A plant list for Laredo

Garden center labels are written for the whole country, so a tag that says full sun and moderate water means something different on the Rio Grande Plain than it does in Dallas. Laredo sits in a hot semi-arid zone, classified BSh, taking 19.68 inches of rain in an average year and running an average July high of 100.3F. That is the brief every plant on this page has to answer. The good news is that the list of species that answer it is long, evergreen through most of the year, and colorful for eight or nine months of it.

Four questions to ask about any plant here

How big does it get? Not how big it is in the pot. Half the shearing done in this city is somebody fighting a shrub that was always going to outgrow the gap it was planted in, and shearing a plant that wants to be bigger is a job that never finishes.

What does it want after year two? Everything needs water while it is establishing. The question is what the plant needs in July of its third year, because that number is the one you live with.

What does afternoon sun do to it? Between two and seven in the afternoon a west-facing wall radiates heat back at whatever is planted against it. Plenty of species that shrug off morning sun scorch in that position.

What happens in a hard freeze? Three answers are possible: no damage, dies back and returns from the base, or dies outright. Knowing which one applies is the difference between a landscape that survives a bad winter and one that gets replaced.

Shrubs: the structure of the yard

Cenizo carries this palette. The Texas Legislature made it the State Native Shrub under the name Texas Purple Sage back in 2005, and the plant earns the billing: silver-gray foliage all year, purple flowering that fires after humidity spikes rather than on a calendar, and no supplemental water in a normal year once it is rooted in. Left alone it becomes a large rounded shrub roughly as wide as it is tall, which is worth knowing before it goes under a window. Compact varieties exist and are the right call in a narrow bed.

Esperanza is the yellow one people notice from the street. It makes a medium shrub here, flowers from spring until the first cold, and is a valued Texas performer for exactly this kind of climate. Guajillo, a native acacia, grows taller and looser, with fine foliage and early flowering, and works where a screen is wanted without the mass of a hedge. Texas persimmon sits between shrub and small tree, with smooth pale bark that reads as a feature in winter.

Perennials: color that does not need a hose

Lantana is the workhorse. Low and spreading or taller and shrubbier depending on variety, flowering continuously through heat that stops most bedding plants, and reliably back from the root after a freeze. Autumn sage and the other shrubby salvias stay low and pull hummingbirds from March onward. Damianita is a low mound covered in yellow for long stretches and tolerant of the reflected heat next to paving. Blackfoot daisy is lower still and spreads wider than it stands, white flowered, and one of the few plants that looks better in poor gravelly soil than in improved bed mix.

The mistake with perennials here is spacing them at nursery-tag distance and then irrigating the gaps. Bare irrigated soil grows weeds. Planting at final spacing and mulching the gap costs less and looks better in year two.

Succulents and architectural accents

Sotol, agave and yucca do a job no shrub does: they hold a hard silhouette through August when everything soft looks tired. Sotol makes a fine-leaved sphere and throws a flower stalk far above it. Agaves run from knee-high rosettes to species you cannot reach across, and the big ones are a permanent commitment, because moving one later is a two-person job in heavy gloves. Yuccas cover everything from waist height to well overhead.

Prickly pear has been the State Plant of Texas since 1995, and it grows wild on open ground all over Webb County. In a designed bed it wants space away from walkways and away from where a dog runs. Spineless selections exist and are worth asking about where a bed sits near a path.

All of these fail in one specific way: sitting wet. On a lot where the cemented layer perches water in the bottom of a planting hole, a big agave will rot at the base and nobody will understand why. Setting these plants slightly proud of the surrounding grade solves it, because the crown then sits above whatever the hole is holding.

Grasses

The soil survey is a better guide than any catalogue. The Webb series description, a fine, smectitic, hyperthermic Aridic Paleustalf, names trichloris grasses, tanglehead and buffalograss as the native climax cover on this ground. That is a direct statement about what this ground will carry unaided.

Sideoats grama has been the Texas state grass since 1971. It works as an ornamental in a bed, carrying its seed heads well clear of the foliage and holding a warm color into winter. Buffalograss doubles as a low-water turf option and is covered in the lawn grass guide. Ornamental grasses generally need one hard cut back in late winter and nothing else.

Small trees and canopy

Anacahuita, the Mexican olive, is the small flowering tree of choice, with white flowers on and off through the warm months and a broad soft canopy. Texas mountain laurel stays smaller, evergreen and slow, and is worth the wait for the purple spring flowering. Retama and huisache both reach small-tree size fast and both are messy in a way some people love and some do not.

For real shade, the choices narrow. Texas ebony carries the densest, darkest canopy of the group without ever becoming a big tree, and is one of the best evergreen shade trees in this region. Cedar elm is a full-size shade tree and takes heavy soil well. Live oak is the largest option of all, spreading wider than it stands, and it needs a planting hole that respects the ground beneath it. Mesquite gives filtered rather than deep shade and grows faster than any of them. Placement matters more than species, and that is covered in the shade guide.

The list at a glance

What February 2021 taught everyone here

In February 2021 a winter storm carried hard freezing temperatures much deeper into Texas than the design assumption anybody was using. Across South Texas, tropical and subtropical ornamentals were killed outright. Established natives largely resprouted from the base and were back in leaf by summer.

The lesson is not that tender plants are banned. It is that they belong in a different role. Build the permanent shape of a yard, the hedges, the screens, the canopy and the accents, out of species with a track record through cold events on this ground. Then treat bougainvillea, hibiscus and the other tropicals as seasonal color in pots or in one small bed, where losing them costs a weekend rather than a landscape. That single distinction is the most useful thing to carry out of that winter.

Getting new plants through the first two summers

Every plant on this page is drought tolerant once established and none of them are drought tolerant on planting day. A shrub out of a small nursery pot has a root ball about the size of a grapefruit and cannot reach a drop of water outside it. It needs regular irrigation through two full summers while roots move out into the surrounding soil.

Two things make that easier in Laredo. First, planting between October and March, so the root system has several mild months before real heat arrives. Second, drip. An emitter sitting on a new root ball delivers exactly what that plant needs without wetting the whole bed to reach it, at a rate the ground can absorb, and it goes on doing so as the wetted area is widened through the second summer. A spray zone trying to do the same job waters the gaps between plants and grows weeds in them. The watering guide works through what that does to a planting plan.

For a deeper reference on species performance in Texas conditions, the AgriLife Extension Texas Superstar and Earth-Kind series are the standard published sources.

Short version

• Choose for what the plant grows into first, then for flower color.
• Cenizo, lantana, damianita, sotol and yucca are the low-effort core of a Laredo bed.
• Keep tropicals in pots and treat them as replaceable.
• Raise succulent plantings above grade so they never sit wet.
• Plant October through March and water for two full summers.
• Beds on drip are not tied to the assigned sprinkler day.