about

Desert Dweller + Shaper of the Land

me on a 5/2012 garden tour in Austin TX

First, where am I located?

In a quiet residential area west of Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA, an arid and warm-temperate climate. My area is some unnamed subdivision of the huge Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion – I’ll call it the Mesilla Valley or Paso del Norte region for now.

My home is about 4,100 feet elevation and 32 N latitude. That causes intense sunlight and with sharply draining, deep sandy and gravelly loam soils. Our decent diversity of native and adapted plants one can’t easily find, adds to the fun challenge and rewards of appropriate horticulture and great outdoor living. We experience 4 seasons: most years have long and hot summers with pleasant nights, short and mild winters with chilly nights, warming and windy springs, and cooling and perfect falls.

Springs and falls can seem to go on for a long time, occasionally cut short or broken up by a crazy flash of heat (spring mostly) or cold (fall mostly). Summer isn’t insanely hot like Tucson or lower, sultry like east of the Big Bend and Caprock of Texas, and just when we get a few too many 100F+ afternoons, the monsoon season arrives to quickly moderate the heat with afternoon clouds and scattered thundershowers many days. We only see a few inches of snow 2/3 of winters, and are among the sunniest places in North America, especially October through June, though July through September are also quite sunny.

My locale is USDA Zone 8b, AHS Heat Zone 9, and our growing season averages about 240 days. The latest 1991-2020 climate normals updated each decade have warmed us 5F over the pervious 1981-2010 period, and the growing season increased 10 days.
(the 1980’s were some of the coolest decades – not included in this period, and the 1990’s and 2010’s were some of the warmest decades – included in this period)

I’m a former landscape architect, but I value plantsmanship and the intimate connection between climate, place, process, and patterns.

My road to landscape architecture started because my family moved where our father was stationed in the military, and I became interested in what made each place different. That grew into how the weather worked and astronomy, eventually starting college to become a meteorologist, but graduating to become a landscape architect.

Finding repressed built environments where I was able to gain employment, I still made the most of the training I received to begin my own practice in 1995.

18 years of that work was in Albuquerque plus outside town to engage with more like-minded clientele than ABQ could offer. Upon changes in my personal life and selling my house of 15 years, it was a downsize move south on the freeway to El Paso for a few years, to continue my practice. After the convergence of different challenges, I accepted a position as a planner, making my design practice a sideline. Now, that chapter is over too, mostly thankfully. A new start to the rest of my life?

Spending time undoing mistakes of the past in my region, I take time out in a number of great settings to mountain bike, hike, eat well, go on some day trips, and re-charge. Doing that alone or sharing it with others, helps me put in the long hours.

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Philosophy on Plants, Including Native Plants

1)
+ low water-use native plants first
+ adapted, non-native plants if natives unavailable or won’t work

That should make it clear that I’m not natives-only in landscapes and gardens. But I would be more of a plant purist if I could. I’m limited by design options and especially one of the most outdated business mindsets on earth – many of our nurseries. This excerpt includes the best definition of a “native plant” I’ve seen –

That’s from Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond – Volume 1, by Tucson’s Brad Lancaster. It’s far more useful than others dismissing conservation. Garden design strives to organize outdoor living spaces, so function and form dialogue nicely. Including where water needs to move from and to, and the plants that grow in either.

Since my ecoregion has less diversity than Brad’s, my definition is broader…low water-use native plant palette of indigenous vegetation found within about:

+ 1,000 feet in elevation
+ a 200 mile radius
+ the same or adjacent ecoregions

2)
Plants are materials but not just any material; plants convey a connection to place more than probably any landscape element or material, so find the best ones for the site and use well.

If there are no native plants in a design, I would say the responsible party missed the mark on more than one account. Steve Martino once said –

“Observing the benefits of using native plants, I decided that all landscapes that weren’t using native plants were displacing habitat and were destructive and probably nature-hating.”

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