Desert Garden Design!

So many residents who are new residents of the starkly gorgeous USA's Desert Southwest Region often fight nature by trying to re-create the same environments they moved from "back East", or as they perceive the tropics should look, even though this region could never (or ecologically should never) be a rainforest!  

Watering of high maintenance lawns, satisfying those water-hungry annuals "like back home", planting apple, pecan & peach trees, and basically, working against "Mother Nature."  These folks are really "sweating it out" when all they should do is work with their new, arid & exotically beautiful (in its own unique way) environment!  Planting with xeriscaping in mind, is an idea that isn't just wise, it is a necessity, as water travelling down cement viaducts becomes more scare and more expensive in the 21st Century!

The desert is spectacular enough to "stand on its own!" If you look at things from that perspective, you'll surely want to landscape differently!  Paul, "The Wise Gardener" guarantees it, friends!  How many neighbourhoods in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, and El Paso look like subdivisions in Chicago, Indianapolis or Philadelphia?  Not only are these yards using way too much of that ever limited resource: water, but they flagrantly defy to work in union with a land of unique, stark beauty, jagged-edged topography, and intense natural geological colourations.

The land is beauty itself; it does not need our "help" to artificially recreate an environment trying to pretend to be a replica of a more humid Eastern community, beyond the Rockies!  It is for this reason that Paul, "The Wise Gardener", revisits in a timely fashion, the return to appropriate "Desert Design"! 

Desert Design works with nature!  Its' increased usage of Cacti, succulents, aloes, native grasses, and other Sonoran/Mojave Desert natives (and minimal watering needs), allow their champions to enjoy gardening, again!  Maintenance is reduced to occasional weeding, spreading of mulches like: pebbles, rocks, and native grasses, and watching the sunsets over the ever-present, ever-looming, starkly rock-strewn mountains (casting a rainbow-coloured glow over the landscape!)

View these wondrous photographs, courtesy of Melba Levick, from the book: "Desert Gardens" by Gary Lyons.  After enjoying them, look around YOUR yard and see how you, too, can bring back the "natural" to our beloved and "unique-in-all-the-world" Desert Southwestern USA landscape!  The ideas that you might gain from them can afford you the opportunity to re-think your gardening endeavours in this truly special part of the world!  You, Southwestern gardeners, are the luckiest gardeners, in "The Wise Gardener's" opinion, on the planet!

Paul,"The Wise Gardener!"