A Garden Full of Secrets: A South Texas Folk Garden

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Petey Nokes invites visitors to enter the garden through the archway. Photo By Paul Bardagjy

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Jill Nokes, an Austin, Texas, landscape designer, has long had an interest in the folk gardens of south Texas and Mexico, and they have inspired her own spectacular garden and storybook garden wall. “I wanted to honor the artisanship of the people who create those folk gardens,” Jill says. “Folk gardens are an exceptionally exuberant effort by an individual to personalize his territory and possessions.”

In their backyard in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Jill and her husband, Jack, have crafted a tribute to these folk artists in stone, collected objects, and plants. Her garden is certainly more elaborate and sophisticated than the average folk garden, but the essential qualities of unrestrained creativity, uninhibited playfulness, and spiritual reverence abound in the stone wall that borders the yard, an archway that includes both sacred and secular sides, and the plants that Jill has chosen.

An inviting wall

Perhaps the crowning glory of Jill and Jack’s garden is a wall inlaid with a variety of objects that amount to a diary set in stone. The wall presents an archeological record of their—and others’—lives, from seventy-million-year-old fossils to marbles from Hobby Lobby. A birdbath bowl makes a large blue circle on the street side of the wall, while a male figure from the same birdbath adorns a mini-grotto. The cast-concrete angels are long-ago Christmas gifts from their daughter. Jill collects snow-globes, and because the wall was constructed in the autumn months following September 11, her New York City skyline/Twin Towers souvenir is embedded near the archway. The wall also includes pieces of black granite from Llano, Texas; a basalt stone from Arizona; fossil shells discovered during soil and water percolation tests; rocks Jill found along the Rio Grande; and the Exogyra fossils from a Cretaceous oyster bed she discovered behind an outlet mall in Comal County, Texas.

One of Jill’s criteria for the wall was that it be the “right height for leaning on.” The wall and the archway entrance are not meant to exclude passersby and neighbors, but rather to invite them in. “We were not aiming to create a private sanctuary,” she says, and indeed the wall has become an informal gathering place in their historic central Austin neighborhood. Neighbors and passersby sometimes add their own things to the wall; items left on ledges and in crevices have included a set of false teeth holding an old spoon, an old pocket dictionary, and a small antique medicine bottle. “Things like that appear and disappear, and at times the wall is like an interactive swap meet for trinkets,” she says.