Small Home Gazette, Summer 2017
Creative Solutions: From a Reluctant Lawn to a Dry Creek Bed
A (usually) dry creek bed was a functional and attractive solution for a shaded, ragged area of this bungalow’s front lawn. Garden hoses were used to lay out the size and arc of the bed.
To make this ragged area of reluctant lawn more attractive, Deb, the homeowner, added a dry creek bed. Collecting rocks over the course of a year gave her time to assemble inspiration images of dry creek beds from the internet. Craigslist linked her to plenty of people with free river rock and with larger stones that were for sale cheap. “As I was picking river rock out of the dirt around a stranger’s tree,” Deb recalls, “I felt like Tom Sawyer had suckered me into painting his fence.”
Deb followed the Better Homes & Gardens online instructions (see resource info below) for constructing the creek bed. Starting at the end of her bungalow’s downspout extension, Deb took out a 5-foot-wide swath of pitiful lawn; dug a trench to the sidewalk; put down landscape fabric; filled in the small rock; and added the larger stones at the border.
The dry creek bed is an attractive garden at all times and helps dissipate roof runoff from the bungalow’s downspout during a rainstorm.
Deb tried to mimic the look of a natural creek bed, clustering stones on the outside curve as if left behind by slow-moving water. After moving each 20- to 30-pound stone several times, some of them simply stayed where her energy flagged. She planted the creek’s edge with native perennials that are tolerant of dry soil and shade plus a few plants split off from her garden as filler.
We think the feature helps her house look like it’s in harmony with nature, as an Arts & Crafts home should.
Deb’s Plant List
- Big leaf aster
- Harebell
- Heuchera hybrid
- Hostas
- Oak sedge
- Pasque flower
- Prairie blue-eyed grass
- Prairie phlox
- Stella D’Oro daylilies
- Thimbleweed
- Wild ginger
Resource
“How to Create a Dry Creek”
Better Homes & Gardens
tinyurl.com/ycmqwkjs
Other Examples?
If you know of other creative solutions to make bungalows more livable, send them to us at mail@bungalowclub.net. Whether they save space; provide modern convenience with an historically-appropriate appearance; or simply make the best of a difficult situation, we would love to share them in the Small Home Gazette.
