While on a recent HOA consultation, we diverted down a few side streets. Some front landscapes stood out, many with good designs and plant choices.
Here’s one example of several simple but effective and low-cost front yards. A multi-trunked, native tree, with adapted grasses and several different shrubs. No gestures to inapplicable places, plus potential if one wants more.
Compare the pruning of the Prosopis glandulosa above to the one below. One is correct and the other is incorrect / counterproductive. Learn more at ISA and SNAG.
My area has many seniors and part-time residents escaping northern winters, so the gravelscape is common, since some aren’t here summers to broil on a bed of rock. They’re swatting armies of mosquitoes by Lake Wobegon!
Yet they did this, like what a few skilled gardeners we know might do if in NM. A great container display, even if some are seasonal.
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Ordinary all over the southwest: yawn at the lawn, with or without the palm. And there’s a struggling chitalpa, one celeb’s recommended tree, as bacterial leaf scorch attacks it and all its kinfolk around.
But wait!
Massed Hesperaloe parviflora, clean lines of the stepped wall, red tile, and the palm fronds all add up. Hopefully it’s not a Washingtonia filifera: the trunk and roots will not have room to develop, then destroy the wall.
Free “expert” advice: learn each plant’s mature size in your locale, then apply.
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Oh, Ocotillo! Fouquieria splendens with local compadres, Fallugia paradoxa starting to flower and Ferocactus wislizenii. Ample room, too.
Ha!
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This looked like a good start to an “Asian theme” using native and adapted plants. They’re onto something. No, I didn’t lose my mind.
The pruned Leucophyllum only need to be sheared with more stems and foliage left, so the bases of each are broader than the tops. /-\ not \-/
The Vitex agnus-castus already works with its natural form and proper pruning.
Here’s to effective use of a cool color in the gate and containers, with fuzzy Oreocereus celsianus ready to snag a woman’s dress looking snazzy.
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Potted Nolina texana greenei and Rosa banksiae: as tough as any gravelscape.
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Last stop! This resembles some of the original design at my last home in Albuquerque, but a twist of Las Cruces: “diversity unified by repeating similar forms”.
A tougher tree than Phoenix-pushing Palo Verde: Koelreuteria paniculata. Imagine this in several years, much broader and clothed in sweet yellow flowers.
What else is there?
Opuntia santa-rita losing the cool season purple and budding out, among a pincushion Dasylirion wheeleri and a bushy Sphaeralcea.
Sphaeralcea ambigua ‘Louis Hamilton’
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A Fouquieria splendens was salvaged from development partly to save the Echinocereus triglochidiatus at it’s base. Staying together.
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The Bouteloua spp. and the small outcropping really work, rock type similar to the distant sandstone boulder and gravel mulch.
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A tough trio of Las Cruces commoners: Washingtonia filifera, Pinus edulis, and Juniperus. Except under desert conditions, the greener J. chinensis ‘Torulosa’ or Hollywood Juniper becomes more like our native J. monosperma.
The palm seems more stately and insulated against weather extremes with the dead foliage skirt left.
4/18/17 weather: 86 / 49 / .0
It's A Dry Heat 