

Lantanas don't like that, they die.

So it's all Gulf muhly and Louisiana iris and plants that like that sort of thing there.

So you just have to figure out your land in your yard.

Where's the water go?

Where does the sun go?

You know, under the mama oak.

Huge oak mott.

No sun.

We couldn't even get much of anything to grow there.

But then we finally found out.

Turk's cap and beauty berry.

They like shade like that.

And they've gone crazy.

And they make it a beautiful area now.

So you got to figure out what you got and what can grow there, and then grow more of it.

(Doug laughs) That's the only thing you can do, you know, unless you're going to work real hard.

I see people trying to grow azaleas here.

And I'm like, seriously?

Really?

(chuckles) An acid loving plant?

You're going to grow it on top of 300 feet of limestone.

Go ahead.

I don't want to work that hard.

Sometimes we'll put a plant some place and then we'll notice that it's moving year by year.

It's like, okay, it's over here now it's 20 feet over there and you're like, oh, it didn't like it.

That's too shady for it.

I think it wants to be over here.

And without us doing anything, it'll just reseed itself down to another area and we're like, okay, you want to be there, that's fine.

And we don't have to do anything and it looks good, attracts tons of butterflies and bees.

We're good to go with that.

So, I don't try to force gardens to be certain things and have plants be in like little rows or anything.

Like, I bet you 30% of the plants in this yard are volunteers.

We started off with a couple of four-inch pots and all this stuff just spread and we've let it go where it wanted to go.

I decided I wanted moving water.

I just went and got a about two feet of, eighth-inch copper, stuff you use for, plumbing your icemaker in your fridge.

Got a cheap plastic planter.

Drilled a half-inch hole in it near the bottom, took a grommet, stuck the grommet in there.

Shove the piece of copper through it on the inside.

You can go to the plumbing department, and they'll have a little connector that you just snap onto the end of the eighth of an inch.

It's got a regular ball valve in it.

You can adjust the drip rate as you want.

You just fill, put about three or four gallons of water in the pot in the morning.

When you're filling up, washing out the rest of the birdbath.

And for all day long you got drip, drip, drip, drip and it's moving water.

I tell you how how much the birds are appreciative of this.

I went organic after I sprayed my pecan trees with malathion one time, got a wind blow back and it broke out in a rash from head to toe and said, that's not good.

There's got to be a better way to do this than those things.

That was back in '86, '85.

I quit using all the chemicals.

So we do all this with, you know, seaweed, fish emulsion, blackstrap molasses.

I like the way that the light shines through those crystals.

I got myself a two-foot chunk of #3 rebar.

And I drilled a half inch hole in a tree stump for a cut down cedar that I you know, left the stump there because it was too big to remove the whole thing and started putting these bars into these, you know, rebars in it and hanging these crystals on it.

They rotate in the sun, in the wind.

They sparkle and shoot all kinds of light.

It's kind of like looking at a vertical kaleidoscope.

And I just kept collecting it over the years.

Just one of those ideas.

And then she just paints everything.

She's always been into wrought iron and she, we had all these wrought iron yard art.

And then she decided it wasn't pretty enough.

So she started painting all of it.

It also gives us a way to, to name the beds.

Because when you get to like 50 beds, it'll drive you crazy trying to figure out which one the other person's referring to.

I wouldn't call us artists, but I'd call her an artist.

But I just mess around with stuff.

I just enjoy having that reward for, you know, like, Ann says: You do the work and then you see the reward, the result, and you know that you made that happen.

I enjoy learning about new things.

I always enjoyed learning all of my career in life.

There's endless amounts you can learn about plants and nature and how to to grow them, different ones.

And it's just something that when it's done a nd I come out and spend a lot of time sitting out here with a glass of sweet tea, you know, on nice days just to watch all the butterflies and bees and hummingbirds and songbirds and everything that just populates this yard all the time.

And the color, it's amazing.

(bright music)