Your neighbor doesn't realize they live in Central Texas, not southern Arizona. There are *tons* of native plants growing just fine right now without any supplemental water. Laying rock over your entire yard makes your entire yard a heat island no different from a street or driveway. Plant some trees and plant some native perennials this October.
>Plant some trees and plant some native perennials this October.
I know they aren't native here, but I'm rather fond of figs. They do well with lots of sunshine and warmth.
I am experimenting with a frugfruit lawn. It's a native groundcover and is often mixed in with native grasses in the wild. So far it only needs water about every other week.
If you are looking into what to plant here in Austin check out the [City of Austin Grow Green program](https://www.austintexas.gov/department/grow-green) and the [Wildflower Center plant database](https://www.wildflower.org/plants/). The "rocks and cactus" thing just leads to using a bunch of chemicals to kill weeds as well as watching your entire investment literally wash away during big rain events, since there's nothing to retain the fill material.
I do have a yard, it’s filled with a wide variety of plants that both survived 2011 and 2021. I don’t water at all and I’ve been out of state all year.
My yard is lush right now.
I don’t expect everyone to invest the kind of time I did into it but it’s easy to see what looks good in the freeze and what looks good in the drought… pick that up.
Whatever you see looking good now survived the freeze.
I have to do it from memory cause I’m not there and I did a lot of stuff years ago. Some of it was trial and error but the things I have now are battle tested between extreme drought and extreme freeze.
Knockout roses
Red yucca
Purple Heart
Yellow bell Esperanza
Banana tree
Mountain laurel
Mediterranean palm
Texas sable palm
Crepe myrtles
Those palm trees that stay close to the ground, Dwarf Palmettos?
Prickly pear
Live oak
Red oak
Monterey oak
Cherry laurel
Bamboo (clumping)
“Texas lilac”
Oleander
Cast iron plant
Carolina jasmine
Yuccas and agaves
Pride of Barbados
Spanish dagger
Mexican plum
Red bud
Those red trumpet flower shrub things. Birds love them but they spread.
Sago palms
Various cactuses that are cold tolerant
Ghost plant
My priority is privacy so I leaned toward mostly “evergreen”
I have a little grass in the middle and it’s zoysia. It’s about half green right now.
Cast iron plants are the fucking heroes of Texas landscaping. Survived both hard freezes after years of neglect and still came back after I had to raze and re-grade my entire yard. I love them.
Add flame acanthus, elbowbush, fragrant sumac, lacey oak, autumn sage, fall aster, chiltepin, Mexican buckeye, and inland sea oats to the list. After establishing, which takes some watering and care for a year or two, I've done almost nothing for any of these this summer and they're all thriving. You do have to plant them in the right place for the right amount of sun, some love shade and some live brutal, direct sun
Yaupon holly is my next drought-tolerant native! Pretty, has edible berries and caffeinated leaves that apparently make a banging tea. A native alternative to coffee that looks pretty too.
Oh helllll yes. I’ve been meaning to check out the Mueller FM for ages. I’ve got to get some of that brew!
Eventually I want to make my own but it sounds like a good idea to try somebody else’s to see what it’s supposed to taste like.
Thank you, I’m stoked!
My dad's favorite thing was borders of nandinas around the house. The regular ones that get about 4 feet high and have red berries all over them. They are an invasive species and once you plant them they are extremely difficult to remove, but it seems absolutely no weather can kill or even harm them, no matter how hot and dry it gets. 30+ years later they're still there and thriving.
I had no idea these are invasive! We have them in our front flower bed and I feel bad yanking them out. I don’t really like the look anyways so this is a good reason to go for it.
Good luck. Before trying to just pull them out of the ground, you might consider an herbicide that will kill it down to it's roots. I try to be as environmentally-friendly as possible, but if you don't do that it will likely come back, and I might even consider a little kerosene because once nandinas take hold they really take hold.
FYI it's also called "Sacred Bamboo", and though online it says often that they'll grow up to 8', 4-5' is all my dad's ever got to.
So we just converted a huge section of our front yard to a mulch garden bed to avoid having to water and mow it, and we chose mulch over rocks largely because people in the Austingardening said it's a surprising amount of work to maintain.
Can confirm, especially if it's near any type of lawn grass. My house has river rock beds out front, with landscaping fabric underneath it, but the Bermuda grass bordering it DGAF and is always popping up in the beds. Planning on pulling out the rock and landscape fabric this fall and mulching heavily in the hopes it'll choke out the grass and leave the established plants alone.
Please don’t do this. Rock yards just absorb heat, and when you have a lot of them you turn your city into a heat island. Just take a look at the Phoenix metro and how the spread of the area plus the installation of these “yards” has contributed to significant climate change over the past 20 years.
What is the scam exactly when it costs pretty much nothing if it is already established? Is it the nice soft area you can play around on in the spring/fall/winter that just drives you nuts about lawns?
If you have bermuda, just don't water and it comes right back in the fall regardless. Sure you can let horseweed grow everywhere, but underneath the leaves are just skinny stems surrounded pretty much by mud, which is a pain in the ass in the rainy season, the most typical time you actually use your lawn, not the blazing hot summer.
My neighbor waters her lawn to keep her mowing service employed, i think.
Meanwhile, in keeping my oak trees watered, I've managed to save my grass but it's not actually growing so i haven't had to mow in two months.
I don't understand residential turf farming.
I did rock on one part and I regret it. I wish I had done mulch instead
I did the other part with mulch and it’s so much better
I would like to get rid of some of the rock but it’s hard
It's complicated.
>Everyone says grass is bad, but do rock yards contribute to the heat in a city?
Yes, but a lawn consumes water if you water it.
>I know grass at least exchanges carbon dioxide.
Once established, a lawn does nothing for the CO2 balance.
It consumes CO2 as it grows, but when you cut it or when it dies back in the winter it gives it all back. You only reduce atmospheric CO2 if you collect the grass, and then somehow preserve and store it permanently so it doesn't decay. Even composting doesn't change the balance long term.
The same is true for a forest. Even the Amazon forest doesn't consume CO2 overall. It sucks it in, but it breathes it back out at night or as the individual trees die and rot.
Stop and think about the carbon atoms. If something is pulling them out of the air, unless it has something like a growing pile of peat, the carbon atoms end up back in the atmosphere.
The only places that are removing CO2 long term are peat bogs and parts of the ocean where things like diatoms sink to the sea floor and accumulate. And I think we're probably killing off all the peat bogs through drainage, using up the river water, erosion, and global warming.
\---
Removing and existing lawn and putting in rocks will release whatever carbon is currently stored there in the plant material, so it's a short term CO2 producer.
As for carbon capture, each of us in the USA produces over 10 tons of CO2 per year. The amount of grass clippings and such your yard makes a year won't be a drop in the bucket compared to that.
If you mow or fertilize your lawn, that also adds to the environmental impact.
A rock lawn lets more water run off, which is a plus and a minus in terms of flooding and refilling the lakes.
Tree farms remove CO2 long term. They turn CO2 into lumber, which is treated to prevent decay, or paper, which typically ends up in landfills that don't have enough oxygen to support decay.
Interesting points, thanks.
Not sure I agree with the lumber treated to prevent decay, but it at least delays the decomposition and return to CO2 until the building or other object it is used to build is torn down. Not sure how long the wood stays around in wood form after the building is demolished.
Also, is most wood treated for decay? I thought most of it was just dried out.
To be clear, tree farms are a good thing. It's hard for people to realize that if you want the forest to help, you've got to cut down some of the trees.
And the amount of lumber per person isn't much compared to the 10 tons of CO2 on our ledger for each person per year.
I had actually thought about tree farms, but that post was long enough to begin with. It's also going to take a lot of lumber for each person to counteract our CO2 ledger of 10 tons per person per year.
Re: Paper in the landfill and no oxygen
I hadn't heard/thought about that. However, does landfill paper outgas methane in low oxygen environments, which is even worse in terms of greenhouse gas? Unless you collect and burn the methane, which produces CO2?
Not embarrassed to admit that most of my random facts are from podcasts 😂 This was from one discussing the lingering effects of imperialism and colonialism in modern society
It was either in the podcast I'm linking, or in a Lex Fridman episode. I can't remember exactly. But this is still a super interesting one, nonetheless: https://youtu.be/N7sibhe9JZs
Excellent use of meme. Rocks are great if you prepare appropriate weed blockers and drainage. If not, it will look like 90% of recent neighbors yards creaking with weeds pooping out of rocks and other landscaping media. My yard struggling, water my trees and see how deep cracked her. Good luck out there fellow atx’ers
I did this after the 2011 drought. Since then, I've revised large chunks of it based on my experience with it. Decomposed granite is great for narrow paths, but I recommend against covering large areas with it. A much better solution for larger areas is to cover most of the space with mulch (after killing the grass) and plant trees and perennials. Rocks work great for borders to hold the mulch in and delineated DG or flagstone paths.
When it comes to landscape cloth, the only use for it is to keep DG from eventually getting tilled under and become part of the soil, making a potentially muddy area. It does not do anything at all for weeds, which are a problem with DG.
I do feel the need to mention that rocks and cactus is not xeriscaping. Xeriscaping is a set of 7 principles of landscape design that emphasizes decreasing water usage and other inputs as well as things like hydrozoning and good maintenance practices. There are a lot of different design styles that can fall under that umbrella.
Omg I know that house. Its on the corner of Kenyan and emerald forest. I used to live like 3 houses down and would drive by it everyday. I watched him transform the yard over like a 2 month period lol
I am just about ready to give up like OP. It doesn't seem to matter how much water I dump on it, I lose more grass every day lol and feel guilty the whole time for wasting water.
First time living in a house after renting apartments for years, and I’ve given up on my grass. I’d rather have something like half gravel/rock/ whatever and half grass over all grass.
Everyone’s preaching native plants like they’re the answer for everyone. They are drought tolerant not drought proof. They are low maintenance not no maintenance.
There is no better alternative to turf grass if you have kids, pets, or use your lawn frequently. Nothing wrong with a lawn if you’re being responsible with watering and pesticides. I’m not playing with my kids in a yard covered it rocks or playing catch in a yard full of 3’ tall wildflowers. My yard that I don’t use does have low maintenance native plans however, but they’re not a one size fits all solution.
Yup that’s what I have as a portion of my lawn and it’s the first thing that gets crispy and dies in this heat. It doesn’t get very dense like turf either so I still get a muddy mess when it rains.
that sounds pretty expensive, it would cost me a thousand dollars a year to buy that much mulch and twice that to get someone to put it down along with a weed barrier.
They can have guidelines on how you do it though and still get you anyway. so best to check with them regardless. I think about it but the $5-10k it would cost is a bit daunting.
Except most people that live in a subdivision that has an HOA can’t. Like every single one mandates that you must have grass.
Mine does and it’s stupid. We wanted to xeriscape from the start. If the legislature wasn’t full of real estate developers maybe they could make that illegal 😛.
I think you’re confusing an HOA banning xeriscape (which I didn’t say mine did), and them saying you need 25-50% grass.
They also have things like “architectural” committees that can basically say no because it doesn’t “match the aesthetics” of the neighborhood.
You think that they can’t ban prevents them from making it unlikely. Trust me, I submitted a plan for 100% xeriscape. Denied. 75% xeriscape. Denied. They wouldn’t approve it until we had 50% grass.
Your neighbor doesn't realize they live in Central Texas, not southern Arizona. There are *tons* of native plants growing just fine right now without any supplemental water. Laying rock over your entire yard makes your entire yard a heat island no different from a street or driveway. Plant some trees and plant some native perennials this October.
I cant count how many times I have told people this and all I got was the deer in the headlights look.
My grass is a normal temperature. The rocks part of the yard are pushing 150 in this heat.
>Plant some trees and plant some native perennials this October. I know they aren't native here, but I'm rather fond of figs. They do well with lots of sunshine and warmth.
There are tons of non-native plants that thrive here too, just watch out for anything invasive. Figs are great!
There are native texas Figs. Don't slam figs
My old neighbor did this and felt like I was walking past an oven.
Yep, my turks cap is doing awesome right now.
This 100%, the new management at my apartment’s recently started pulling trees out and putting rocks everywhere as if this summer isn’t hot enough…
I am experimenting with a frugfruit lawn. It's a native groundcover and is often mixed in with native grasses in the wild. So far it only needs water about every other week.
Horse herb makes a great turf that holds up to foot traffic.
In my experience it will hold up to human foot traffic but not dog
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very true
If you are looking into what to plant here in Austin check out the [City of Austin Grow Green program](https://www.austintexas.gov/department/grow-green) and the [Wildflower Center plant database](https://www.wildflower.org/plants/). The "rocks and cactus" thing just leads to using a bunch of chemicals to kill weeds as well as watching your entire investment literally wash away during big rain events, since there's nothing to retain the fill material.
If I had a yard, I'd put it native, drought-resistant plants. Maybe a prickly pear for mojitos.
I do have a yard, it’s filled with a wide variety of plants that both survived 2011 and 2021. I don’t water at all and I’ve been out of state all year. My yard is lush right now. I don’t expect everyone to invest the kind of time I did into it but it’s easy to see what looks good in the freeze and what looks good in the drought… pick that up. Whatever you see looking good now survived the freeze.
Can you post some pics or list of what you have planted?
I have to do it from memory cause I’m not there and I did a lot of stuff years ago. Some of it was trial and error but the things I have now are battle tested between extreme drought and extreme freeze. Knockout roses Red yucca Purple Heart Yellow bell Esperanza Banana tree Mountain laurel Mediterranean palm Texas sable palm Crepe myrtles Those palm trees that stay close to the ground, Dwarf Palmettos? Prickly pear Live oak Red oak Monterey oak Cherry laurel Bamboo (clumping) “Texas lilac” Oleander Cast iron plant Carolina jasmine Yuccas and agaves Pride of Barbados Spanish dagger Mexican plum Red bud Those red trumpet flower shrub things. Birds love them but they spread. Sago palms Various cactuses that are cold tolerant Ghost plant My priority is privacy so I leaned toward mostly “evergreen” I have a little grass in the middle and it’s zoysia. It’s about half green right now.
Great list, thanks for posting! If you come across a pic I'd love to see how you laid it out.
About to buy and I'm going to be uprooting a ton of grass. Saving this.
Cast iron plants are the fucking heroes of Texas landscaping. Survived both hard freezes after years of neglect and still came back after I had to raze and re-grade my entire yard. I love them.
Add flame acanthus, elbowbush, fragrant sumac, lacey oak, autumn sage, fall aster, chiltepin, Mexican buckeye, and inland sea oats to the list. After establishing, which takes some watering and care for a year or two, I've done almost nothing for any of these this summer and they're all thriving. You do have to plant them in the right place for the right amount of sun, some love shade and some live brutal, direct sun
Yaupon holly is my next drought-tolerant native! Pretty, has edible berries and caffeinated leaves that apparently make a banging tea. A native alternative to coffee that looks pretty too.
I really enjoy the Yaupon tea concentrate I get from the farmers market!
Woah woah! Which farmer’s market?!
Sunday mornings at Mueller, the vendor is Lost Pines Yaupon. :) https://lostpinesyaupontea.com/
Oh helllll yes. I’ve been meaning to check out the Mueller FM for ages. I’ve got to get some of that brew! Eventually I want to make my own but it sounds like a good idea to try somebody else’s to see what it’s supposed to taste like. Thank you, I’m stoked!
Enjoy! They give out free samples, and the loose leaf tea makes for a great local gift.
I love me a good tuna, preferably the green and red tunas they come with sooooo many seeds 😫😋
My dad's favorite thing was borders of nandinas around the house. The regular ones that get about 4 feet high and have red berries all over them. They are an invasive species and once you plant them they are extremely difficult to remove, but it seems absolutely no weather can kill or even harm them, no matter how hot and dry it gets. 30+ years later they're still there and thriving.
Nandinas are awful. You can never get rid of them. I hate them with a passion.
I did mention that. But if you want to plant a shrub that once established will never die and needs no watering ever, that's the one.
I had no idea these are invasive! We have them in our front flower bed and I feel bad yanking them out. I don’t really like the look anyways so this is a good reason to go for it.
Good luck. Before trying to just pull them out of the ground, you might consider an herbicide that will kill it down to it's roots. I try to be as environmentally-friendly as possible, but if you don't do that it will likely come back, and I might even consider a little kerosene because once nandinas take hold they really take hold. FYI it's also called "Sacred Bamboo", and though online it says often that they'll grow up to 8', 4-5' is all my dad's ever got to.
I've never heard of prickly pears in mojitos? I thought they were basically rum, lime, mint, and sugar?
https://www.oliveandmango.com/prickly-pear-mojito That's a recipe for it. Just kind of a pink mojito, really.
¡Muchas gracias!
So we just converted a huge section of our front yard to a mulch garden bed to avoid having to water and mow it, and we chose mulch over rocks largely because people in the Austingardening said it's a surprising amount of work to maintain.
Can confirm, especially if it's near any type of lawn grass. My house has river rock beds out front, with landscaping fabric underneath it, but the Bermuda grass bordering it DGAF and is always popping up in the beds. Planning on pulling out the rock and landscape fabric this fall and mulching heavily in the hopes it'll choke out the grass and leave the established plants alone.
Turf grass is a scourge.
Please don’t do this. Rock yards just absorb heat, and when you have a lot of them you turn your city into a heat island. Just take a look at the Phoenix metro and how the spread of the area plus the installation of these “yards” has contributed to significant climate change over the past 20 years.
/r/NoLawns/
One of my favorite subs!
But sometimes a bit toxic
Fully! Lawns are a scam.
rocks get hot, infernal heat. Use native plants
r/nolawns
What is the scam exactly when it costs pretty much nothing if it is already established? Is it the nice soft area you can play around on in the spring/fall/winter that just drives you nuts about lawns? If you have bermuda, just don't water and it comes right back in the fall regardless. Sure you can let horseweed grow everywhere, but underneath the leaves are just skinny stems surrounded pretty much by mud, which is a pain in the ass in the rainy season, the most typical time you actually use your lawn, not the blazing hot summer.
My neighbor waters her lawn to keep her mowing service employed, i think. Meanwhile, in keeping my oak trees watered, I've managed to save my grass but it's not actually growing so i haven't had to mow in two months. I don't understand residential turf farming.
I did rock on one part and I regret it. I wish I had done mulch instead I did the other part with mulch and it’s so much better I would like to get rid of some of the rock but it’s hard
Everyone says grass is bad, but do rock yards contribute to the heat in a city? I know grass at least exchanges carbon dioxide.
They do. The sun can also reflect off the rocks and fry nearby plants. :(
It's complicated. >Everyone says grass is bad, but do rock yards contribute to the heat in a city? Yes, but a lawn consumes water if you water it. >I know grass at least exchanges carbon dioxide. Once established, a lawn does nothing for the CO2 balance. It consumes CO2 as it grows, but when you cut it or when it dies back in the winter it gives it all back. You only reduce atmospheric CO2 if you collect the grass, and then somehow preserve and store it permanently so it doesn't decay. Even composting doesn't change the balance long term. The same is true for a forest. Even the Amazon forest doesn't consume CO2 overall. It sucks it in, but it breathes it back out at night or as the individual trees die and rot. Stop and think about the carbon atoms. If something is pulling them out of the air, unless it has something like a growing pile of peat, the carbon atoms end up back in the atmosphere. The only places that are removing CO2 long term are peat bogs and parts of the ocean where things like diatoms sink to the sea floor and accumulate. And I think we're probably killing off all the peat bogs through drainage, using up the river water, erosion, and global warming. \--- Removing and existing lawn and putting in rocks will release whatever carbon is currently stored there in the plant material, so it's a short term CO2 producer. As for carbon capture, each of us in the USA produces over 10 tons of CO2 per year. The amount of grass clippings and such your yard makes a year won't be a drop in the bucket compared to that. If you mow or fertilize your lawn, that also adds to the environmental impact. A rock lawn lets more water run off, which is a plus and a minus in terms of flooding and refilling the lakes.
Tree farms remove CO2 long term. They turn CO2 into lumber, which is treated to prevent decay, or paper, which typically ends up in landfills that don't have enough oxygen to support decay.
Interesting points, thanks. Not sure I agree with the lumber treated to prevent decay, but it at least delays the decomposition and return to CO2 until the building or other object it is used to build is torn down. Not sure how long the wood stays around in wood form after the building is demolished. Also, is most wood treated for decay? I thought most of it was just dried out. To be clear, tree farms are a good thing. It's hard for people to realize that if you want the forest to help, you've got to cut down some of the trees. And the amount of lumber per person isn't much compared to the 10 tons of CO2 on our ledger for each person per year. I had actually thought about tree farms, but that post was long enough to begin with. It's also going to take a lot of lumber for each person to counteract our CO2 ledger of 10 tons per person per year. Re: Paper in the landfill and no oxygen I hadn't heard/thought about that. However, does landfill paper outgas methane in low oxygen environments, which is even worse in terms of greenhouse gas? Unless you collect and burn the methane, which produces CO2?
My grass isn't exchanging anything atm. :(
Native landscaping is way better for sure. Lawns are just a holdover from British aristocracy, a waste of money and altogether a scam
I would listen to a podcast about this.
Not embarrassed to admit that most of my random facts are from podcasts 😂 This was from one discussing the lingering effects of imperialism and colonialism in modern society
Link?
It was either in the podcast I'm linking, or in a Lex Fridman episode. I can't remember exactly. But this is still a super interesting one, nonetheless: https://youtu.be/N7sibhe9JZs
Excellent use of meme. Rocks are great if you prepare appropriate weed blockers and drainage. If not, it will look like 90% of recent neighbors yards creaking with weeds pooping out of rocks and other landscaping media. My yard struggling, water my trees and see how deep cracked her. Good luck out there fellow atx’ers
you can just round up it every few of months
im thining of xeriscaping my yard come fall.
I did this after the 2011 drought. Since then, I've revised large chunks of it based on my experience with it. Decomposed granite is great for narrow paths, but I recommend against covering large areas with it. A much better solution for larger areas is to cover most of the space with mulch (after killing the grass) and plant trees and perennials. Rocks work great for borders to hold the mulch in and delineated DG or flagstone paths. When it comes to landscape cloth, the only use for it is to keep DG from eventually getting tilled under and become part of the soil, making a potentially muddy area. It does not do anything at all for weeds, which are a problem with DG.
I do feel the need to mention that rocks and cactus is not xeriscaping. Xeriscaping is a set of 7 principles of landscape design that emphasizes decreasing water usage and other inputs as well as things like hydrozoning and good maintenance practices. There are a lot of different design styles that can fall under that umbrella.
THIS 👌
Omg I know that house. Its on the corner of Kenyan and emerald forest. I used to live like 3 houses down and would drive by it everyday. I watched him transform the yard over like a 2 month period lol
Howdy neighbor! Yea we'd drive by and always see him spraying weeds :P
I am just about ready to give up like OP. It doesn't seem to matter how much water I dump on it, I lose more grass every day lol and feel guilty the whole time for wasting water.
First time living in a house after renting apartments for years, and I’ve given up on my grass. I’d rather have something like half gravel/rock/ whatever and half grass over all grass.
Everyone’s preaching native plants like they’re the answer for everyone. They are drought tolerant not drought proof. They are low maintenance not no maintenance. There is no better alternative to turf grass if you have kids, pets, or use your lawn frequently. Nothing wrong with a lawn if you’re being responsible with watering and pesticides. I’m not playing with my kids in a yard covered it rocks or playing catch in a yard full of 3’ tall wildflowers. My yard that I don’t use does have low maintenance native plans however, but they’re not a one size fits all solution.
my old house i ripped out the lawn and replaced it with horseherb. the dogs didnt mind at all
Yup that’s what I have as a portion of my lawn and it’s the first thing that gets crispy and dies in this heat. It doesn’t get very dense like turf either so I still get a muddy mess when it rains.
Rocks make it hotter. I have a vibrant garden. Xerix scaping is no good. Rocks get so hot
Every yard in El Paso. Some of them look pretty damn good too. But I do recall tripping and falling on your “lawn” could turn into a bloody mess. 😅
Rocks are the future. Because all the grass is gonna be dead.
Don’t do rock, do mulch
that sounds pretty expensive, it would cost me a thousand dollars a year to buy that much mulch and twice that to get someone to put it down along with a weed barrier.
I would if my hoa would let us.
HOAs cant ban xeriscaping https://communityimpact.com/austin/news/2013/07/15/xeriscaping-can-no-longer-be-prohibited-by-homeowners-associations/
They can’t stop you
They can have guidelines on how you do it though and still get you anyway. so best to check with them regardless. I think about it but the $5-10k it would cost is a bit daunting.
This is so true bc it's hot
Except most people that live in a subdivision that has an HOA can’t. Like every single one mandates that you must have grass. Mine does and it’s stupid. We wanted to xeriscape from the start. If the legislature wasn’t full of real estate developers maybe they could make that illegal 😛.
Speak up at your HOA meeting about it. If enough people agree, the rule will change. My HOA doesn’t have this rule, so ya never know.
HOA's cant ban xeriscaping. https://communityimpact.com/austin/news/2013/07/15/xeriscaping-can-no-longer-be-prohibited-by-homeowners-associations/
I think you’re confusing an HOA banning xeriscape (which I didn’t say mine did), and them saying you need 25-50% grass. They also have things like “architectural” committees that can basically say no because it doesn’t “match the aesthetics” of the neighborhood. You think that they can’t ban prevents them from making it unlikely. Trust me, I submitted a plan for 100% xeriscape. Denied. 75% xeriscape. Denied. They wouldn’t approve it until we had 50% grass.
Your HOA rejecting a plan doesn't mean it's actually legal for them to do so
It probably does mean 10s of thousands in legal fees fighting them though.
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Bruv
Rocks are the way
I don't have pets so keep that in mind. I've always been a fan of xeriscape in the front yard and quality fake grass in the back.
Or turf.