While drought-stricken Texas looks for ways to save water and find billions of dollars for new supplies, Burton Knight figured he’d do his little share.
He ripped out the lawn at his small home in the Junius Heights Historic District, an East Dallas enclave of early 20th-century Craftsman and prairie-style houses. He brought in some rocks and planted cactus and other water-stingy plants.
But Knight’s project ran afoul of the city’s Landmark Commission, which oversees development in designated historic districts. Commissioners told him this month that cactuses aren’t historically appropriate.
Also unpopular was the border of jagged stones that Knight installed. Mostly, however, the commissioners really wanted a lawn. Rip out the rocks and lay down some nice, green sod, the city said, and you’ll have that familiar — and approvable — Junius Heights look.
For Knight, rising water needs and a hotter, drier Texas as a result of global warming make up the state’s most urgent environmental crisis. He said his case suggests that the cultural norms that earned Dallas a reputation as a water hog are still deeply entrenched.
“How can you say that cactus is not historic?” asked Knight, who has a horticulture degree from Texas A&M University. “Guess what crop has the greatest consumption of time, energy, water and chemicals? Turf grass.”
Recent drought years have led Dallas to try to change its ways on water. City advertisements now target waste. An annual city-sponsored home tour promotes water-wise landscaping.
On Tuesday, a report by the Austin-based advocate group Environment Texas called drought-tolerant landscaping one of the best and cheapest options for saving water.
By 2020, the report said, replacing water-sucking traditional lawns native to wetter regions with drought-adapted species could save 14 billion gallons a year, enough to meet the demands of 240,000 Texans.
But the need for new supplies remains great in Dallas and across much of Texas. The state faces a projected $53 billion cost of providing more water.
Legislators are considering whether to make a $1 billion to $2 billion down payment this year from the state’s rainy day fund.
They’re also working on a smaller scale. Three bills in Austin would bar homeowners associations, which frequently control how homes look, from imposing blanket bans on xeriscaping or drought-tolerant landscaping.
The Senate on Monday voted 30-0 in favor of Sen. Kirk Watson’s bill. It now goes to the House, where two similar bills are pending.
All the bills would regulate homeowners associations. One, by Rep. Cindy Burkett, R-Garland, would also apply to local governments.
However, it’s unlikely any of the bills would help Knight keep his drought-proof yard intact. Dallas doesn’t have a blanket ban on xeriscaping or even a policy that routinely discourages it; Knight’s case only got the city’s attention because it’s in a historic district.
And even the author of one of the bills said her idea of drought-tolerant landscaping doesn’t extend to the stony approach that Knight took.
“It’s not ‘rockscaping’ or elimination of grass,” Burkett told fellow legislators Tuesday.
In Knight’s case, however, it is. And therein lies the problem, said Carolyn Horner, the city planner who handled the matter.
“The biggest issue was the lack of lawn,” Horner said. “There’s none. Zero.”
Homes in Junius Heights, the city’s largest historic district, originally would have had a lawn, Horner said. Old photos show at least some grass.
But there’s no formal requirement. Just one sentence in the ordinance that sets standards for Junius Heights concerns plant selection and landscaping plans. It offers no more specific guidance than Knight’s yard has grass:
“Landscaping must be appropriate, enhance the structure and surroundings, and not obscure views of protected facades.”
What’s appropriate is apparently a matter of individual interpretation.
The Junius Heights Task Force, which screens proposals in the historic district, went along with Knight by a 3-2 vote.
While the plants might look scrawny now, the majority agreed, they’ll grow. Landscaping, they decided, is transitory anyway — and the district was created to protect the homes, not the plants around them.
The opposition, a city report said, was based on the landscaping not being appropriate to the district. “Boulder and stones on perimeter not appropriate,” the report said — “more appropriate to American West.”
Once the case reached the Landmark Commission on March 4, the opposition prevailed — not because the city opposes saving water, Horner said, but because of the way his yard looks.
There are historically appropriate and acceptable ways to save water, she said. “This isn’t it.”
Knight said he expects to have to comply with the city’s wishes. But the episode left him wondering how imported turf — the ubiquitous Bermuda grass, for example — could be historically superior to Texas natives that claim thousands of years of local residence.
Dallas, after all, has cactuses in its hillier southern sectors and rose from a prairie — the same landscape memorialized by Junius Heights’ prairie-style homes.
“We just fight for the things we love,” Knight said. “Using native plants is exalting our native heritage.”
Follow Randy Lee Loftis on Twitter at @RandyLeeLoftis.