It's mostly clay like. It would be watered via a system, so, drought won't kill it per se. I don't know how accurate simple rain gauges not placed by the house or trees are, but, mine measured 57" between April and June. Lost plants, trees, etc. from drowning and disease. Mine saw 7 events of 5"+ in a day. Are these really that accurate? I tried to keep it away from any other water accumulator like a roof.

Steve, Those gauges are fairly accurate. The problem is that we had (I hope!) a sort of once-in-a-lifetime ridiculous amount of rain here in southern OK this past spring, and while it brought us out of long-standing drought, we're right back in drought again. That is what you can expect here....perpetual drought interrupted by occasional flooding for a couple of months. We were pretty wet in 2004 and 2007 but 2015 was wet beyond belief. The flooding in 2015 was the worst I've seen at our house, in our neighborhood and in our county, and the same is the true of the Red River and Lake Texoma flooding. Hopefully we won't see a year again any time soon with this sort of excessive rainfall.

I hate hearing that you have clay because I was going to suggest any of the great ground cover type sedums if you have well-drained soil. Sedums do not survive in my clay, even when the clay has been well-amended. In clay I have substituted a local sedge that pops up on its own for liriope, which didn't thrive on the west or south side of our house. Whatever the sedge is, it grows in clay. I've also used some of the really short yaupon hollies and nandinas. Both tolerate clay, but they may get taller than what you want, although you could keep them clipped short. That clipping is more maintenance than I'd want to do.

Our property slopes, but our south and west sides are the higher parts of the property. On the east where we have trouble keeping mulch in the beds, we have those native sedges. On the north side of the house where we have a steep dropoff, we used purple wintercreeper as a groundcover in a bed beneath a tree. The purple winter creeper holds the soil in place, but we have to cut it back occasionally (with the weedeater) or it will get several feet tall, kind of sprawling and reaching, instead of creeping along on the ground the way I want for it to grow.

Some of the really dwarf daylilies might work but you likely would need to amend the clay with several inches of organic matter before planting them so that the soil would drain well enough. Clay soil + a western exposure + hot weather = really tough conditions for anything. With amended clay, you might be able to grow the ground cover sedums, some of the taller sedums like stonecrop or even hens and chicks. Around our house, I amended our clay for seven consecutive years and grew only annuals in it until it finally drained well enough to suit me, and then I planted shrubs, ground covers and perennials.

If you click on the link below, you can see the Bryan County rainfall record for the last few years. The Mesonet data will be incomplete because sometimes flooding knocks out the rain gauges and they don't report for a while, but it will give you an idea of what is "normal" for your county in a typical year. By the way, the slogan we have at our house is "there is no normal here". How else do you explain 18.5" of rain in one year and 55" or more in another? You probably should expect long drought spells more often than you'll actually see flooding rains. Plants of any kind that will tolerate both bone-dry cracking clay and soggy, soppy clay that has the texture of chocolate pudding are hard to find, but if you amend the clay well, you'll have a lot more options available to you because you'll be able to grow ground covers that need well-drained soil.

Mesonet Monthly Rainfall Record for Durant

And, this link has a lot of climate data for your county.

The Climate of Bryan County from OCS

Let me think about some other plants that might tolerate full sun in clay with a western exposure that stay less than a foot tall but which are dense enough to hold back mulch.

I have to add that friends of ours who had the same problem you're having got rid of their bark mulch and used a stone mulch that looks to me like it is lava rock.

Dawn

I had those links but thanks for the thought! I know the climate, was just wondering since I had seen only 30" or so on the Mesonet site, why mine would record close to double that.

I really want to keep the border plant short, maybe 6" in an ideal world. Sedges that I know spread really fast, sounds like a lot of maintenance? Also, no annuals. Hoping to find some dwarf decorative grass that would do ok.

The nursery in Denison could not find a plant for me. But I just find that so hard to understand, like, I have the only house with a west exposure!?

Stone mulch would be ok, but, 100' of it is a tad pricy. Seems like it would just crank up the heat too! Heck, this year, even gravel would flow into the streets here from gravel driveways, roads, etc.

Rainfall is highly variable. We often get significantly more or less rain than our mesonet station, and the difference can be that they record 3" and we have 12" or they record 3" and we get 0.01". I use the official rainfall for amusement purposes only because, in general, it bears little relationship to how much actual rainfall we record at our house. We have three rain gauges, each of them about 100' apart, and even over that small of an area, we often see differences of 1/4-1/2" recorded during one rainfall event. I figured that out pretty quickly after we moved here, but it took me a lot longer to realize that even our temperatures can vary a very great deal from the official recordings.

There have been times we have been 10-12" hotter than the high temp recorded at our mesonet station, or 3-6" colder, and we have our thermometers posted the proper way at 5' above ground level in full shade. It is shocking when you start tracking your own rainfall and temperatures and comparing them to the nearest mesonet station and discover how different they can be.

I think this partially explains why my last average freeze date is March 29th, but for 8 of the last 11 years, we have had our actual last freeze at our house during the first week in May. I cannot wait until May to plant my veggies and flowers or the heat will burn them up before they grow much and do anything, so I plant when I am supposed to, based on average last frost date data and on how warm my soil is, and then cover up the plants with floating row cover on the occasional night we have late freezing temperatures. I'm in a low-lying creek hollow area within the already low-lying Red River Valley so I've just had to learn to adjust my planting timing to the weather we actually have here on our property as opposed to the weather they record several miles away at our county's OK Mesonet station.

This year's rainfall is highly unusual and unlikely to be repeated more than once or twice a decade. Most of the people who live around me plant trees and shrubs on the western and southern exposures of their homes which provides a lot of shade for shorter plants in flower/shrub beds as well as providing shade for patios, porches and the homes themselves. We all do that because there's not many plants that will survive a typical June-August with highs in the upper 90s through 110 or so routinely, and often very little rainfall if it rains at all. That's doubly true when those same plants have to survive the one or two years per decade when we have heavy flooding rains that last for 2 or 3 months and cause many plants in clay soil to die from root rot. And, if you have dense, slow-draining clay, the list of what will tolerate both extreme heat/drought as well as occasional years where rainfall is so high it is off the charts....well, the list drops down to almost nothing. I can grow liriope now in the dappled shade to the west and south of our home, but in the early years it scorched and turned brown every summer. So did dwarf mondo grass. I used a lot of short yaupon hollies and nandinas, and even the nandinas scorched in July and August until the trees got tall enough to shade them more. I finally just went with annual bedding plants for ages, and then had to fight the battle to keep the bermuda grass out of them.

Once you've got the dappled shade from the shrubs and trees, you can grow liriope and other plants that cannot tolerate full sun in the summer on a western or southern exposure, but it can take a decade to get enough shade to then be able to plant what you want. We are rural so most people here are probably less picky about their landscaping than in town in a subdivision where the houses are close to one another. We also plant a lot of taller plants, like cannas, right alongside the home's foundation to shade the walls of the house from the western and southern sun and heat. One of my favorite plants in the early years here when we had little shade and far too much sunlight and drought was 'Stokes' yaupon holly, but it gets taller than a foot high. I even resorted to putting bird netting down on top of my mulch to hold it in place. I staked it down close to the ground with U-shaped landscape staples. It held the mulch in place pretty well during heavy rainfall, but wild animals and our free-range chickens made a mess of it. Also, snakes would try to crawl through it and get hung up in the netting. So, I switched strategies and choose mulch that wouldn't wash away. Instead of using bark mulch, I use grass clippings and shredded/chopped autumn leaves. We have about 10 acres of woodland so once it is cold and the snakes are down for the season, I go into the woodland and rake/collect all the leaves I can. They pack down with rainfall and stick to one another and don't wash away easily most year. As they break down, they enrich the soil. To be honest, though, in a year with rain like we had in the spring and early summer, this is not much mulch (except stone) that won't wash away. Sometimes pine needle mulch (if you can find it) will hold its own against heavy rainfall, and if you can find the finely shredded cypress mulch, it will too. But, in a year when we have had too many days with 6", 8", 10" or 12" rain events, mulch is going to be carried off by rainfall/runoff. There's just no way around that and there's no simple solution.

The nursery in Denison cannot give you a good list of what will tolerate a southern or western exposure here because there's not many plants that can handle our perpetual heat and drought in the height you want and in the clay soil you have. Hence.....all the folks around here with rock mulch around a few widely space shrubs. If you had sandy soil, you'd have more options, but you don't. I like creeping plants like Asian jasmine and winter creeper (there's both a green version and a purple version). Wandering jew and purple wandering jew also have done well in my dense soil on the south side of the house. My west side is mostly shaded now, but in the early years I had mostly lantana there, which functions more like an annual than a perennial because it cannot tolerate the heavy, slow-draining, dense red clay soil in wet winters.

So, I'm not sure I can tell you what WILL grow in a western exposure with heavy, dense, slow-draining clay but I have a very, very long list of plants I have tried that failed in a similar situation since 1999. We have to be realistic and deal with the actual weather we have and, in any given year, we have no idea if we are going to spend April, May and June flooded (usually not, but maybe 2 or 3 times a decade) or if we will spend June, July and August with practically no rainfall and with severe, extreme or exceptional drought, which seems to be the rule any more rather than the exception to the rule. This year, joy of joys, we have had both! At our house, we had 71" of rainfall from mid-June of 2014 through early July of 2015. Sounds great, doesn't it? Now, after less than 2" of rain in the last 90 days, we are in Extreme Drought and are having grass fires practically every day. Does it seem logical to go from flooding in early summer to moderate, severe or extreme drought just 30-60 days later? Of course not, but that it what it is like to live here, and plants that tolerate both extremes are rare. Watch the fields around you or the homes that have been there longer than yours and you may find some landscaping ideas. That's how I found purple wintercreeper. Someone who lives several miles from us has it growing in their bar ditch where it gets flooded in spring and roasts in the hot summer months, and yet it always looks good. I figured if it could live in a bar ditch without irrigation in the summer, it could tolerate my dense clay soil in summer with some irrigation, and it has. The same weedy native sedge that drove me crazy in the early years by trying to grow where I wanted to plant something else is now my liriope substitute. The Virginia Creeper vines that climb my fence and get into my veggie garden where they are not welcome? They are great at holding the soil on the north side of the house where there's a steep dropoff from our yard down to the adjacent woodland that sits 6 or 8' lower than our house. The trumpet creeper that is highly invasive? Our tornado shelter is buried beneath a huge green mound of it with only the door visible. You learn to work with the plants that want to grow here, not the ones you'd like to plant and grow instead.

This year we had widow's tears pop up all over the place. It isn't my favorite plant, but it loves dense clay in wet years (not so much in dry years) so instead of digging it out of my beds, I just enjoyed it while it was there, knowing that when drought returned, it would dry up and go away (it did).

For so long (we've been here since 1999), I fought my soil and the weather and tried to grow what I wanted to grow. It was a long time before I wised up and learned to look at my natural landscape (we're on acreage) and to learn from what grows here naturally. Once I understood both our weather patterns (crazy as they are, they is a certain consistency within a decade) and our soil (horrible red clay, but better every year as mulch decays and enriches it), I was better able to figure out what plants tolerate both. Most people here often just have bermuda grass on the southern and western exposures of their homes because it can handle anything, but I hate bermuda grass because of the way it invades flower beds, so that doesn't really work for me. For anything that I am serious about growing, I have raised beds that sit 4-8" above grade level and that are filled with very highly amended clay. WIth soil like that, I can grow anything (including liriope) as long as I am willing to irrigate it. I think you might get away with liriope on the west side of your house if you have highly amended soil rich in organic matter, if you irrigate, and if you have planted some trees that eventually will give it dappled shade, but you'll have to put up with a lot of scorching for the first 3-5 years. The plants that I planted our first 2 or 3 or 4 years here? They're almost all gone now, replaced by tougher, hardier plants that never would have been my first choice. You have to work with what you have in terms of heat, rainfall, sunlight, etc. and the plants that grew well for me in a kinder (though still hot and dry) climate in Fort Worth are not the ones that grow well for me here. I also think that nurseries assume most people are "plant it and forget about it" types who want something easy they can plop into the ground and mostly forget about. For a serious gardener who will amend soil and irrigate consistently, then I think some plants can be used that they wouldn't recommend to a non-gardener who wants a maintenance-free landscape. So, if I were you, I might try a limited planting of liriope and see for myself how it does. That's what I did, and it might have worked were it not for the drought of 2003 (less than 19" of rain that year) and the drought of 2005-2006 (maybe 25" of rain in 2005 and I don't even remember what we had in 2006). After 2005-06, I pulled out the liriope and used some of the ground cover type junipers but they get 1-2' tall even if you get the shortest ones available. This winter I'm taking them out. Having learned that wildfire is a big threat in my region in winter, I don't want any junipers near the house, which is too bad because they grow really well in our clay. At one point we had six, and now I'm going to be taking out the last one. It looks awful, and I am not sure if the flooding got it or the subsequent drought, but it is half-dead and it is time for it to go. I'll probably replace it with daylilies, hopefully the evergreen to semi-evergreen ones. That area has shade from a chaste tree, so maybe the daylillies won't even bloom there, but if all they do is hold the soil in place so it doesn't erode, I'll be happy. The western expsoure of our home is hard to landscape, but easier now that we have trees that provide some shade. In the beginning, nothing would grow there and everything just roasted in the afternoon sun and heat. So, my main landscape solution has been just to plant tons of trees and shrubs so that someday I'd have enough shade to grow more ornamental plants in heavy shade to dappled shade.

I have a number of plants surviving and even thriving on my side side, just none (yet) as I described, The soil does stay moist, even during no rain like lately. The problem is I had some root rot, but, have solved that now I believe. So, my Crossvine, for example, thrives, as does my bushes. I was thinking about a dwarf fountain grass possible, perhaps something like little bunny. Ever tied one of those? It's supposedly the shortest one. < 1'.

You must be in a cold valley to have freeze up to May! I also have thermometer, and multiple rain gauges. I put them at different spots as I didn't believe the rainfall totals, but, they really come up with the same number for the most part, certainly over time. Here, we almost never get as cold as the weather station says. When plants die, mine survive. Might be micro climate, maybe being 2 miles from the lake adds a degree or two, not sure. It certainly adds more humidity.

So, you are saying the Blue rug juniper which supposedly tops out at 6" actually grows taller? The advantage of using it would be no mulch at all once it grows wide. Thought they were evergreen? Sounds like another potential option, see previous message too.