An 18 inch wide parking strip is really a difficult spot to fit shrubs into, as most will get wider than this and need pruning, but here are a bunch of things that can certainly take the heat of a California or Arizona desert location and still look good, so ought to be equally as hardy in San Antonio where you get more rain. Some of these plants will want to get up to 4 to 5 foot wide, so are probably not a good fit for your situation, but you may have other spots in the yard where they would fit.

A couple of things come to mind, such as Calliandra eriophylla, Encelia farinosa, Dalea pulchra, Ericmeria laricifolia, Justicia spicigera, Leucophyllum frutescens compacta, Salvia chamaedryoides, Salvia greggii, Simmondsia chinensis, Sphaeralcea ambigua as fairly low growing shrubs.

If you wanted lower growing ground covers; Baccharis 'Centennial', Dalea greggii, Dyssodia pentachaeta, Melampodium leucanthum, Oenothera berlandieri, Rosmarinus officinalis prostratus, Verbena rigida, Zauschneria californica would all be fairly drought tolerant choices.

If you wanted to plant some succulents, there are certainly some smaller growing Agaves that would work, such as A. parryi,Opuntia basilaris or Opuntia violacea 'Santa Rita', Hesperaloe parviflora,, Yucca bacata, or some of the grasses such as Muhlenbergia dumosa, M. emersleyi, M. lindheimeri, Stipa tenuissima, and Sporobolus airoides.

Of course any or all of these would need some irrigation the first year, so should probably be planted at the start of your rainy season or when it cools down. I'd suggest you look at the web site for Mountain States Wholesale Nursery, www.mswn.com if you aren't familiar with these plants. Yucca do Nursery near Houston would also certainly have good choices for south Texas conditions, and also has a web site.

I have seen others do this in front of their homes and it looks great. I agree that shrubs are out because of the size of the space.

Investigate native plants. They will be most used to the conditions. I would wait until you had cooler weather to get them off to the best start paossible.

cjra: I dug up part of the 2-1/2' wide strip between my sidewalk & the street last fall and planted it with the following:
- foxtail ferns (doing well)
- California poppies (did very well from March thru May)
- Mexican feather grass (doing very well)
- white lantana (doing very well)
- agapanthus (one has died, don't know if the other will)
- Knock-Out roses (doing okay)
- pentas (died)
- mondo grass (toast)
- lavender (doing very well)
- annual poppies (did well)
- bulbine (don't know if it will survive)

Probably too many different plants for the space but I want to see what's going to work best out there, then I'll eliminate some.

We've had 1/10" of rain in the past 6 weeks and some 100+ degree days. I water out there about every other week. I'm going to fill in any bare spots this fall with Russian sage.

Here's a photo from April, with the poppies going full speed:
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(The state ripped up the pavement in May and put down asphalt, which was really hard on everything out there.)

My little strip happens to drain well and is in sun only part of the day. Another thing to consider (along with stop sign visibility) is where people will step if they park along the curb.

Thanks for the information. I won't be planting anything until at least this heat wave breaks (been 100+ for 3 weeks now), and probably not until fall. This gives me time to plan.

I appreciate the suggestions. The rest of my landscaping has been done with native/drought tolerant plants, so I have a fairly good idea of what will grow. I'm just not sure they'd work so well there. For example,I have 3 wonderful firebush plants in front of the porch which are just growing fabulously and forming one big bush, but I'm pretty sure such a bush would not work well in that space. I like the lavendar idea - almost planted it this year until I discovered how much it attracts bees, which my 3 yr old is allergic to so that scared me away.

The site gets good morning sun, and is partially shaded the rest of the day.

Good point about where people will step if they park there. We don't have a lot of people parking there usually (the other street is a big problem....nothing will grow due to foot traffic), but there is the occasional parker (guests, parties etc). I think ideally I'd space the plants out just a bit so that there was space to step.

Here are some pictures I just took tonight - you can see how awful it is now. Some Bermuda is growing towards the back (and we've been away so haven't edged), but the rest is just weeds.
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{{gwi:39748}} It is a bit wider towards one end, where the driveway is.

You could deal with this temporarily by digging a small trench along the curb & sidewalk, tossing the soil into the center of the strip. Cover it all with several layers of newspaper, tucking them down into the trenches. Then top everything with mulch, which would look tidier than what's there now. I've found that if you water the shredded type hardwood mulch a little, it will knit together and not blow around or wash away.

The weeds and grass will die . . . except for the Bermuda grass that will grow through anything. You probably should kill that chemically first. Then in the fall when you're ready to plant the area, just scrape back the mulch to dig your planting holes.

If you do get rain this summer, the newspaper will start to decompose. No rain & you might have to pull it out when you plant, but that's not too difficult. I've done it in a similar situation.

Hmmm, I hadn't planned to do anything for awhile, but it does look horrible and we are having a party soon. That sounds like it'd be a huge improvement.

Now, if I can just bring myself to work in this 106F weather....maybe I need to do it at 3am.

That is a long strip!

Good luck and keep us posted! I dont know where in SA you live but I always found the folks at Rainbow Gardens very nice and helpful.

I'm near downtown. My neighbor goes to Rainbow Gardens all the time. I try to avoid it because I usually end up a lot poorer when I leave ;)

Fannick's is actually a lot closer for me and I love them, but Rainbow Gardens is better organized.

Now I'm conflicted. I finally edged and cleaned it up a bit, and see that there's a lot more grass than I thought. It's still about 1/2 weeds but the other half is grass (a mix of St.A + bermuda):
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I don't water here - it's too much hassle and given I have too much lawn already in this drought, really don't want to have to water on any sort of regular basis. It's also a pain to keep it edged properly w/o making a huge mess. So it's ripe for some new drought tolerant/native plants. However, that's a lot of grass to get rid of. Would spraying chemicals really work on that much? Do I need to dig it all out?

The other half I'm going to pull out the weeds and do the newspaper/mulch suggestion for the short term to clean it up a bit. I am a little concerned any plantings will get trampled on when people park, but I wouldn't mind discouraging people from parking there! They already park too close to the stop sign.

Since you're not planning to plant anything while it's so hot, Roundup would probably work fine, though it might take a couple of applications to get rid of the Bermuda grass.

It does look lots better with the weeds trimmed. Too bad it's so tedious maintaining a weedy area. Almost as bad as having to clean an ugly house, imo!

Funny you mention the cleaning....we have an old house in various states of disrepair. It's better now, but for the first couple of years it seemed odd cleaning what was basically a construction zone.

And yes, taking care of this spot is tedious. My neighbors have a very lush green beautiful strip but 1 - it's a very small area and 2 - is part of a very small lawn, so they water much more (by hand) but overall probably no more than we do (our yard is about 4x the size).

That's funny - it's an argument my husband and I have had for the 15 years we've been stuck mid-reno: I say exactly that: why clean/organize/tidy a construction zone? He says, why finish anything if it is going to be a mess anyway? While we were arguing, the kids grew up in spite of the mess/half-finished house, and now we have more time and energy.

I'm not at all familiar with your climate or with Bermuda grass, but have been a keen student of hellstrips and custodian of one of my own for a long time. Some thoughts:

If people park there at all you should make areas for passenger exit from cars, because people sometimes want to park badly enough that they will trample your plants. Perhaps you can actually control where people will park by creating mulch or paver areas to accommodate them (depends on how competitive parking is around there). Anyway, I would begin your plan by laying out the bones for such walkways, along the curb and from curb to sidewalk, just as you might for any garden design project. I have seen some that put a pathway along the entire roadside, but this is one narrow strip so that may not be do-able.

The other thing you can do to give this space something other than a linear character is to use other hardscape instead of all plants - boulders? stumps? a trellis down at the wide end where it wouldn't block the stop sign? garden junk? (I have some old sinks that contain my aggressive spreaders in my hellstrip). As an aside, hard things discourage parking just a bit more assertively than plants do, although single occupant vehicles won't notice and others can always pick-up/drop-off their passengers at the corner....

What kind of root zone was left when the city poured the sidewalk? If there is just a shallow trench of dirt, your plants are going to have a hard go of it, but if it is truly an opening into deep soil, trees might have a chance. You could put up columnar types a safe distance from the stop sign or prune the canopies to ensure stop sign visibility. Shrubs, in contrast, will mature and broaden at the wrong heights for most types of vehicles.

As far as plant selection is concerned, I could be worse than useless given my zone (I can identify perhaps three of the plants Bahia has listed for you!), but in general terms I have some preferences based on the public nature of such a strip. In my "urban renewal" environment, littering is endemic and there is a risk (thankfully quite low) of litter of a particular unpleasant nature. For that reason, I like to be able to see the area quite bare at least once per year. So the only evergreen plants I like are those that are ground-hugging that no garbage can hide under, and the stuff that bulks up a lot is perennial - it either dies back or I cut it back (quite carefully) when it's done. Tree trunks excepted, obviously.

An option that would work for me if your hellstrip were in front of my house would be to use some ground cover succulents (my experience is limited to sedums and sempervivums) that may be evergreen, offset with some hardscape and funnel-shaped pathways crossing the strip, and punctuated with either blooming perennials (such as those poppies) or manageable trees. In fact, this would be really awesome just planted with sempervivums from one end to the other!

KarinL

KarinL - thanks for the suggestions. You've given me a lot of food for thought. I definitely like the succulent idea, that's not uncommon in my neighborhood and looks nice. We also have a litter problem, although it's substantially better now (also an urban renewal area - used to be the area of the most notorious projects in the city, now the hip urban revival area, I came in very early in the revival).

I'm not really sure about the root zone. I'm fairly sure it's an opening into deep soil, but the soil is hard clay, which seems to be a challenge for many things.

The pic treelover posted is really appealing, and that's kind of what I was initially thinking. In my ideal I'd have something like that to 'soften' up the area - there are lots of crepe myrtles along the yard line but at mid-day that spot just looks really harsh between the concrete and asphalt with the sun beating down.

However I realize now that parking really is an issue. It's not heavily used, but is often enough that anything there would get trampled. There's a JW church across the street, so on a daily basis we have parkers in front of our house (so the Bermuda is just not doing well there....I wish they'd put a sidewalk in there instead) and on Sundays they also park along this strip. A couple of times per year, during area-festivals we have highly competitive parking, but only on those few days. On a daily basis there's not generally anyone parking there unless it's one of us or the neighbors have a visitor. Still, anything there would get trampled.

For now, it's pull the weeds and mulch in those zones. I'll work on the grass a bit later.

Thanks all! Next up will be how to fix my back yard :)