Desert Design!
by Paul,"The Wise
Gardener"
So many residents who are new to
the Desert Southwest try to re-create their environments they moved from
back East, or from the Midwest. 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, stark
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 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!
Visit Paul's site at TheWiseGardener.com.
Paul is a tropical plant specialist with a special love for palms & cacti. He is an horticulturist and gardening lecturer living in Florida.
