July 09, 2025
You never know when inspiration will spark in your brain and grab hold. For West Lake Hills gardener Sherry Smith, it happened on vacation in Provence, in the picturesque village of Bonnieux. While vacationing there in 1997, she and husband Bill stumbled upon The Louve (which means the She-Wolf), an esteemed private garden on a stony hillside overlooking the Luberon.
La Louve was created by Nicole de Vésian starting at age 70, when she retired to Bonnieux from the fashion world and took up a new career as a self-taught gardener and garden designer. (In 1996, at age 80, she sold the garden to an American, who kept up the garden and its open days.)
La Louve’s limestone terraces of sheared poufs and pillars, accented with stone orbs and troughs, was a revelation for Sherry. The garden’s “precisely clipped plants amidst the irregular natural and set stone and plants left in their natural shapes gave me an aha moment for gardening in my similar landscape devoted to native, drought-tolerant plants,” she says.
She brought that spark home to her own garden in West Austin, where the house she and Bill built in 1992 shelters behind a limestone cliff. Shallow soil, a hilly lot, stone everywhere, hardscrabble plants, heat and drought — much about Central Texas and Provence felt similar to Sherry, minus, of course, the low humidity and rainless Mediterranean summer.
Sherry had been gardening here for 5 years already. In fact, she started before construction on the house had even begun, transplanting native nolina from the building site…
…to the dramatic cliff edge that fronts the street, where it cascades like Rapunzel’s hair over a fortress of limestone.
Street view — the house is behind the cliff wall.
Sherry came home from that trip with La Louve in her head and saw her garden with new eyes. “I started out close to the house,” she says, “sculpting plants that took to the trimming, and then spread out to the volunteers on the upslope and east side of the house.”
She experimented with shearing cenizo, yaupon, santolina, rosemary, and pink skullcap. She tried lavender too, even though she calls it undependable here in Central Texas.
Other plants she leaves more natural for better flowering, like Mexican oregano. “Severe clipping restricts blooms,” she points out, “so I choose which plants to regularly shear during the growing season and which to shape just at the beginning. Cenizos and yaupons are in the regular camp.”
Unsheared Mexicano oregano in bloom
Her clean-lined stone house with a simple front porch is itself inspired by Provence. “Provençal and Tuscan homes and gardens have always been an influence,” says Sherry, “because the land reminds me of those regions. The antique olive jars and terracotta pots stem from those influences, as does the design of the house itself.”
The house is built on the natural, sloping topography of the lot. Sherry exposed rocky outcroppings in front and back to create natural terraces, and she used limestone excavated during construction to build walls for garden terracing.
Terraced garden along the front porch
Pink skullcap and catmint tumble over limestone walls.
Bumblebee collecting pollen from pink skullcap
Catmint
Sherry designed the garden herself and does the regular gardening too. Her eye for design led to her garden being selected as a finalist in the Gardenista Considered Design Awards, Amateur Garden category, in 2015.
For bigger projects over the past 20 years, she’s employed “a multi-talented landscaper” to lay stone, spread gravel and mulch, do major shearing, trim perennials after winter freezes, weed-eat large areas, and plant and transplant trees and other large plants. “He is my rock,” she says.
The porch overlooks an up-sloping garden of flowering salvias, Mexican oregano, skullcap, and catmint.
Skullcap is naturally mounding…
…but the mounded shape really takes hold along the upper terraces, where Sherry shears native shrubs into geometric forms.
Clipped cenizo and yaupon make tables and poufs along an exposed limestone ledge.
Sherry’s garden has more flower color than de Vésian’s, with autumn sage…
…Mexican oregano…
…and lantana offering color, nectar, and pollen from spring through fall.
Hummingbird, bee, and butterfly offering
Sherry’s dog Zephyr accompanied us on our garden amble, after getting out pent-up energy running up and down the terraces.
Spanish dagger and clipped cenizo
Wheeler’s sotol and a nicely pruned juniper
Terraced garden, a long view
One more
Russian sage and autumn sage
A double-decker side porch offers more outdoor living space, as does an open deck in back.
Behind the house, a natural area under oaks and other trees leads to an open wildflower meadow and septic field.
Sherry shared this photo of Mexican hat and other wildflowers in the meadow in late spring.
Beach vitex
Retama flowering along the cliff
I love retama’s buttery flowers and green branches.
Sherry’s garden is a beautiful example of gardening for the place you live, with all of its challenges — rock, thin soil, drought, and heat. Yet it can still take inspiration from a faraway place — in this case, Provence, a similarly rugged yet beautiful region of France.
Thank you, Sherry, for sharing your garden with me!
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