Deborah Hornickel’s modern-formal garden invites outdoor lounging

Deborah Hornickel’s tiny bungalow lives larger by extending her living space outdoors with a pear allee and other architectural features.… Read More

The post Deborah Hornickel’s modern-formal garden invites outdoor lounging appeared first on Digging.

May 28, 2024

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Deborah Hornickel credits her garden’s timeless good looks and livability to her good friend James David, a hugely influential designer formerly of Austin with a showpiece personal garden and a revered boutique/nursery called Gardens. (He and partner Gary Peese now call Santa Fe home.) Thanks to James’s design vision, Deborah’s tiny Bryker Woods bungalow was made to live larger by extending her living space outdoors.

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In 1991, James convinced Deborah to plant an allée of Bradford pears down the center of her backyard. As they grew, he helped her train them into a tunnel on a custom rebar arch. Aligned with Deborah’s back door, the allée draws the eye from inside the house out into the garden.

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String lights run the length of the allée, which leads the eye to a potted Ming fern on a limestone pedestal. Not long ago, Deborah lost one of the pears and has planted a new one to replace it. The gap is hardly noticeable thanks to the strong architectural form of the allée.

(Does this pear allée remind you of another Austin garden I’ve blogged about? Designer Jackson Broussard, who worked for James and who’s also worked with Deborah on her garden, has a similar allée in his personal garden.)

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Over time, the pears have grown around the rebar tunnel, becoming one with the frame.

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Italian terracotta pots throughout the garden hark back to the classic style of Gardens. Two terracotta bowls of purple heart elevated on limestone plinths mark the entrance to the pear tunnel.

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A rectangle of lawn makes a verdant outdoor area rug on one side of the allée.

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In the center, framed by a square of clipped boxwood, stands a focal-point pot. Deborah told a funny story about shopping with James, when he spotted this pot and insisted she had to have it. She hesitated. “Trust me,” he said. She did, and he was proved right. This was a theme in every story she told about James’s influence on her garden: “you need this,” “trust me,” and “he was right.”

Notice how deep the fence-line bed is — 8 or 10 feet, I’d say. Newly planted screening shrubs — replacing plants killed by recent deep freezes — include Arizona cypress, cherry laurel, and ‘Brodie’ eastern red cedar.

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Against the back of the house, a metal arbor encloses a small patio adorned with candelabras, a limestone console, and a garden-reflecting mirror.

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At the far end of the lawn, a limestone bench under a vitex tree terminates the axis view.

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Vitex’s pretty purple flowers

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At left of the vitex, a trio of elevated pots makes a focal point at the end of the pear allée.

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Mangave in one of the pots

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Beyond the allée, a raised container pond beckons. A Monet-green bench under the allée overlooks the pond.

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Green bench and ceramic table positioned in the shade

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The raised concrete walls of the contemporary pond elevate it about a foot. A long steel pipe emerges from a boxwood border (recently replanted with blight-resistant ‘Winter Gem’) to spill water into the pond. Yellow-stemmed ‘Alphonse Karr’ bamboo and a limestone bench accent the modern lines of the pond.

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Steel-pipe fountain and a hot-pink waterlily

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Waterlily

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A 1400-pound slab of limestone on faceted pillars makes a custom dining table near the house. Deborah said James made sure the pillars we