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I live in Texas too and we have no gutters and our front yard was being drowned with water as well as our front steps everytime it rained so I made my own creek bed.
I have not placed water wise perennials because we do not seem to get so much water all the time and with water ratios here in Austin I cannot water them regularly (twice a week only). I do not know much about water wise perennials, so I did not want to venture that way.
Mine has served us well. The only time I have a "problem" is in the fall when my fruitless Mulberry tree loses its leaves. Cleaning the dry creek is time consuming. Haven't figured an easy way to clean it yet.
Wow, very nice creekbed! Great looking rocks. I've seen people use leaf blowers to get the leaves out of their creekbeds; your rocks are big enough that they won't move under the blower, so that should work well. I've got little pebbles in mine and they'd probably blow away with the leaves.
Thanks for your article since we have a personal interest in diverting water ourselves! For 14 years we lived in Garland and had a beautiful river rock bed, but I grew to dislike how much work it caused me since it was under a live oak tree with bushes bordering it and the debris built up and caused me much trouble in trying to keep it looking nice and functioning properly. If you're dealing with a lot of trees like we are now that we're in Denton, TX, and live in an oak forest (in the Cross Timbers area), we found an alternative that works great under trees is a paving stone path. Here, my husband's water diversion that he built 8 years ago is a curving, sloping, 2 ft wide red paving stone path that has worked wonders to divert water, even during the 100 year flood a year or two ago. The naturally raised plant beds on either side are so full of roots from ferns, azaleas, and other plants (with added mulch on top) that they kept the dirt from washing away. It's easy to clean with a leaf blower, too. He did have to cut the paving stones with a rented saw from a home improvement or rental store, but made the patterns he wanted to cut on his computer, printed them out, and then cut from those. It's been a beautiful addition in our woodland garden for 8 years.
This picture shows the only part of the water diversion path that isn't curving, but you can see where at each end the path starts to gently curve and does so as it meanders across the back yard. At one end of the yard, the path funnels the rain water toward the top of our concrete driveway where it quickly escapes down to the street. In our woodland setting, this has worked very well in the 8 years since my husband built it. It took him a couple of weekends to build. When we moved here, most of this area was dirt and weeds and any rain we got would wash lots of soil away. Now you can see the lush garden that my husband planted around the water diversion path and the soil is held remarkably well by all the roots through all the seasons of the year.
Thanks so much for your interest, and I hope you get some good ideas to help you or to pass along to others. This is a great website for sharing!
Jan
Jan, that is beautiful! Who knew you could have such a gorgeous, shady woodland here in Texas. Looks like a great place to be now that we're in triple digit heat. I bet the pavers are easy to keep clean, too.
Thanks for the compliment (for my husband's hard work)! Soaker hoses help. We've found that lots of birds love all the bushes and hiding places, so we feed them now, and every year we get to watch lots of baby birds being introduced to our fountains and bird feeders. It makes the yard so peaceful to hear their lovely chirping:).
