“I led the way, and while I walked, I began to have a nasty feeling crawling up my legs and into my stomach…Dear reader, as you must understand, I had entered so powerfully into the project that I had really thought that the house was finished!”

All of Tove Jansson’s wonderful Moomin characters are concerned with nature (are nature), and offer many lessons for the gardener. I have felt crawling up my legs the suspicion that what I see in the garden may not be shared with my visitors (or readers), that what appears to them is only a drawing in the sand, and perhaps a shabby one at that.

What exactly are gardeners looking at when they see a garden? How might this differ from the visitor who comes upon a pretty planting?

When I look at the garden, do I see it for what it is? Or for what it may become? Does one take preference over the other, or is it both at once so that what emerges is something altogether new, or different?

Spending time in a garden predisposes us to a particular way of seeing. My mind skips about. I see the torch cactus now. I see it in a few weeks when the nascent buds have swelled and bloomed. I see it years from now: old growth cascades over itself, and from the heart of the plant emerge new columns. They push aside the old, grow up and out, only to start this great enlargening again.

Or the saplings I’m growing. I collected the seeds from a strange mesquite at Spring Mountain Ranch. The leaflets were blue-gray, the bark a light gray—the very image of an ironwood, but certainly a mesquite. I’ve planted one in the garden. I see two small whips growing up from the ground; I see its awkward adolescence. I see the old gray-white bark unfurling into a magnificent tree. When I look at that sapling, what garden do I see? How far into the future might my perception take me? To a time when the wood is brittle, the lower branches self-pruned. A stately tree appears among the ruins of my house, barely surviving without supplemental water, the summers too hot to support almost any kind of life that I would recognize today.

I often draw new plantings by hand, though I confess I’ve been more carefree about my desert garden. I physically laid out the plants based on the image of the garden in my mind. They were hardly more than a sand drawing, a two-dimensional landscape, little lumps of green and blue overshadowed by the water wells I dug around them. Seventy-five percent of those plants remain; the others did not make my brutal watering regime, or because I did not understand exactly how they would handle light and shade as the planting grew in. Even then, when it was a two-dimensional nursery, I saw it looking something like it does today (surprised that a garden has appeared).

I suppose one could argue that the gardener is always restless in the garden, always swatting away the creepy crawlies of suspicion, unable to see the garden as it actually is, too caught up in how it will look after a rain, or in the spring, or in the fall, or fifteen years from now. But who is to say that *that* is not the garden?

Gardens are a bit like crystal balls; they reflect (and distort) the future. This way of seeing is unique to gardeners, to those who plan and plant, sow and cultivate. To see a meadow in a handful of seeds, mixed with sand and coir, broadcast across a vacant plot, is to understand what a garden is. Which means that to perceive a garden as it actually is may be impossible for the gardener. The gardener collapses different ways of perceiving into the single moment of viewing; the moment is all we have, and yet it is also the conditions for all we are likely to see.

Among crafts, the garden must be unique, at least in this sense. The work of art is viewed as completed (or abandoned), whereas the garden is never completed. When abandoned, it persists in some wilder way—I can perceive that, too, as I wander my yard’s narrow paths.

And so it is with Moominpapa. He is so caught up in the idea of his house that he is quite surprised, embarrassed even, to see that it is only markings in the sand. Gone are the balustrades, the intricate woodwork. Is it only a little sand, a little brook babbling, a friend peering over his shoulder, unable to see what Moominpapa sees.

The garden is probably the closest thing we will ever get to time travel; gardeners a bit like time travelers. We see what a garden may become. Becoming mixes with what is. What we create bounces along temporal and spatial lines. I do not imagine the grown mesquite; I can see it. The pleasure of gardening comes from this fact, to which the gardener is uniquely attuned.

But gardening in the United States has doubtless been influenced by farming, courtesy of the well-meaning extension campuses of the large land grant universities. Extensions may have been created to help small farmers, but, as Wendell Berry has argued, they turned into showrooms for agribusiness, sales funnels for heavy machinery and industrial fertilizers. When master gardener programs started to pop up around the country in the 1970s, those same extensions took the lessons they learned from farming and applied them to the garden, which is why extension programs tend to focus on productivity over organic gardening, aesthetic considerations, or even moral obligations. Blanket statements are rarely accurate. Today, many master gardener programs have transitioned to a more gentle application of farming technologies. Many people who work in extension programs are dedicated to organic principles, to principles of care rather than conquest.

I consider this history and my own training in a master gardener program as I contemplate the role of home gardens in the desert foodscape.

I am not very good at growing food on the edges of the Las Vegas valley. When I gardened in the rich ancient lake-bottom soils of Salt Lake City, I could grow just about anything with a little extra water and the well-timed application of compost, all accomplished during the traditional, more temperate gardening year. In the Mojave Desert, that ease has vanished, never existed.

But it was gardening for food that got me interested in gardening in the first place. I grew tomatoes in silent competition with my 10th-grade honors English teacher, who once bragged about eating tomatoes before Independence Day. I could get a tomato sooner, I thought, and subsequently babied a row of Early Girls in the down back of my parents’ property, covering them with five-gallon buckets in early spring, then manufacturing impromptu greenhouses out of plastic sheeting and chicken netting when the plants got too big for their high-density polyethylene enclosures. I got tomatoes very early that year when, finally following the advice of a long-time neighbor-gardener, I pulled back on the Miracle-Gro and watering, and the big fat fruits finally ripened.

In most of the country, tomato plants are a gateway drug to broader gardening. They certainly were for me. But they can be difficult to grow in the low desert; our two growing seasons are almost too short. Cherry tomatoes do well here, and I snack on tomatoes all spring, pulling them out at the end of May (or sooner) when daytime temperatures make it difficult for fruit to set.

I’ve adapted to growing different foods, and growing them during the appointed times (all winter long for some leafy annuals). I’ve learned to grow all sorts of plants for their aesthetic value, and, along the way, I’ve learned that many of these so-called ornamentals are also food plants. The difference, however, is who they feed.

Today, I primarily grow food for winged vertebrates and invertebrates, crawling insects, and the packrat who resists all my attempts at capture. While I may not directly contribute to our food web in the form of summer-grown beans and tomatoes and zucchini, I am still growing food.

Essential to this food work has been my slow introduction to the majesty of native shrubs. Native shrubs are among the best food sources for local wildlife. They are easy to grow, requiring neither soil amendments nor fertilizers, and only a little extra water when they are getting established (more if I want them to grow faster or look a little more polished year-round).

My introduction to native plants has been slow because container-grown plants are often hard to source, and because I am a poor germinator of seeds, though even these can be hard to find. As native plants appear more often in local nurseries, I’ve taken to trying them out in the garden. I’m exploring them just as slowly as I acquire them, learning how they flourish in my own garden. When a shrub does well, I find a few more of the same species (or cultivar, in some cases) and add them generously to the garden.

Here are three shrubs I recommend to desert gardeners. They are increasingly easy to find at a nursery, they add rugged beauty and a sense of place to the garden, and they support wildlife—birds and pollinators in particular. Many of these shrubs can be food for humans, too, assuming you get to the berries before the birds do.

Berberis fremontii (Freemont barberry) — Blue, holly-like leaves, yellow flowers, and red-and-orange berries. The internet reports that, in small quantities, the berries can be eaten, though you’re unlikely to beat the birds. A day after the photo above was taken, all the berries were gone. Go birds! This plant is related to the very popular Creeping Oregon grape (Berberis repens, formerly Mahonia repens), which is commonly seen in high desert gardens.

Lyceum fremontii (Desert wolfberry) — Wolfberries are edible, and while I’m yet to harvest any, they are extraordinarily nutritious. It has been fast-growing in my garden, which means I’m probably overwatering it.

Salvia dorrii (Desert sage) — I was delighted to finally get my hands on this plant after multiple failed attempts to collect and germinate seeds from the wild. Its bluish-purple blossoms are a little less blue than desert chia, which, with its longer bloom season, would look pretty planted among drifts of desert sage—you can eat the chia seeds, and the butterflies and bees can enjoy the flowers of both. The leaves have that incredible sage scent that this formerly-Great Basin gardener can’t get enough of.

“This is the country of three seasons,” writes Mary Austin, the great chronicler of the Mojave Desert. “From June on to November it lies hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive. These months are only approximate; later or earlier the rain-laden wind may drift up the water gate of the Colorado from the Gulf, and the land sets its seasons by the rain.”

The Las Vegas garden ends when almost every other garden you know begins.

Three Seasons to Enjoy, One Long Season to Grow

Some argue we have two short growing seasons—the fall, before frost descends, and the spring, before heat rises. This was likely true for many years, but rising temperatures have made our winters mild enough that fewer plants go dormant. Others suggest we have a long growing season that extends from early spring to late fall (with enough water, this may be true). I agree we have a long growing season, except we get it in inverse, from October to late May.

• October—March: First Season. Grow cool-season annual vegetables, herbs, and flowers in raised beds or containers; plant trees and shrubs, cactus and agave (while the soil is still warm).

• April—May: Second Season. Enjoy the efforts of your labors—California poppies and desert blue bells, penstemon and desert marigolds, native indigos and creosote, hesperaloe and prickly pear, tomatoes and zucchini, if you are very lucky; brace for the heat.

• June—September: Third Season. A great time to work on your indoor garden. Our long days and strong sun mean you can grow just about any houseplant well, and even those that prefer bright light will get by in an east-facing window.

Entering The Third Season

How does the garden cope? Outside of the occasional third-season monsoon, my garden gets most of its water during our second season when I prepare my desert-adapted plants for the heat. The extra water allows succulents to fatten up, and for shrubs to grow their roots so that, when it rains, they have the infrastructure to make the most of it.

Mentally, I practice a form of deranged acceptance. I vacillate between staring at my weather app and the garden. The former in perpetual fear of the first one-hundred-degree day, the latter in astonishment at how beautiful a desert garden can be.

Of course, you may choose to resist this peculiar and natural rhythm. Some gardeners do. There is a famous gardener in the valley who waters her food crops no less than nine times a day and harvests all summer long. You can grow shrubs and annuals that soak up the water authority’s ceiling of six times a week. A walk down The Strip will show you it’s possible.

Or, you can let your plants fall into a sleepy, subconscious state where they look good enough while you visit coastal and mountain gardens on the weekends. You can lounge by the pool in the evenings after work while your friends from cooler climes drag hoses and carts around the garden. Then, when everywhere else the horticultural calendar rests, when your friends are stuck inside, held captive by the throes of winter, you will plant scrub oak in the back and desert sage in front, and your containers will overflow with nasturtium and dill, alyssum and geranium.

Her: The apricot tree bloomed and froze.

Me: The California poppies balked at the early heat.

Her: The dahlias have started. [A few days later]. The dahlias are shriveled up and sad.

Me: The bougainvillea is glorious. [A few days later]. The wind has taken away all the bracts.

Her tulips vacillated between a college try and a failing grade; my Penstemon parryi went for broke, then folded during March’s heatwave.

All gardeners west of the 100th meridian are terraformers in miniature. Here arises a disturbing gardening realization: I garden to rework the land into some image of what I think it ought to be, but what I work with to make the garden mine is decidedly not mine. The gardener is thrown, to borrow a term from Heidegger, into wind and heat, rain and soil, all of which we can’t control. What remains gives the gardener an outsized idea of what is possible.

My sister decided that only the seeds we choose to sow are in our control. Yet these germinate, or do not germinate, according to their own mysterious rhythms. Even native shrubs need help in their first few years, the weather often too erratic for dependable germination or establishment, should we choose to let nature run its course.

I wonder if all the setbacks are to remind us of our place, that we are subordinate to the garden, to nature, to God.

And these are just the ornamentals. The goal of growing food is even harder, even more transparently out-of-place and out-of-our-control. The aphids show up earlier and earlier, an insurmountable lead for the hungry lady beetles that do their best to keep the local population in check.

Her: The aphids have descended on my pepper starts.

Me: Peppers? A fat rat helped themselves to mine. And the cilantro, mustard, and arugula have bolted, have already gone to seed.

I think it was the Not So Bad Tempered Gardener who said that gardening was hard enough already—why make it even more difficult by growing food?

We considered giving up.

But I harvested my first Mojave-born zucchini after almost five years of trying. And the cherry tomato plants are laden with little green globes (if only they would turn red and I could eat them). The zinnias are already tall, their bright pink rays a useful foil for the dark green herbs I grow them with: basil, dill, mint, and oregano. The parryi started up again with the recent moderate temps, re-blooming just as the Palmers (Penstemon palmeri) start. A generous pollinator may visit both; a hybrid may appear some years hence. My sister has decided to understand her apricot as more ornamental than edible; the fruits, when they come, a kind of grace.

The paradox of the garden is that the gardener is necessary but not sufficient. The more we assert control, the less we have. We frustrate ourselves with our failures, obscuring the joy that what we see and smell and feel is a gift, not earned at all. Any expectations we have of our gardens are quickly dashed against the realities of a changing climate. Still, a garden appears, and our plants grow, as they will, despite and because of the gardener.

I garden because I want to see a new shoestring acacia (Acacia stenophylla) settle in, or the patch of desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata) finally fill out, or the sprawling segments of an unknown Opuntia reach the heavenward spires of the medicinal San Pedro (Echinopsis pachanoi), and a scene of textures and colors combine to make it seem as if these plants had always been here.

But gardening in the Mojave is by no means easy. While my garden forces me into nature, and nature into my world, it does not always do so willingly.

I sometimes wonder if God has forsaken this land. The surest sign is the lack of rain, which in America possesses the peculiar property of falling only on the good. By this logic, the Mojave Desert must be very wicked, and its heart, Las Vegas, especially so.

But it stopped raining in Las Vegas well before legalized gambling, liberal divorce laws, and twenty-four-hour liquor stores. It stopped raining millennia ago. Surely the lack of rain is not a result of our wickedness. As if the God of Abraham, some 20,000 years ago, sent creosote and rain shadows as punishment for constructing a 20th-century city in the desert. Or perhaps it was not God’s foreknowledge at all, and the giant sloths that once roamed the valley were particularly sinful; their punishment drought and creosote.

I am told that it has not rained in our neighboring state, Utah, and that the governor there has told people to pray for rain (lest creosote move in). Perhaps Utahns are especially wicked, even without legalized gambling and twenty-four-hour liquor stores.

It might not occur to the Utah governor that God wants it to be dry. That the desert blossoming as a rose was a blip, an error. God prefers Utah revert to its post-Edenic state. But that doesn’t mean Utahns should give up on gardening any more than Nevadans should.

I have lived in deserts almost all my life. But this one is particularly arid.

Arid: likely from a Proto-Indo-European word that means to burn, to glow, and which forms the roots of words like ash, ardor, and aril—a seed’s covering, also the juicy seeds of the pomegranate (Punica granatum), which, according to the poet Eleanor Wilner, was Eden’s forbidden fruit.

I learned about Wilner’s Eden while reading Robert Pogue Harrison’s Gardens, and I was surprised he doesn’t mention that the idea of Eden germinated in the desert. When our biblical forebears looked out upon the scorched terrain of their habitation, they could not but have ached for abundant greenery, for fruit.

But as I wander my garden, I resist the urge to pine for Eden; resist, even, the urge to pray for rain.

When God considered what the Mojave would become, they held in mind a different kind of beauty, a wild and desert kind, both in itself and as warning: Take heed and be like the giant sloth, that your skies may turn an aching blue, and the creosote spread its clonal roots, its boughs giving pungent evergreen reminders of rain’s rare occurrence, and the cactus bloom just once, sometimes on just one day. That on the skeletal scaffolding of sweetbush may Chuckwallas warm in morning sun just before they are eaten by roadrunners, and may the hoot of the ground owl and the creep of the tortoise, the flit of the hummingbird and the blank stare of the mountain goat remind you that I have not forsaken you, just as the desert marigold unlocks its yellow rays, and the sacred datura unfolds each night. Though this place will never be Eden, it may, with your care, become a garden.

It seems that if God did not exactly see Las Vegas, Shakespeare certainly did. From As You Like It: “I prithee, shepherd, if that love or gold / Can in this desert place buy entertainment, / Bring us where we may rest and feed. / Here’s a young maid with travel much oppressed, / And faints for succor.” I couldn’t give you a better description of this great city, which, at its heart, is hospitality given form, filled as it is with “fresh array and entertainment.”

But it is not only in the city where we find succor and entertainment, we may likewise find it in our gardens.

I thought that all things had been savage here,
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment. But whate’er you are
That in this desert inaccessible,
Under the shade of melancholy boughs,
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time,
If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
If ever sat at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
And know what ’tis to pity and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be,
In the which hope I blush and hide my sword.

When melancholy strips away all my interests, all my joy in living, when reading and TV and food have lost their animating essence, when relationships fade into the monotony of existence, when all pleasure in life vanishes, I put away my sword and reach for the trowel. Gardening is the only activity I know, even in the desert (where it is often the cause of much grief), that persists as a way through time’s “creeping hours.”

But sometimes I think to ask, as Celia did, “Why should this a desert be?” Many desert gardeners make this mistake, and we head to our gardens with both sword and shovel, the idea having germinated that our little plots require redemption, an act I can’t help but identify with pride. The desert gardener is nothing but hubris, attempting here what was meant only for gods. For turning soil and water into wandering grape vines, into wine.

Who am I to say that God got it wrong any more than the governor of Utah is? For those of us led into desert gardening, our greatest temptation is water. Often, it can stop us from even getting here, from accepting the fact of our conditions, from understanding that even though the desert is a vanishing Eden, it is still worth caring for.

Aspiring to Eden is the pride that comes before the fall. In the Mojave, to tempt God with rain is a kind of sin. Better instead this prayer: give me the strength to sow seeds that grow with little rain, the wisdom to arrange plants in ways that inspire, the strength to tend the garden when temperatures climb. Do not give me a garden; give me instead a place to garden.

A garden in the desert requires an excess of form and water that can only be supplied through the gardener’s constant and attentive care. You’ll find no Eden here. Which is to say that while desert gardens are rare, desert gardening, at least, is not. And for that I will be forever grateful.

The natives have gone dormant, the penstemons (Penstemon spp.) receding to a few basal leaves, the spiny senna (Senna armata) revealing a leafless labyrinth of thin green branches. Although the recent moisture and cooler temps have forced a few minuscule leaflets.

Must gardens be beautiful? Is my garden beautiful? What does it say about me? I read once that the English cleric Thomas Fuller said, “As is the gardener, so is the garden.”

But gardening well and being a well-adjusted gardener are two different skills. Thinking of gardening as another way of seeing, perhaps as close seeing (the horticultural equivalent of literary criticism’s close reading), helps.

The snag I’ve kept in the back yard, and which has accrued dissonance to my marriage in inverse proportion to its demise, is a failure. I refused the interventions it likely deserved; it has succumbed to heat and disease. But it reminds me that death is not one-dimensional.

In the evening, two hummingbirds chase each other into the sky, a vortex of libidinal energies, before landing apart on the snag’s lofty branches. There, the little lords admire their diminutive kingdom, which must seem mysterious and grand when viewed through the twiggy scaffolding of my dying mimosa (Albizia julibrissin).

In forests, snags occupy important ecological niches. As they die, they shelter insects, fungi, birds, and mammals. In a park near the house I grew up in, the local raptor society identifies snags in the park’s wilder areas and asks the superintendent to keep them around. Not all of the park's visitors appreciate these dying trees, but it seems like a small sacrifice to give Cooper’s hawks or American kestrels improved habitat.

Of course, my garden is not a large urban park; its ecology is an impoverished resonance of the great ponderosa forest from which I took the photo below.

But when I think to remove the decaying tree in my back garden, carpenter bees soon remind me that it is good lodging. They flatten their bodies until they look like glistening oil slicks seeping in reverse. During certain times of year, I hear their busy mandibles burrowing deeper into the aging trunk.

I should take it down. Remove its unsightly presence from the garden. Spare me the marital stress, the ersatz interest of well-meaning relatives, the daily reminder of my failure, this tree’s failure to thrive under my watch. Spare me the questions about what it says about me, about my bad practices. (What would the Zen gardener Muso Soseki think, who said, “He who distinguishes between the garden and the practice cannot be said to have found the true Way.” Can a garden out of practice still be true?)

But the tree is not dead, only dying. Its delicate fronds, photosynthesizing waterspouts, stretch beyond its trunk and shield the agaves and Portulucaria and cactuses growing beneath it. A morning glory vine, burnt from the sun and insufficient water, twines slowly around the brittle, sloughing wood.

I’ll plant more vines, give this snag multiple duties: ecological and horticultural. Turn it into scaffold, a vertical nursery for growing plants and animals, for seeing the garden a little differently.

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I profiled Michele on Mojave Gardener earlier this spring, and I’ve followed her work for years. She writes a quarterly newsletter called Designer’s Notebook that any southwest gardener would benefit from. Her debut book, Designing With the Desert: A Thoughtful Approach to Desert Garden Design, takes all that hard-earned wisdom and organizes it into a single resource.

Finally, a book for Las Vegas gardeners

Many of us move to Vegas thinking we can grow anything that southern Californians and central Arizonans can grow. We can grow many of those plants, timed appropriately—soft-leaved succulents are winter plants here, for example—and with plenty of water, but a more place-appropriate garden is possible. Michele shows us the way.

The book is organized into multiple sections, but the overall argument can be divided into two large sections. The first half considers the work of garden design, including hardscape, space use, and water restrictions. The second explores individual plants and how they can be used in specific gardening styles.

Design-centered gardens, with special attention to the old and inherited

Michele begins by taking readers through her approach to designing a garden. She identifies common gardening scenarios and problems that Las Vegas gardeners are likely to encounter. These include starting a garden from scratch, planning a small garden, or renovating an inherited one.

This last piece—on inherited gardens—is an important contribution to garden design literature; it has not often been considered. But most of us come to a ready-made garden—even if that garden is mostly hardscape. “In many cases, the inherited landscape displays a haphazard layout and an uninspired plant selection,” she observes. However, the perceptive gardener doesn’t have to throw it all out and start fresh. It’s possible “to amplify the good, mitigate past mistakes, and see new possibilities.”

In my garden, I inherited a well-thought-out hardscape with a traditional Mediterranean/90s planting scheme: lots of oleanders, palm trees, and a stunning carob tree that is the heart of the back garden. There was also a lot of pittosporum and some lawn.

I was selective in removing oleanders (they need hardly any water at this point in their lives, and I adore their musky vanilla scent in spring), and I tore out the turf under the carob tree. It has not been too happy, but I hope it will recover with deeper, more infrequent watering, and the planting underneath (agaves, columnar cactus, and aloes) has benefited from the shade the carob provides. But I wish I had found Michele’s book first, because it would have given me the courage to be more aggressive with my overhaul, instead of forcing some plants to work.

Michele offers a list of questions to help guide the renovation process, with particular sensitivity to preserving the site, where possible. For example, she asks if the planting tells an important historical or cultural story. “If the home is in a historical area…mature trees could reflect the plant palette from the time they were planted and represent a story worth preserving, even though tastes and water use have since changed.”

In a land where our default mode is to demolish and build new, that sort of discriminating approach could go a long way to creating gardens that truly reflect this beautiful and difficult section of the Mojave.

As a horticulturist, her love of plants shines through

Michele is a plant lover, and two-thirds of the book’s page count is devoted to plants. She details plant types, forms, and arrangements, including well-thought-out lists of trees, native plants, vines, and perennials (the lists alone are worth the price of admission). She also provides expert planting tips, enough for the amateur gardener to get started and a great refresher for the experienced gardener.

But my favorite part of the book—and one many readers of this newsletter will appreciate—is a section on specialty gardens. I enjoyed Michele’s careful approach to three specific types of gardens: container gardens, edible gardens, and desert cottage gardens.

A persuasive case for a new kind of Las Vegas garden, the desert cottage garden

Regardless of where you are in your garden journey—just getting started, or a lifelong gardener like me—we can all benefit from Michele’s nuanced and sensitive approach. A good example of this nuance is her discussion of lawn conversion. “Grass in and of itself is not ‘bad’,” she says. “Yet the fact is, across the country, attitudes toward turf grass have been changing for some time now, shifting from the 1950s’ mindset of lawn as an absolute necessity, a ‘matter of success.’”

So what does success look like now?

If Michele has a style (I think she does, and it's one many of us would do well to emulate), that style is desert cottage. It could very well be the new marker of success.

One of the main problems with turf removal has been a problematic and lazy approach: we lay down gravel, throw in a handful of ill-pruned shrubs, and then pat ourselves on our backs for using less water. But then the high temps come, and our little gravel pits raise the temperatures around our houses substantially. A cottage garden, packed with low-water plants, cools our homes and gives us something to look at year-round—vibrant flowers in the fall, winter, and spring, stunning structure (cactus, agave, stone, and shrubs) in the summer. For my money, this style of gardening says “success” in a way that a labor and resource-intensive lawn does not. For one, it is bespoke. A cottage garden speaks to the owner’s unique style and interests. It suggests a certain level of care and intrigue (and success) that a lawn lacks, and that a gravel yard repels.

While cottage gardens are traditionally associated with the dreamy and lush greens of our British gardening forbearers, Michele makes a strong case that they can (and should!) be adapted to Las Vegas. The result is something entirely new. A little like how experimenting with new flavors in an old recipe can turn the same dish into something altogether different.

For new and experienced gardeners

I have been a Vegas gardener for nearly four years and suffered immense failure in those four years (our unique climate, with multiple growing seasons, means you can fail multiple times a year!). I thought, when I moved here, that I would be able to easily translate my high-desert Master Gardener experience into an instantly stunning low-desert garden. I was wrong. Had I had Michele’s book sooner, I might have avoided some of those costly and heartbreaking mistakes.

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Things in three, you see. Three plants, three groups of three plants. This is what counts as design for me, who gardens from the spleen. I am a mess of intuitions as I gaze about the garden, hoping to identify some secret emanation. The garden designer Russell Page said, “Every object emanates—sends out vibrations.” Pay attention.

I’m paying attention to weeds.

The first weed thing was a book, Wild About Weeds, by Jack Wallington, a darling of trendy British horticulture. My sister checked it out from her library, and we thumbed through it when I was in Salt Lake City to visit family a few weeks ago. The weeds were all from wetter places, and I thought that many of them were hardly weeds at all. Rich greens, yellow and purple flowers, and rampant growth! I would sow them all in my Mojave garden, if they would but grow.

The second weed thing: a memoir, by Marco Wilkinson, told through weeds. He and I share a birthday. Like Wallington’s book, it includes weeds of wetter, abundant places. While reading in early morning light, beside a recently cut field of alfalfa on the Utah-Idaho border, I learned that some weeds smell best fresh (mint, for example), while others come into their own when dried. Hay is in the latter group, and the compound responsible for that morning’s sweetly rotten scent is coumarin: the smell of fresh-cut hay.

I was taught that a weed is just a plant growing in the wrong place. But a weed in the Mojave seems like an impossibility. Here, any plant that grows is in the right place.

Some call creosote a weed. They say it desertifies: that is, makes a desert. As if the desert were an error, all along the creosote’s fault. If we could but root it out (also: desert broom, white bursage, Mojave yucca, and beaver tail), the water would somehow return.

This myth, that agriculture brings with it rain, persisted for decades, fuel for Manifest Destiny. We filled the west with the quixotic idea that, if we but planted, the rains would come. The phrase was quaint and perfect, the kind of motto I wish we had now (if only it were true): rain follows the plow.

Like all perpetual motion machines, it was of dubious origin. Rain does not follow the plow any more than Larrea tridentata causes drought. Creosote makes fertile islands, little nurseries in the dry Mojave sea.

But before we could plant, we had to clear out the weeds and bring in new ones. Purslane is one of them.

To be clear, purslane is not exactly xeric. In my garden, it grows among newly placed plants, often those planted last fall or, if I was anxious or delirious, in the spring. For example, my best crop of purslane is next to the golden torch cactus cuttings I added to the garden a few months ago. These currently get more water than they normally would as they adjust to the garden. Purslane also grows well near the muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) that was planted late last year and gets some extra water while they establish. But purslane needs much less water than spinach, the taste of which it mostly closely resembles, and does not bolt.

Purslane is of unknown origin. It has been cultivated for so long that it shows up wherever humans are: a plant without a past. Strangely American, even if we rarely see this vegetable in our wraps or on our salads in the United States. It is more common in the Mediterranean.

Certainly, you have purslane in your garden. Pick a stem. Put it in your mouth. It tastes good.

It also shades the ground, shields the cactus from the gravel’s reflected heat. It has tiny buttercup flowers, and the leaves are quasi-animate. They fold up in the day, and lie flat at night. Like a moth. It could take flight; over the long summer, it does. Purslane flies, just too slowly to see.

I chase these shadow isles, tracing the contours of their flattened matter on the hot, dry asphalt like the insomniac chases sleep: when it comes, it is never enough.

This is a red flag warning in the eastern Mojave. Strong winds, high temperatures, and dried-out vegetation are technical terms. What little water is left in the air will vanish, as will the water in leaves not evolved to withstand these conditions. The risk of fire is high; granted, there is not much to burn.

The summer garden is a shadow garden

But in the early morning hours, the shade is long and generous, and the old mesquites and Palo breas are sentinels. They guard the secret paths that skirt the sun.

Even the meager shadows cast by opuntia and creosote, by brittlebush and cholla, create a kind of shadow art. The latter resists the sun’s erasure by transmuting solar radiation into a subtle glow—the green of its photosynthesizing structure becomes a shadow of itself.

Desert gardeners are smart to design around this fact: unlike more temperate climates, where the garden is everywhere growing, the desert garden loses mass in summer. The shadows become the garden.

Summer is for planning

The summer heat in Las Vegas is the gardener’s sole Herculean labor, our punishment for the sin of growing things.

While gardeners north of us use winter to plan their gardens, the desert dweller’s crucible is the searing summer heat. We learn what will endure the sun and survive our meager water budgets, as well as what will thrive with hardly any supplemental water at all.

We learn which precious plants we are willing to baby, and maybe, like I have, we learn that we are not willing to baby any. Instead, we count corpses and decide there must be a better suited plant for this particular spot, something native perhaps, or something from another desert clime: a strange euphorbia, a transplant from the outback, a chihuahuan shrub that has found itself on the wrong side of the Rio Grande, like a character in a McCarthy novel.

In the summer, I walk the garden, count the dead, and make plans for fall. This is the plan, I tell myself. In fall, I collect plants far and wide and put them in the ground. Their first summer, they get regular water. In the second summer, they must be able to survive with supplemental water only every two to four weeks. If they can, they have passed the test. Those who can’t handle it die, to be replaced by something else. I’ll admit when the heat is high and the plants are sad, I sometimes give in. The desert garden is an aspiration.

There are a few exceptions. On the shady, northeastern side of the house, I’ll plant things that need more water. A Texas redbud, for example. Or the native yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica). And in fall, I plant containers with blousy annuals to decorate the winter courtyard.

Adapting to the hot desert garden

The most important variable when choosing a plant for the desert garden is not drought tolerance, but heat tolerance. There are all sorts of techniques to make watering even the most water-hungry plants (think veggies) much more efficient. There are no such tricks for heat tolerance. Though I will suggest a few.

Watering more frequently is not one of them. Instead, a light mist from the end of the garden hose to increase the ambient humidity will help. You should already be giving your desert-adapted plants long, infrequent drinks.

Shade cloths can be draped over vulnerable plants. The cloth must have good ventilation, or you risk creating the conditions for even more intense heat. But in the very least, you are shielding the plant from the worst of the day’s solar radiation. Once you see sun damage, it is often too late, especially for agaves and cactus, which will bear the ugly scars for the remainder of their lives. The trick is to put the cloth out before the sun scorches them—some divination on your part is required.

Unfortunately, a garden covered in shabby burlap for two or three months of the year (and again in the winter for plants that are frost sensitive!) looks less like a garden and more like a laundromat.

Misting and covering are temporary fixes, and what you must do is plant more desert succulents and shrubs, and trees that cast dappled shade, and enjoy the burst of ephemeral flowers in spring and again in late summer and early fall, if we are lucky and the monsoons come.

Summer-flowering plants to grow

The summer garden has its pleasures, too. Not just in form, but in flower. I’ll avoid the regulars here (like lantana and bougainvillea) that only look good because of a steady water diet. Desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata) and blanket flower (Gaillardia sp.) extend their discs of flowers even if their foliage starts to droop. And purple prickly pear (Opuntia macrocentra) continues to bloom sporadically. Asclepias subulata (desert milkweed) is just getting started.

But flowers are, admittedly, rare. Instead, the shade cast by plants is the real desert darling—a kind of reality that is true only now, in this moment of extreme heat, as the sweat from my body disappears just as soon as it appears, a shiny varnish on the angry animal I am as I wander the garden, seeing the wilt here, the spent blossom there, and then the shade, where I rest and consider the birds and other flying things, and the arthropods and other crawling things.

Then, when the sun has reached its zenith, when it has burned away the shadows, that is when death comes to the desert, and I go inside.

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The first little visitor, the middle of three boys, with sandy blonde hair, freckles, a wide smile: “I see a cactus squatting on the ground.”

Cactus are a delight; odd and different right down to how they photosynthesize. The days are too hot to waste precious water through transpiration, so they keep their stomata (tiny pores similar to those on your nose) closed during the day. At night, when the air is cooler, they open up to absorb carbon dioxide, which they store until the sunlight returns and they can convert it all into usable energy. In this way, they time-shift, just like we do. We share more with cactus than roses, even if we have taken to preferring the latter in our gardens.

The second little visitor, the youngest of two brothers, his voice as clear as a wind chime on a warm day, his vowels long and continental: “I see a palm tree standing against the sky.”

Palm trees are iconic desert plants. I say this despite the controversy they’ve garnered in some circles. They do well here, and humans have been growing them in the desert for a long time. The palm tree is to Vegas as the creosote is to the eastern Mojave. Neither belongs here, they are both imports. Vegas itself is a chimera; still, it persists.

Desert garden grammar

My two little garden visitors reminded me that desert landscapes of all kinds are legible in ways that the great subtropical forests of the Northwest are not, or even the oft-copied prairies of the Midwest. The desert garden’s grammar is more approachable, even if its materials (spiky, hot, austere, dry) are not.

Children instantly get the desert garden. Cactus, palm trees, sun, and sky. Adults find it so hard.

Part of the reason is that we make gardening in the Mojave difficult by bringing all sorts of prior assumptions of what a garden should look like. When we do that, we make an already difficult task almost impossible. Not just in terms of the physical demands of desert gardening, but psychologically as well.

The desert has asked me to change a lot of my expectations around what counts as beautiful; I appreciate my two little garden visitors for reminding me just how cool my garden is.

Of course, desert gardens are more than cactus and palm trees. They are shrubs, ground covers, flowering perennials, and a dizzying array of ephemeral annuals. Here are two non-cactus plants I’m particularly excited about.

Two white flowers

I sowed Datura wrightii (sacred datura) seeds earlier this spring in pots. Last fall, I collected them from the ground around the ranch house at Spring Mountain Ranch State Park. Most did not germinate, but two did. I got one in the ground two weeks ago, and it has already quadrupled in size. The second I planted in a newly bare space, after a strong wind took half of a Tecoma x alata ‘Orange Jubilee’ with it.

Datura is perennial and comes from the same family as potatoes, eggplant, and tomatoes (Solanaceae). It's a vigorous plant that requires little in the way of effort. A botanist friend told me they thrive in Death Valley.

Growing up, my neighbor grew Datura along the fence that separated our front yards. I hated them. They smelled like rancid peanut butter, their leaves were weirdly gray, and the flowers never seemed to be open (they are a night bloomer, pollinated by hawk moths—my favorite garden visitor).

You come into the desert trying to change it, but eventually you accept that the desert changes you.

Another weedy-looking plant with beautiful flowers: Argemone polyanthemos (prickly poppy). I’ve sown seeds all about the garden, but none of them have come up. Maybe next year. Fortunately, they are blooming in Kyle Canyon, where I took this photo.

Their delicate white petals and dark yellow anthers grow from thistle-looking foliage. Like an egg, sunny side up, has sprouted from dry ground. Prickly poppies are annuals, so if I keep sowing seeds, some of them will eventually germinate and I’ll have a stand that returns every year. For now, I enjoy them up the canyon.

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I sometimes think that trash was invented to dull the beauty of my cactus.1

For a long time, I’ve wanted to say something about cactus. I’ve tried here and here. I’ve taken photos. Or tried to. I lift my phone in the morning light and center on a flower. The petals only look like crêpe paper—they are thicker, waxier, tolerant of the sun. The stigmas are like fiber optic cables. The pollen is a fine golden dust that coats the tip of my index finger as I reach in and stir the flower’s contents.

But I don’t take a photo. I don’t even write about it. Cactus are ineffable. The space between the spines, where the plastic peanut hides, is the cactus. The cactus is the thing it is not: broad-leaved and luscious, a peach picked and consumed.

Cactus fruits are edible. And it is well worth the gardener's time to grow Engelman’s prickly pear (Opuntia engelmannii), to harvest the fruits, to juice them, and to add them to lemonade. I keep meaning to try this. I collect the fruits too late, I shave off too much skin, the seeds are little BBs.

Columnar cactus are different. They are the desert gardener’s answer to allium, the perpetual punctuation marks of the dry garden: golden torch (Trichocereus spachianus), Mexican fence post (Lophocereus marginatus), San Pedro (Echinopsis pachanoi).

I have added these last everywhere. A great wind came through my sister’s property and blew over all the landscape architect’s carefully planned planting. She gave me broken arms that I cut into still smaller pieces and propagated.

Have you ever cut a cactus? The knife goes in after the first puncture like a hot knife through butter, but then you must saw again on the other side.

I cut them into 12-inch pieces, put them in gritty potting soil in gallon pots, and let them rest for a good six months.

This spring, they were rooted and fat with water, and I have added them to the very dry garden on the west side of the house and throughout the yard. My garden has turned medicinal. Bright green towers point to heaven, or if not to heaven, at least the stars. They echo the towers on the Las Vegas strip, the background for my garden.

But back to paddles: they are a desert shrub of extraordinary beauty. I wish we planted more of them. You’re not walking through, or sunning in, or playing soccer on the gravel patch that is your front yard. Fill it with cactus. A cottage garden of the treacherous, glochidinous, and dry. Pack Opuntia in.

Herbaria are quieter than libraries. All those dead plants pressed peacefully onto acid-free paper and laid to rest, stacked floor to ceiling in heavy metal cabinets. I volunteer at one: the Wesley E. Niles Herbarium at the College of Southern Nevada. I’m helping to digitize their collection.

The story about the BYU botanist has been devastating for my herbaria safety assumptions. You see, I’m neurotic about heart attacks—five mg of Rosuvastatin every morning, aspirin and nitrates within arm’s reach, regular runs and vegetarianism. The slightest gas pain, the mere suggestion of a sore arm, and I am ramping up the EKG app on my watch. (I hope a heart attack isn’t like Chekov’s pistol.) But there’s nothing I can do about the fact that the Wesley E. Niles Herbarium harbors hundreds of specimens collected by Jerry Tiehm.

He's a prolific collector. One species he discovered, Erigonomum tiehmii, is so rare it’s on the Endangered Species List (for as long as the list lasts). It’s a beautiful little buckwheat that I would grow if it weren’t critically imperiled and I had even a modest skill for growing buckwheat from seed.

The only buckwheat I grow is the weedy E. deflexum. Its virtues are that it grows with abandon (it is a weed after all), attracts the Mormon metalmark butterfly, and has the prettiest little pink flowers when the cold arrives (they start white in summer and turn pink in fall).

So I was very glad to find a cultivated buckwheat. I’m trying it out in the new garden I’ve been slowly seeding and planting on the west side of the house. Eriogonum fasciculatum ‘Little Rascal’ is an Arizona native selected and grown by Civano Nursery. It grows about two to three feet tall and wide, takes sun or part shade, and flowers from spring to fall.

Just now, its flowering stems are stretching out like clenched fists. I expect to be punched one day as I scoop dog poop from the bare spaces where the poppies once were. Like E. deflexum, the blooms age to pink.

Mercifully, I survived digitizing Eriogonum without incident. But I learned that Tiehm has seven plants named for him, and there are thousands of specimens in the collection to digitize. I cross my fingers, pull a specimen from the shelf. Hope-to-god it’s not a tiehmii.

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These blooming trees signal the end of the cool season and that summer’s heat is sure to descend. In a way, they suggest senescence. The Mojave desert is a strange place; as soon as spring gets going, it ends.

Mary Austin, in her book, Land of Little Rain, described the Mojave Desert as “the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive.”

We are in that third season, the few radiant weeks between April and Hot. When spring and summer and fall are packed into one glorious burst of blooms. It’s not just the palo verdes, the desert willows are blooming, too. Their orchid-like flowers are certainly seductive, but they can’t compete with the palo verde’s yellow blooms.

The blossoms smell like mown grass. They intensify as they dry on warming ground. The oleander are in full bloom, too, and the garden is perfumed with vanilla, and musk, and the color green, heat’s herald. Always the heat. This would make a fine perfume. Desert No. 5. Worn sparingly. In the wild, this combination lasts only a week or two. Less, but more intense, if it is hot and windy.

Many of the palo verde trees in the valley are hybrids, a variety known as ‘Desert Museum.’ It is a combination of three different species: blue palo verde (Parkinsonia floridum), foothill palo verde (Parkinsonia microphyllum), and Mexican palo verde (Parkinsonia aculeata). It is often multi-trunked, its bark a bright lime green.

Desert Museum green is bold and care should be taken when underplanting. More yellow than blue, its green reads warm and benefits from the incorporation of other warm-hued colors, either as flowers, foliage, or pottery. With good reason, bright golden barrel cactus are often planted underneath. But bougainvillea’s hot pink bracts planted nearby would make an excellent combination. Other plants to consider: Texas yucca (the cultivar ‘Brakelights' is warmer), blanketflower, California poppy, and coral vine.

A close relative, less boldly green and more graceful because of it, is getting established in my front garden. Palo brea (Parkinsonia praecox) is as cool as palo verde is warm. Native to Northern Mexico and the Sonoran desert, its bark is a pale, sea green. “So smooth,” according to Mary Irish, “it resembles a dancer’s leotard clinging to the winding branches.” The specimen in my front garden is too small to evoke Irish’s vivid description, but the bark’s cool tones are a perfect fit for the relaxed greens and grays and blues of the Mojave desert.

Palo brea is not always available at nurseries. I found mine at a backyard nursery that was going out of business, growing in a pot much too small for its size. It had no leaves. I put it in the ground in early fall and it immediately leafed out, but a week or so later, all of its leaves fell off. It was a lovely, tortured mess of pale green sticks. Sculptural, really. Then, just this week, tiny leaves emerged up and down its branches. It seems to have accepted its new home.

Large palo brea trees, victims of too much water, can be seen in older neighborhoods. As with all desert trees, don’t water them so much. Many problems associated with our beautiful desert trees, and the complicated and ugly pruning methods undertaken to prevent these problems, could be solved by watering them less. They will not grow as fast, but they will be healthier and longer lived and able to resist our cruel and commanding winds.

In a few days time, all the bright yellow blooms will fall. Already they darken the ground, making it sticky with pollen. A wind will come and blow them all away. Some will make it into the house, stuck to the bottom of my shoes or my son’s. I’ll find them months from now, when the heat has all but burned the memory from my mind. And I’ll be seduced, again, at the sight of that faded-and-once-radiant bloom.

While talk of the picturesque has faded from contemporary gardening discourse, the idea is still very much alive. I believe the picturesque has returned and that the implications of its return extend well beyond our gardens.

First, Beauty and the Sublime

The philosopher Stephanie Ross traced the idea of the picturesque to eighteenth century English landscape gardens in her book, What Gardens Mean. According to the theorists and gardeners in her studies, the picturesque was a category of aesthetic appreciation that fell between the Beautiful and the Sublime.

Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, Ross says that beauty is associated with “smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy, and clear but mild coloration.” Think: “swan, rose, a [pastoral] garden.” The sublime is associated with “obscurity, power, privation, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence, loudness.” Think: “a storm at sea, a gloomy forest, a lion, tiger, or rhinoceros.”

Or a cactus.

The sublime comes easily to the desert. The Grand Canyon, Mount Charleston, Joshua Tree, and Death Valley are all sublime. They must be taken in doses. To paraphrase Nietzsche, when you stare at the Grand Canyon, the Grand Canyon stares back at you.

Certain plants in the desert, cactus and yucca among them, are definitionally sublime: they provoke ideas of pain and danger. But the sublime is too intense for an ornamental garden. Traditionally, the goal of a garden is beauty.

There are many gardens that achieve this quality: The Hemingway Four Seasons Garden at Red Butte Garden in Salt Lake City or the Cactus Alley at Springs Preserve. The latter may be filled with sublime plants, but their arranged effect is beautiful whether or not in bloom. The alley invokes love, not terror.

The only sublime garden I have visited is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake. It was a cold winter day. Snow fell and the line separating lake and sky was as porous as the thin jacket I was wearing. I trembled and not because I was shivering.

Defining the Picturesque

The picturesque exists between the beautiful and sublime. A garden is picturesque when “it exhibits roughness, sudden variation, and irregularity, or intricacy and variety,” according to Ross’s reading of the movement’s leading garden writers.

Imagine a remote forest where snags (dying trees) abound, but so do wildflowers and berries and waterfalls. Imagine this scene as a painting, which is then translated into a garden. This is the picturesque.

In fact, for some eighteenth-century thinkers, the picturesque was a refreshing response to what they saw as the stale, too-tidy parks that Capability Brown was then designing throughout the English countryside. Instead of pastoral vistas and tame clumps of trees (the brief American obsession with kidney bean-shaped planting beds in front yards is Brown miniaturized), these writers encouraged gardeners to imitate the grittier side of nature.

The Picturesque in Practice

I’m currently in a lukewarm argument with my husband about the more picturesque qualities of our own garden. He says we should remove the dying mimosa tree in the backyard. I think of it as natural sculpture and I’ve planted vines to grown up it—several morning glories and a desert grape, Vitis arizonica. Dying trees also fill important ecological roles. Carpenter bees, those giant, black, bumbling curiosities, have made a home in it.

My husband is against my picturesque proclivities. Just this week, on a walk through the neighborhood, he referred to a large and stately creosote as a weed; I divorced him on the spot. Creosote are a desert jewel—they are blooming now and going to seed. The plants are covered in rich yellow, star-shaped flowers and round, glowing seed heads that shimmer in early morning light.

The Return to the Picturesque

Gardening in the United States and UK is in the midst of a picturesque resurgence. While the top-selling gardening books on Amazon are gardening primers and coffee table books filled with beautiful flowers, Douglas Tallamy, who advocates for wilder backyards, has two books in the top 50. The avant edge of garden writing is replete with invitations to use wilder, native plants in the home garden. There’s Shrouded in Light, Planting in a Post-wild World, Wild About Weeds, and Planting the Natural Garden, to name a few.

These titles suggest the picturesque is thriving. Even the backyard veggie gardeners, which have been beholden to university extension programs for the better part of a century, are thinking seriously about permaculture. We are rewilding our yards, a project that strikes me as particularly attuned to the picturesque.

History repeats itself, you know. But is today’s idea of the picturesque the same as the eighteenth century’s idea?

A Critique

Ross is not exactly on board with the picturesque. Drawing on the work of several critics, she suggests it arose from a particular anxiety about large-scale political and social changes in England, and a decline in good taste. (Sound familiar?) Critics of the picturesque, according to Ross, accused it of lacking moral responsibility and as emblematic of a crisis of confidence. They identified it as pessimistic, paternal and nostalgic.

Does the return to the picturesque reflect these same concerns? Or is the new picturesque different? Does it have a moral character that the old picturesque lacked?

Consider, for example, the current practice of leaving leaf litter in place. It’s picturesque through-and-through—very rough, very irregular. But there’s also the fact that it is better for my garden. It is a visual sensibility with material (and moral) consequences: decaying leaves feed my impoverished soil. The western banded gecko hides in leaf litter during the day to emerge at night and control the excess scorpion population.

Despite the ecological benefits of picturesque gardening, is there something darker, more troubling, in its resurgence? Does it signal that we have given up on the idea of institutions, that the grand theories for improving the world have failed? The return to the picturesque may suggest we have narrowed our focus in a way that excludes that larger world.

I say may because I do not know. While the wild garden is often articulated as revolutionary, as a site of resistance, I worry that this narrow focus on the backyard signifies a troubling turn away from the larger world. If the picturesque is a tactic that makes the world into something as small as a private backyard, what does it mean for the wider world of public and collective possibility?

A Defense

The picturesque invites us to cultivate wild and resilient plants, the result of which are more wild and resilient ecosystems. They may not be beautiful or sublime, but they are more approachable, more available to the average gardener. Which is to say: more available to you and me.

My sense is that today’s picturesque, as it relates to the garden, claims a stronger moral dimension than the old picturesque. Yes, for some an untidy garden may indeed suggest a crisis of confidence, a lapse in morality. I think a dying mimosa tree is picturesque, but there’s no doubt it provides fair cover for a certain laziness on my part.

But there is something plucky about the new picturesque. Despite the pessimism or crisis it may suggest, its attitude is at least moral, even though it may not be grand in the same way that Enlightenment institutions were. Rather, the new picturesque says, “I can make a difference in my small corner of the world.” It is a profoundly pessimistic moral orientation, but it may be the best option we have.

Many southwestern gardeners know well the hummingbirds in their gardens. My great aunt can tell you exactly how many there are in her garden, what kind they are, and their daily habits. The hummingbirds in my garden have always been a mystery to me. They move too quickly; their beaks too sharp for my comfort. But the tiny female Costa’s is particularly present. I am recognized by her, and she by me. We see each other.

Hummingbirds visit and live in my garden year-round. How they manage to find enough to eat all winter is beyond me, although I do my best. Still, there is that brief, cold window when the Tecoma shrubs and the Baja fairy dusters have all but stalled out. Then, the hummingbird feeds on the nasturtium that I take care to protect from the occasional frost. Before long there are the bluebells and the aloes to slake their thirst. They eat bugs and pollen and other foods, too. But since I don’t use hummingbird feeders, I must grow enough nectar-producing and insect-attracting plants for my year-round hummingbird residents.

But I know the little Costa’s wants more. Like Whitman, I stand accused, the source of her complaining. She’s not angry with me—there is no aggression in the way she pesters me. No irritated chirrup. There is only her flapping witness of my failing gardening efforts. They are never enough.

I suppose if I had a spotted hawk to complain about me, I would have been a poet. Instead I have a minuscule hummingbird, which means I am a gardener.

I like being a gardener. It suits me. I like writing about gardens, too. But these are not glamorous pursuits.

Take, for example, this week’s chore: pruning. The Tecoma shrubs (various cultivars) have all woken up, but it was a briefly cold winter, so there was some dieback here and there. There’s also the fact of their ranginess, which irritates my husband. So I thin them. Not too much, removing only a handful of older canes, and they are never sheared. They now look neater than I would prefer. But I don’t mind this chore. It is a gentle shrub.

The bougainvillea, though. That is another matter.

In Tove Jansson’s delightful book Comet in Moominland, Moomintroll, a round adolescent, finds that his love, the Snork Maiden, has turned damsel-in-distress. She is being eaten up by a terrible bush!

“To their horror they found that this was actually the case. A poisonous bush of the dangerous Angostura family had got hold of the little Snork Maiden’s tail, and was now dragging her toward it.”

Moomintroll takes out his knife to come to the Snork Maiden’s defense. “The bush glared at [him] with all its green-yellow flower-eyes…and stretched its twining arms toward him.” But Moomintroll attacks the shrub’s waving arms and saves his precious Snork Maiden. “A howl of terror was heard…when one of the green arms twisted itself round Moomintroll’s nose. But it changed to a triumphal war cry when he chopped off the arm with a single blow.”

Each spring, as I consider the two bougainvillea that were already in the garden when we took ownership, and which sprawl confusingly along a stuccoed wall, I become Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden; defender and damsel.

I go at it with long-handled pruners, thick leather gloves, and a long-sleeve shirt. If I were wise I would wear jeans, but the weather has already warmed. Clad thusly, I carefully locate the growing buds in the heart of the tangle, so that I can cut away everything above them.

Why do I have to do this?

Bougainvillea are not really hardy in my garden. They need to be planted in a protected place—a patio works great, or somewhere below an overhang—to prevent dieback each winter. There is a bougainvillea that blooms all winter long in Boulder City under the overhang of a shop that sells souvenirs to Hoover Dam tourists. It is possible, but you’ve got to have the right conditions for it.

Mine grow in the worst possible place: a veritable and very cold wind tunnel for a good two to three months. This year I thought they might be spared! But then February got very cold, and the winds came, and the leaves turned brown and crunchy.

Each year I think, “RIP.” But then it buds out, there in the thick of itself. And each year I prune out all the damaged branches. Because I know in a few months, when the garden is drab and limp, midsummer having claimed the garden for herself, the bougainvillea will give the heat (and me) its resplendent, gaudy, fuchsia-colored middle finger. And I will nod my head back and say touché. Maybe next year one of us will win this battle.

Two redbuds for the desert garden

Redbud species in the garden are usually eastern (Cercis canadensis) or western (Cercis occidentalis). I planted a variety that comes from somewhere in the middle: a Texas redbud (Cercis canadensis var. texensis). Its leaves are crisped—a word that cuts itself short just before you would expect it to otherwise roll off your tongue. As a botanical term, it’s an excellent description for the leaf margins, which are wavy and rolling. In fact, the entire leaf looks like a giant clam shell. The leaves are also thicker than the common redbuds of Appalachia; their undersides are like felt.

These are smart adaptations for hotter, drier climates. The top of the leaf is not uniformly exposed to solar radiation because it rolls in such a way that only part of the leaf receives sunlight at any given time of day. The thick, felted leaves reduce evaporation. But to be sure, that doesn’t mean it will tolerate full sun in the low desert. Morning sun is best.

I also planted a Mexican redbud (Cercis canadensis var. mexicana) last fall. Its leaves are smaller, bluer, and rougher. It feels and looks in every way like a desert plant; more rugged, less graceful. More approachable, too. I purchased it from a backyard nursery in a half-filled gallon nursery pot: a burnt and pathetic twig hanging on somehow. I wasn’t sure if it would make it, but earlier this week I saw minute leaves, reddish-pink, then bright green, emerge like tiny folded valentines drawn from a secret envelope.

Sensitivity to the ordinary

I’m reading a new work on garden philosophy by father-son duo David and Ethan Fenner, The Art and Philosophy of the Garden. David is a professional philosopher and hobbyist gardener, while Ethan is a hobbyist thinker and professional gardener. Their central question, drawing on the nascent but growing work of garden theory, asks: Is the garden art? I have some thoughts, but I’m withholding judgment until I finish the text (I plan to eventually share a review).

Along the course of their discussion, they draw on the work of the American pragmatist and thinker John Dewey. Fenner Sr. is an aesthetics expert and his discussion of Dewey is clear and skillful. “The appreciation of art is based first and foremost on a particular sensitivity to the ordinary,” they say, drawing on Dewey.

I’ve not read Dewey in a very long time, and I have never read Art as Experience, but I agree with the Fenners that Dewey’s ideas about art and appreciating the ordinary apply to gardening.

Gardens prime us for the experience of art because they help us see the ordinary. They help us see the ordinary by arranging plants in novel and unique ways, and by training our attention to perceive what might otherwise go unnoticed. Gardens make all gardeners close readers. In other words, gardens force proximity to, and therefore awareness of, the ordinary.

Perhaps, as a gardener, you may not agree that plants are ordinary. You are wrong. They are so ordinary that many people do not see them at all! But you, gardener, can see them. All-too-well, actually. Which has transformed them into something less like nature and more like art. Their arrangement in your yard may even be a work of art.

You observe that plants are reaching, growing, moving, wandering (from here to there). Yerba mansa’s creeping stolons move with such speed and intention that it makes porous the plant-animal boundary; canna lily’s rhizomatic growth creates floral constellations out of a starchy, fleshy root; the sharp crack of the seedpods of Mexican bird-of-paradise signal growth on the other side of the garden. These are all ordinary achievements for Anemopsis californica, Canna indica, and Caesalpinia mexicana.

Gardening, whether art or not, has deepened my appreciation for seeing beauty of all kinds. It has been consequential for the development of my personal taste, both aesthetically and in terms of my taste buds. It has opened up a more expansive repertoire for experiencing, acknowledging, and describing the world.

Gardens and art

Gardeners are particularly suited to making sense of the ordinary. This fact alone may be why gardeners, and the philosopher-gardeners who write about gardens, are so keen to see their gardens as works of art. This isn’t vanity; rather, it’s sensitivity. Gardeners are particularly sensitive to seeing art in the ordinary, and thus in a garden. But this sensitivity may mean that only gardeners will ever think of gardens as works of art.

Still, I’m not sure I will end up agreeing that the garden is a work of art. For me, there seems to be something about a garden that precedes art. But I’ve much more reading to do—not just from the Fenners. There’s Cooper’s Philosophy of the Garden and Miller’s The Garden as an Art, as well as Ross’s What Gardens Mean. After many years of reading gardeners on gardening, I’m thrilled to dive into a fresh and growing body of literature by philosophers on gardening.

I wish I were among them.

When I lived in the high deserts of Utah, tomatoes were a more dependable crop. I started them from seed, under shop lights, in the basement of our Salt Lake City bungalow, and transplanted them early, covering them with little cloches or, if I started them sooner, water walls. In July, I harvested bushels of the most beautiful heirloom varieties: Cherokee Purple, Brandywine Pink, Japanese Trifele, Black Krim, Cosmonaut Volkov. There were so many tomatoes. I roasted and froze them, and we ate sauces and soups straight through Christmas.

In Las Vegas, I am far less successful. My mouth waters as the temperature soars. And then all the lovely, little flowers drop (tomatoes won’t set fruit when it gets much hotter than 90°F). The fruit that has set turns a sickly white, burnt up by the sun.

But since those first, failed attempts, I’ve settled on a dependable and boring method that consistently delivers results, even if it means forsaking the grand expectations of heirloom indeterminate types.

Instead, I focus on a few hybrids that perform well. They do not taste as extraordinary as a Cherokee Purple on a warm, late summer day, but perhaps a tomato eaten off the vine in May cannot compare no matter the variety. But sliced thick and stacked tall on toasted sourdough bread, with plenty of mayo, and I can forgive the odd timing of my abbreviated tomato harvest.

The key to growing tomatoes successfully in Las Vegas is to start them before it is prudent, before I feel comfortable, so that they set fruit before the heat sets in, the timing of which is quite variable. This means that I start them earlier than suggested, and in doing so risk frost and nights that get too cold.*

In the desert, we’re all riding tomato-bearing camels, threading the needle’s eye of the valley’s narrow growing season.

I account for cold by growing them in simple, black plastic containers. Five-gallon nursery containers, the kind that have piled up in the shed from years of too many visits to the nursery, do just fine. They absorb the sun’s heat, keeping roots and soil warm enough for strong, active growth.

At planting time, I put tomato cages into the containers, and then I leave them alone, watering when the soil begins to dry on top. If the temperature dips, I move the containers next to a warm wall or into the greenhouse. If it gets too hot too soon after fruit has set, I move them into a shadier, cooler part of the garden while I wait to harvest.

Early maturing, determinate varieties are best. They are not as sexy as heirlooms—but my goal is tomatoes of any kind. I grow Early Girls, Hawaiian Tropic, and Heatmasters. I make an exception for cherry tomatoes. For these, I like Sungolds, a yellow pear, and then a red type that isn’t too tomato soupy (Sweet 100s taste like Campbell’s condensed tomato soup straight out of the can). This year I’m trying Chocolate Sprinkles. I don’t grow any of my tomatoes by seed anymore. I pick up small starts at a nursery.

Determinate varieties tend to get one large flush of fruit; sometimes there is a second flush that may or may not ripen, depending on the temperatures in late spring. Then, they are done. I pull them from their homes and throw them into the compost. I use the soil as a mulch in my other garden beds and I hunker down for the long, hot days of summer, before doing it all again in fall.

My fall-planted tomatoes are not as abundant, but they will sometimes grow through the winter if I move them into the greenhouse. Their quality deteriorates—particularly taste—but this means they are better for soups and sauces, which is fine. By then, the days have shortened and cooled so that warm, tomato-based soups are now finally in season.

*I appreciate the recommendations from the local extension office, but I get the sense that evidence-based gardening has become something of a fetish for these revered horticultural institutions. At any rate, our climate is changing too quickly to wait for peer-reviewed gardening practices. It’s a wild world out there.

But blue must be a close second; February, its favorite month. Try to hold it in your heart, this month, this color.

The first spring flower, which opened in the warmest, sunniest part of my garden, was blue. The desert bluebell (Phacelia campanularia) is all the more alluring because the stamens are a very pale yellow, almost white.

The possibilities for blue are rarely as rich as this, though. The powder blue of brittlebush leaves is much more common. They will be blue until they turn white with drought.

Both of these blues—rich and pale—are the February sky; it sways between them, its qualities changing in tandem with the quantity of atmospheric moisture. This year, it has not been much.

On a desert hike this weekend, the sky was the beginning and end of blue’s narrow place in the color spectrum. Red and yellow rocks served as perfect, primary foils. But the red-orange berries of desert mistletoe (Phoradendron californicum), which have parasitized most of the catclaw acacia (Senegalia greggii) in Oak Creek Canyon, just outside Nelson, are best in this matter. When I saw them, they were rich, ripe, and full of water. Their backdrop was a thin sky, as if it were veiling itself, ashamed of the depth of its blue.

As I walked deeper into the wash, the shrub oak took hold. Quercus turbinella is the gnarled, unruly ruler of the small riparian forest in the heart of this wash. Its leaves are thin, leathery, and blue.

Blue flowers are rare. They so often veer toward purple. But blue flowers are probably more common than green ones. The only one I know of is silver cholla (Cylindropuntia echinocarpa). A neighbor grows one in her front garden. In mid-to-late April, blue and yellow conspire to make a green that I cannot pull my gaze from. I wish I could say with some certainty just how green they are, but you have to see them for yourselves. A photo won’t do.

Blue Flowers

While blue flowers are rare, many grow well here. As I’ve mentioned, there is nothing quite like desert blue bells (Phacelia campanularia). They are sneaky annuals, appearing all over, sometimes in thick blankets around irrigated shrubs and perennials. This can make them a nuisance for some people, but anything that grows carefree and blue is welcome in my garden. Grow these by seed, broadcasting them fall through winter.

Another carefree, if all-too-common, blue-flowered plant is rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus). Its pale blue flowers start in late winter and continue into early spring. This is an easy plant, and there are many cultivars to choose from, the blues more or less saturated depending on the variety. They come in upright and prostrate forms. Too frequently, rosemary is sheared into the weirdest shapes, stripping it of the natural, rugged form that looks so at home here in the desert. Prostrate varieties are beautiful overhanging a retaining wall. The leaves, when crushed or brushed by your hand, are immediately cheering. There are few better remedies for the winter doldrums than deeply inhaling rosemary.

Several indigo bushes are native to our region. While their flowers may be more indigo than blue, I cannot tell the difference. I grow two: Psorothamnus schottii and Psorothamnus arborescens. They are both new to my garden. Regionally native plants have been difficult to source here, but it is getting easier, thanks to the pioneers behind Mojave Bloom. Many of these natives are shrubs.

Shrubs are the backbone of a garden. In the desert, I’m becoming more sympathetic to the idea that they are the garden. A fine and strange book is to blame for my change of heart. But desert shrubs are easier to grow than perennials, require almost no care and very little water, and, unlike most of the evergreen imports in many of our gardens, actually change with the seasons.

Blue Foliage

While blue flowers are rare, blue plants are common in the desert, usually in the form of glaucous leaves. Glaucous leaves are a desert adaptation that help plants retain moisture during hot, dry summers. Brittlebush (Encelia farinosa) is among my favorites. It grows with zero input, is easy to find, and readily reseeds, lending itself to naturalistic gardens.

There are many blue-leafed agaves, but scabra (Agave scabra) is the easiest to find and grow in southern Nevada. It is rare among agaves; it can take the desert’s full sun and even the reflected heat of a dry, gravel garden. Scabras are not so blue or graceful as Agave americana or some of the Agave parryi varieties, but they make up for it in their toughness.

Lastly, consider purple prickly pear (Opuntia macrocentra). The pads develop a purplish tint in the winter, but for most of the year, they are baby blue. There are several cultivars and a lot of variation in the species, some turning dark purple in the cold. In others, the new pads are deep maroon. The causes of variation may be environmental (they all grow a little differently depending on where they are in my garden). Purple prickly pear is sometimes confused with Opuntia santa-rita, which I find much more purple (and often covered in scale). Opuntia macrocentra appears resistant to cochineal scale. But they may each be variations of the same species.

I made that last one up. I like it as a new common name for the Australian sennas that are pedestrian in the desert southwest. I grow two of them: Senna nemophilia and Senna artemisiodes. The former has bright green, very narrow leaves (phyllodes, actually). The latter comes in various cultivars, but the leaves on mine are feathery, the color a bluish green.

Widely known as cassias (and they used to be in the cassia genus) they are scientifically identified as sennas, which puts them in the same genus as our southwestern native sennas, including Senna armata, which, in my garden, grows near its Aussie cousins. It will bloom later this spring and into summer. Sennas are legumes. They have the amazing ability to take nitrogen from the air and put it into the ground, where they use it to make even the most inhospitable soils a little more fertile.

Forsythia reimagined

The forsythia you are likely most familiar with, Forsythia x intermedia, is native to eastern Asia—it looks nothing at all like the desert forsythia that grow in my garden.

The advice for east Asian forsythia is to plant it in the back of a border, or at least some place where the plain leaves and unassuming architectural features can fade into the background. It is prized by most gardeners for heralding spring with bright, acid yellow flowers. Indeed, flowering forsythia, along with the earliest daffodils, still means spring to me.

I once experienced forsythia twice in a year. Once, in my old garden in spring in Salt Lake City, and then again that same year, outside of Boston, when our son was born. On the eastern seaboard, forsythia blooms about a month later than the high deserts of Utah. We were staying in an extended stay type hotel while we waited for adoption paperwork to clear. There were fields of forsythia everywhere, growing wild and reckless. Forsythia is forever tied to my son’s birthday, even though the association remains true only in the backwoods of Massachusetts.

Desert forsythia doesn’t exist. But there’s no reason it couldn’t. Common names are taxonomies of place, they are discrete and not at all generalizable. Accessible to you and me in the moment and place of our existence. I think this makes them also more useful.

I can imagine a new arrival to the desert strolling the aisles of a nursery, totally bewildered about what to plant here, and seeing a name like desert forsythia. Forsythia would trigger in her mind the idea of bright yellow blooms heralding the arrival spring. She’d know immediately how it might be incorporated into a garden that is trying to achieve a certain rhythm of bloom and color. Desert would tell her something about its adaptations. All the Australian sennas could be grouped into this category, and she could choose from a leaf pallet that is diverse in form and color, picking perhaps S. artemisiodes for areas that call for a cool color scheme, and S. nemophilia for a bright, limy green contrast against a stucco wall.

Gardens as ritual

I’m reminded of the Diné medicine man, Betonie, in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. He’s able to help heal the main character, Tayo, who lives with post-traumatic stress disorder, only because he’s willing to try new ways, to adjust the ceremonies for a different time.

“Don’t be so quick to call something good or bad,” Betonie says, during a healing ceremony for Tayo. “It is a matter of transitions, you see; the changing, the becoming must be cared for closely. You would do as much for the seedlings as they become plants in the field.” He provides this important context for Tayo because Betonie does not stick to the ceremonies in their traditional sense. He has made changes. Those changes have resulted in his ostracism, but also in his success as a healer.

“The people nowadays have an idea about ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony must be stopped… [But], in many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing…Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things.”

There is an idea that scientific order (botany, in fact) can bring clarity to gardening, making it truer and more perfect. The same idea pervades the ethos of design, as if the arranging of plants in a particular order—their vibration, as the great British garden designer Russell Page, might have said—predict a certain degree of success. And it is true that a scientifically managed garden will yield particular results, higher productivity, for example. A well designed garden does something similar, yielding a certain kind of harmony, a symphonic cadence of blooms.

But a garden is something deeper. It is a kind of ceremony, with patterns, symbols, languages, lives, and manners. A garden, even the loneliest, saddest pile of rubble and weeds, can only ever be true so long as it is gardened—so long as a hand tends to it.

Gardening understood this way (as a phenomenological interaction with non-human life), means that it is wildly open to revision, which is to say it is especially amenable to change. Not just in substance (the kind of plants we use), but also in symbol (the way we talk about our gardens, or the names we give them, both their parts and as a whole).

Naming the desert garden

I like using common names and even think we should come up with new ones. It is true that a scientific approach to gardening (whether it is called botany, agriculture, aesthetics, or horticulture) is necessary for certain gardening inputs (for example, getting the precise seed you want), but gardening is not these academic disciplines, though they may be useful for studying gardens. Instead, I understand gardening as a modality, a way of interacting with the non-human world that acknowledges that the interaction changes that world and is changed by that world. Another, and perhaps more concise way of saying this, is that gardening comes before science and art, it collapses the subject-object distinction of enlightenment thinking and is instead a totally distinct way of being in the world.

That may seem like a lot to put on digging in the dirt and throwing in a handful of seeds. But gardening is the primordial act, superseding all that has come after. The fate of our human structures, the things that came after the first garden, depend on us going back in a meaningful way, before science and art, before the invention of horticulture, to that way of being in the world.

While that idea may seem very heavy, there’s also a playfulness to it. I imagine the conversations Eve and Adam must have had as they wandered the garden, coming up with names for all of the delightful and sensuous things they saw. I imagine how those names changed the quality of what they saw, for better and for worse, and how those names then changed them, and their progeny, and all of us.

Cultivating the vernacular

I try to always use Latin names in my writing because it provides a common language for other scientific-minded gardeners. But it does almost nothing for most of my readers, who do not interact with their gardens in this overly precise way. Instead, we could come up with more sensible names, more place-driven names, that adhere to the very specific space- and time-bound conditions of gardening.

Desert forsythia may be a silly example—but I like the sound of it. I like how it tells me something of place (arid, dry) of color (acid yellow) of placement (near the back) and timing (late winter or early spring). These are all very useful for the gardener, independent of (and perhaps in addition to) native status or binomial nomenclature.

As the earth finally tilts toward the sun, I plan to wander my own garden, far from paradisiacal it may be, and name what I see. Some names will be useful and meaningful only for me, and those I will keep for myself. But others I will gladly share, if I think it may help you in your own gardening efforts. In doing so, I will remind myself that the ceremonies don’t have to be performed the same way. As my garden shifts and grows, the symbolic structures I attach to it will shift and grow, too—that’s what makes a garden alive.

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Michele, one of Las Vegas’s few progressive garden designers, met with me so I could write about her for Mojave Gardener. But also because I wanted to meet her.

I have read her quarterly garden design newsletter since moving here, my mouth watering at her descriptions, my eyes fixed on the photos, as my heart ached for the kind of clear, simple, artful and flowering beauty that all of her designed gardens possess. But the path to those gardens did not run straight—and her education, from Las Vegas to New Orleans to the Bay Area and back home, offers a master class in gardening, even for one of the most arid places in North America.

I asked Michele if she preferred to sit in the sun, where it was warmer. She said she did and we walked over to her beds, both of us sitting, facing out, the sun warming our backs and the concrete pavers warming our undersides, and talked. The bed we faced held some of Michele’s favorite perennials: three kinds of penstemon (p. palmeri and p. parryi among them), a large blackfoot daisy (Melampodium leucanthum) that cascaded over the concrete walls of the bed, and half a dozen other plants that were huddled in their winter dormancy.

Michele possesses the quiet, introverted, and immovable mannerisms—as if she is part plant—of a great gardener. When she talks, she tends to hold her own hands, clearly uncomfortable with the attention she’s getting. But soon she forgets, looking out over the parched landscape and into the recesses of her memory.

She was born and raised in Las Vegas, growing up here in the 70s and 80s, back when the Valley was about a tenth of the size it is today.

“As kids we had two streets out there in the desert that we played on and there was nothing else around,” she said. “We called them front street and back street.”

My mom tells similar stories of growing up in the valley, a decade or so before Michele, back when it was fully desert. My mom rode ponies in what is now the shopping courts and subdivisions of Silverado Ranch. Michele also ran through scrub, creosote and beavertail cactus, where she started to notice the imported plants that were growing then across the manicured environs of the valley, mostly mulberry, fruiting olive, and oleander. They made up what she terms the 70s plant palette, and there are many neighborhoods that still bear signs of this gardening style.

So when Michele moved from Las Vegas to New Orleans, she was shocked by how lush and floral the landscape was, saturated in the deep, glossy greens of subtropical foliage. She began working for a landscaping company there, the beginning of her horticultural training. “I didn’t even know how to pronounce hydrangea,” she said, recalling her first job. “I’d never seen one!”

She took classes and jobs here and there, before moving to the Bay Area where she continued her education, enrolling in an ornamental horticulture program at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, and then interning for a landscape contractor in Pleasanton. It was there, outside of San Francisco, that she had her first in-the-ground garden—a hot, dry slope made of heavy, clay soil.

Michele held off gardening that slope for a whole year. She planted sunflowers, but that was it, instead taking her time to really understand her new place. “I watched it through the seasons,” she said. Until finally she made her first major contributions to the garden, which began by terracing the backyard and planting a large, weeping willow to stabilize the slope and to soak up all the extra water in the heavy soil.

“Everything starts with place,” she said, as our thoughts turned to Las Vegas and where she returned after her horticultural education in the Bay Area and New Orleans. “We don’t have as much wiggle room. Or grace,” she added.

“When I got back to Vegas it kind of killed my spirit,” she continued.

I felt her pain, even all these years later, when she told me that. I feel it, too. This is a hard and brutal and unforgiving climate. We get a paltry four inches of rain, our summers bake and our winters freeze—although, they freeze less often now than they used to.

Nevertheless, Michele continued to make gardens. I asked her what fed her spirit, and she told me it was the plants. And the community. And the people. Springs Preserve, in particular.

“Springs Preserve got me back into doing gardens. They showed me what’s possible. Visiting Springs Preserve got my spirit back,” she said. “Still to this day, I get inspired all over again.”

Springs Preserve, a public garden administered by Southern Nevada Water Authority, is the crown jewel of Las Vegas’s few public gardens. It feeds my spirit, too. I remember distinctly standing at the top of cactus alley last summer after leaving my corporate job. The future seemed suddenly so open.

Cactus alley is a long, formal series of beds overflowing with hundreds of species of cactus and desert succulents— barrels and columns, little pincushions and giant saguaros, paddles, agaves, and yuccas. I felt heat rise up from the crushed gravel path, dappled light fell across my neck and shoulders, and a still, small feeling rested there, in the crux of that moment, urging me to stay, to love, to live, and to garden in this hostile landscape.

It’s true that our plant palate is very small here—but that means we have an opportunity to use all of it. Every last plant that can grow here ought to be tried here. That small palate also has the effect of freeing us from some of the constraints of design that gardeners in other places might experience.

“In other places you can afford to be a color snob,” Michele said, for example. Not so here—if something flowers, especially regularly or intensely, who cares if the color clashes once or twice a year with something planted nearby. The desert light’s intensity washes out many colors anyway.

But it isn’t easy to argue for plants in Las Vegas. We are a transient community, and people come from all over the world to live here, each bringing with them their idea of what a garden should be.

“Vegas has a reputation for being a fantasyland,” Michele said. “Why can’t I have a Hawaii in my backyard?” Or a New Orleans, or a Southern California, or a Seattle, or a Michigan. And the fact of USDA hardiness zones does not make it any easier. Gardeners from other climates see Zone 9 and think they will be able to grow almost anything. But it’s not enough. “Not even near the whole picture,” Michele said. Adding that New Orleans, her East Bay garden, and Las Vegas are all in Zone 9. Still, you can’t imagine more different places to garden.

For gardeners new to Las Vegas, the Sunset zones can be helpful for understanding the impact of heat and sun. But it also takes understanding that the desert is just different. “The desert is its own kind of beauty,” she said. “It takes time for people to adjust their eyes.”

Apart from the sun’s intensity, there is also the matter of rainfall. While we can supplement our gardens with water pulled from the Colorado River, it is a poor substitute for rainfall. “Rain is organic fertilizer,” Michele said. “It’s not just the moisture. It’s also the nutrients. It washes the dust off of stuff.”

Indeed, there is nothing more glorious than a desert garden after a rain storm, so lush and fragrant. If it looks like your garden has grown after a rain storm, it’s because it has, Michele said. Our gardens do most of their growing during those brief and blessed events.

In all the heat, and rock, and dust of the eastern Mojave, Michele sees some quality that nourishes her, allows her to persist.

Being a garden designer in this town is not easy. People want their gardens to look like Southern California. Or they want hardly any garden at all: a great expanse of gravel punctuated with a few small, easy-to-manage plants. They want their shrubs sheared so that no messy flowers grow. In that environment, Michele is something of an evangelist. A much needed voice calling out from desert wilderness, asking us to consider our gardens a little differently.

Aside from being sites of beauty and places of refuge for people, Michele also designs gardens with nature in mind. “I love gardens that attract life,” she said. "We have an opportunity to give back with our gardens, no matter how big or small.”

Michele looked across the community garden as she talked about this debt—this thing we owe this land we call home—as if the plants and animals of some Edenic paradise were there, just beyond my visual field of perception, but that she could clearly see.

“Gardens are always changing. Sometimes we need to adjust for that. Losing a plant is an opportunity to try something new. That is part of the fun of gardening. Trying new things. Gardeners make the best gardens, not designers. The people who really know their space and live and love it,” she said.

Six of Michele’s (currently) favorite plants

Plant choices should always be place-driven, but here are six of Michele’s currently favorite plants. Give one, or all of them, a try in your garden this spring. For more specific advice, consider booking a consultation with Michele.

• Desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata)

• Parry’s penstemon (Penstemon parryi)

• Brittlebush (Encelia farinosa)

• Desert willow (Chilopsis linearis)

• Creosote (Larrea tridentata)

• Strawberry hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus engelmanii)