We had good intentions for our landscaping this past spring, like we do every year. Spring is a time of rebirth, after all. A time to cut down what died in the freeze and plant new things that’ll die in the heat a few months later. It’s the circle of $300-garden-center-purchases life.
As soon as the weather warmed, my husband and I spent weeks working to shape up our lawn at our home in Bee Cave, just southwest of Austin. I raked leaves and picked up stray rocks and hummed. Chris inspected sprinkler heads and replaced mulch and cussed. We signed up for one service that does nontoxic weed control, another that aerates the lawn, and a third that mows it. We then tried to not think about what we could have spent that money on instead. Like a trip to Hawaii, where grass just, y’know, grows.
But our hard work paid off, and soon our front and back yards both looked lush, green, and weed-free. For approximately two weeks. Once Austin temps hit the high nineties in May, our already exhausted lawn threw in the towel, and patches of it immediately morphed from the color of guacamole to the color of tamales. To paraphrase Kermit the Frog, it ain’t easy being green when you’re living under a heat dome for a third of the year.
To add insult to injury, I then received two emails. The first was from our community HOA’s residential management company “nicely” reminding us that all homeowners are “required to keep up the appearance of plants, shrubs, trees, grass and plantings, control weeds, and replace dead sod, per the governing documents, Article 2, Section 5.25, blah blah blah.” And if we don’t help keep our neighborhood beautiful, they continued, they’d then send us the most passive-aggressive missive in existence: “a courtesy notice.” I’d rather get a subpoena to be a witness in a Mafia trial than be slapped with “a courtesy notice.”
Many homeowners would read an HOA email like that and think, “No problem, I’ll just water the lawn more often.” But not us Texans. Nope. No can do. Because the next email I received was from our water utility company, letting us know that we’re already in stage two water restrictions, meaning we’re only allowed to water our lawns on one designated day a week. Addresses ending in one or three water on Monday. Addresses ending in two or four water on Tuesday, and so on. And if you use your sprinklers more often than that, you’re in danger of getting caught by one of the water company’s water cops, who patrol the city sixty hours a week looking for wet lawbreakers like they’re in some sad remake of Starsky and Hutch. Worse than that, however, is the risk that you could also be reported by an anonymous neighbor who’s suspicious of why your grass looks just a little too green. That’s right. The Lawn Stasi.
So to recap:
1. Our HOA requires that we keep our yards looking fresh and green.
2. The way to do that is to water.
3. If we water more than once a week, we could be fined up to $1,000 and have our water shut off.
What’s a sweaty Texan to do?
I admit that I almost forwarded the water utility email to our HOA residential management company with the message: NOW WHAT, GENIUSES? But “compliance” is my middle name, so I instead tried to brainstorm a less combative solution. Should we pull a Lance Armstrong—the former cycling star infamously used so much water at his Austin mansion that the New York Times once shamed him as a “champion guzzler”—and just ignore the restrictions? No, that won’t work because we don’t have Lance Armstrong water-wasting fine money. Should we do whatever it is that golf courses do to stay green, like this one in Midland that uses its five wells for irrigation? I don’t think so, because God knows I don’t have the upper arm strength to dig a well. I guess I could break into the Astrodome with a pair of hedge trimmers and cut out a few hundred feet of Astroturf to cover my yard. It’s not like the Astros are using it anymore. Or maybe I’ll just water my lawn with my tears of frustration at our dwindling natural resources and the dire reality of climate change. But I’m probably not well hydrated enough to do that, either.
My friend Shannon Bennett went a little rogue with her landscaping in the Houston suburb of Katy a couple of years ago, when she painted “BETO” in white paint on her front lawn. This next-level campaign sign led to more than a few upset neighbors, some media coverage, and even a consultation with a lawyer after the HOA president nicely offered to backhoe her BETO away. It ended when she agreed to “stop badmouthing the HOA,” and the group backed down. But in Shannon’s defense, she made sure the grass underneath the paint was still green.
Of course the ideal solution to the not-enough-water-for-the-lawn issue is to xeriscape. We could rip out our dying grass and replace it with some nifty rocks and succulents so our yard looks like that of a fancy spa in Phoenix. Maybe we should add one of those giant metal roosters for some flair. We’d save a ton of money on weed control, lawn mowing, and watering, and we wouldn’t live in fear of being fined by anyone. (In Austin, the city even offers a rebate of up to $3,000 for replacing your turf grass with native plants.) It’s not like we’re using our lawn for any real purpose now that our kids are in college anyway. Our poodle, Teddy, doesn’t care if he poops on Bermuda grass or on volcanic rocks. And if we ever decide to put our house on the market, we can just Photoshop green grass into the pictures, which my realtor friend tells me is common practice in Texas (with a disclaimer that it’s an edited image.)
Unfortunately, a few unanswered emails to our HOA management company and some quick polling of the neighbors gave me no answers as to whether xeriscaping is allowed in our neighborhood or not. Despair set in. I canceled my cactus order. But then I read that thanks to tweaks in 2011 and 2013 to the Texas property code, an HOA legally can’t stop a homeowner from implementing drought-tolerant changes to their landscaping. (For readers in San Antonio, here’s a great article explaining your rights.) Additionally, the law requires that HOA guidelines and processes do not “unreasonably deny” the ability of a homeowner to save water. This means that eco-conscious efforts such as composting, rain barrels, more efficient irrigation systems, natural turf, and drought-resistant landscaping are permitted, no matter what that threatening letter from your HOA might say. Good news!
Of course, most HOAs still require approval before the homeowner makes changes, to ensure that your landscaping ideas have “maximum aesthetic compatibility with other landscaping in the subdivision.” Meaning if your neighbor doesn’t have a giant metal rooster, neither will you.
This situation has led to at least a few battles between homeowners and HOAs. Many HOAs, like mine, don’t make it widely known that there are limits on their ability to define exactly how we “keep the neighborhood beautiful.” A friend of mine in the Dallas suburb of Colleyville, who asked to remain anonymous, thereby prompting me to immediately give her the nickname Green Throat, told me that she’s received many a nastygram from her HOA. “First there was the infraction of relandscaping my front yard with native plants without submitting a plan, then for not cutting down said native plants when they became dormant, then for not having enough grass in the front yard due to said native plants.” She hasn’t backed down, though, and her yard looks great.
The changes to the code, and the increased frustration of hot Texas homeowners, gives me hope that unrealistic landscaping standards are on their way out. There are signs of progress, such as in the North Texas suburb of Lewisville, where the city hosts free workshops to help homeowners make their yards drought-tolerant. Some water experts, like Amy Hardberger, who serves on the San Antonio Water System board, even think that new homes in Texas should avoid installing any irrigated turf in the first place. “How stupid is it to put all this stuff in, have people basically pay for it as part of their home price, and then we’re going to try to encourage them to tear it out, right?” she told Texas Monthly in April. I agree completely. Maybe it’s time to rewrite “The Green, Green Grass of Home” to “The Decorative Rocks and Agaves of Home” and stop fighting a battle every summer that we just can’t win. I’ll be sure to send my HOA a “courtesy notice” to let them know my plan.
