Contrasting textures draw attention to details. Dramatic focal points and clever view corridors make the small space feel expansive. “Changes in flow patterns slow passage through a small urban garden, which is essential-or else you’re done in 30 seconds,” says Hall-Behrens.
Themes of compression and release establish dynamic rhythms throughout the garden. Evergreen plants provide a steady backdrop for the more charismatic plant performers, with their voluptuous bursts of growth, blossoms, seed heads, and seasonally shifting colors. Classic Southern plants with personal resonance (Hall-Behrens grew up in Texas and Oklahoma) have also made their way into the garden, including mondo grass, star jasmine, and crape myrtle. She embraces other motifs from formal tropical gardens around the world, like symmetry, low evergreen hedges, and uniform swaths of low ground covers. “Many Asian tropical gardens have statues or other matching formal elements serving as a kind of ‘call to entry’ at doorways and passages,” explains Hall-Behrens. Formal planters filled with exuberant Astelia spikes and dripping with silvery dichondra flank the back steps, extending the hot-climate vibe.
Just inside the main gate, immense leaves of cold-hardy banana ( Musa basjoo) draw the eyes upward, grounding the house while creating a sense of being dwarfed by nature’s fecundity-at least from late July to October, when the bananas stretch to their full height and magnificence.
A semiformal, tropical motif comes to life in Hall-Behrens’s plant selection.