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Oh so yellow, gravel gardens and no mow rewilding

When April comes in Tucson and the temperature reaches to the high 80s F (30C) the Arizona native Palo Verde (Parkinsonia florida) trees burst into dazzling bloom. Street after street are lined with them and, were gas prices lower, I might be tempted to spend a hour or two every day driving around the city taking photos of them.

The Palo Verde is a good basis for a two-color garden–green + one other color–and yellow is a good color to pick because so many plants for hot, dry gardens bloom in yellow.

Plants for a yellow green garden

So here are a few plants to use in a green and yellow garden with almost no extra watering is required.

Two Palo Verde trees across the street from my home. Look closely and you’ll see others further on down the street. The only water this garden receives is rainfall of about 14 inches (35 cm) a year, most of that during the summer monsoon. In Spanish Palo Verde means green stick — the trunk and branches stay green year ’round. The leaves are tiny and, overall, the Palo Verde is not great as a shade tree –but awesome in April!

Going native with yellow flowering plants

yellow flowers on purple prickly pear cactus

Prickly pear cacti (Opuntia) in bloom. The variety on the right, the Santa Rita, has the bonus of bringing purple to your garden after the flowers fade. Another bonus with prickly pear: the fruit is edible and especially good as jam.

If you want a garden like an Arizona native, plant a Brittle Bush (Encelia farinosa) with its daisy-shaped yellow blooms. Actually, they grow well with little attention in both the Mojave and Sonoran deserts–that means in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

yellow lantana in bloom

If you don’t care about native v. non-native a golden yellow Lantana (Lantana montevidensis) fits right in a yellow-green garden theme. Whoever planted this South American native slipped in a couple of small purple Lantanas, but they are not as long-blooming or hardy was the golden yellow ones.

Of course, you can always add an annual like the Sunflower — Ukraine’s national flower–or Rudbeckia, a low-growing perennial with sunflower-shaped blooms. And your local plant nursery may have other suggestions.

Gravel gardens — a new trend?

While it may not be apparent in these photos, none of these gardens have lawn. The one near my home, has–as you can see in the photo–simple Arizona dirt underlies the garden. The Lantana was planted in fine pebbly mulch in a Southern California garden.

So I read with some amusement of the “new” trend toward gravel gardens in the U.K. and in the U.S. northeast. Basically, they are what we call desert gardens with rock mulch. In the northeast and U.K., however, the aesthetic choice seems to be grey gravel instead of golden or red sandstone colors. But planted lawns that have to be mowed, watered and intensively cared for — they’re out!

Where to get a free or cheap tree for your home.

Rewilding roadsides may be dangerous

Another trend out of the U.K. is the rewilding of roadsides. It seems to have taken hold as more and more towns across England simply let the verge alongside roads become home to native plants and grasses instead of mowing them. Traditionally, May is the mowing month. But no longer.

In truth, many of these roadside gardens are not purely native: they receive a little boost with seeds of wildflowers scattered among the volunteer plants. While I like the rewilding idea, just letting plants and grasses grow along roadsides can create added wildfire danger here in the American West.

So while I can cheer the trend toward no lawn “gravel gardens”, I have problems supporting letting native grasses and plants grow uncontrolled along the Western roads and highways.

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

5 fragrant plants for your hot garden

Summer is coming and with it, warm evenings to enjoy outside on a patio beneath stars and moon — and all of Elon Musk’s orbiting satellites.

While star-watching and satellite-watching may appeal to the eyes, fragrant plants in your garden create appealing scents that makes being outdoors after dark an even better experience.

So here are 5 very fragrant trees, shrubs, and vines that do well in hot, dry climates. Note that not all are drought tolerant. Some will need watering as the days heat up. And some bloom and release their fragrance during the day, too.

Fast growing and fragrant

Butterfly Bush or Summer Lilac (Buddleja davidii). This rangy shrub, above, grows fast and produces fragrant, lilac-like blooms in mid-summer. In cold winter areas it may freeze to the ground, but will regrow and bloom the same year. In fact, if you plant one now, you may have a good-size shrub with blooms this summer in your desert garden. One interesting variety is the ‘Harlequin” with dark magenta flowers and white-edged leaves. Another popular variety also created by Monrovia Nursery is the “Black Knight,” pictured above.

A show-stopper in your front yard

Flowering Crabapple. (Malus ionsis ‘Klehms’) Cars will come to a screeching halt on the street outside your home if you plant a flowering crabapple in your front yard. When this tree blooms, it is covered with glorious, fragrant double-pink flowers. The blooming period is short and the resulting fruit is best in jellies or pickled. In the fall the leaves turn a brilliant rusty orange giving you a second season of color.

Like most crabapple trees, it is rounded and low-growing to about 15 or 20 feet and definitely needs regular irrigation during hot summer months. Because some varieties are susceptible to regional diseases, ask your local nursery which one is best for your area. But try to find a fragrant, double-flowering one!

Where to get a free or cheap tree for your home.

Imitating orange blossoms

Pittosporum (Pittosporum tobira) is also called ‘Mock Orange’ because its fragrance can envelope a garden in an unforgettable scent similar to a true orange. Over the years pittosporum has become quite popular with commercial landscapers because two dwarf varieties are definitely drought tolerant: ‘Wheeler’s Dwarf” or “Turner’s Variegated Dwarf’. They are almost indestructible.

But neither of these dwarf hybrids produce the incredible fragrant flower clusters that the non-dwarf Pittosporum tobira does. It can be used as a hedge shrub or small tree and grows from 6 to 15 feet tall with very dense shade beneath.

Another member of this family is the Cape Pittosporum (P. viridiflorum) which grows to 25 feet high, has small, very fragrant flowers, but–alas–may not be suitable for all hot gardens. It does better in more humid, tropical climates. Again, ask your local nursery.

A true night bloomer

It’s commonly called “night-blooming jasmine”. It is, however, not a true jasmine at all, but is a jessamine plant (Cestrum nocturnum), a member of the nightshade family along with tomatoes and peppers. Whatever its name it is noted for releasing its fragrance after dark in hot, dry gardens.

Like jasmine, jessamine plants can be shrubs or vines. Night-blooming jessamine is a tropical, evergreen shrub, native to the West Indies that grows 8-10 feet (2.5-3 m.) tall and 3 feet (91.5 cm.) wide. It is evergreen and tall so it makes night-blooming jasmine an excellent candidate for privacy hedges and screens. It bears clusters of small, white-green flowers from spring through late summer. When the flowers fade, white berries form and attract a variety of birds to the garden. These berries are toxic. Do not eat them.


Decades of graceful purple blooms

The lovely Wisteria (sinensis) is a surprisingly tough vine suitable for growing in hot dry climates. Better yet, it does well in poor soil so, if you plant one, do not fertilize it. Wisteria requires patience because it may take up to 5 years for the first flowers to bloom if you have planted one grown from cuttings. Wisteria grown from seed may take 20 years to bloom. Then it is non-stop! After that it could continue to put forth fragrant flowers for decades. In Sierra Madre California the annual Wisteria Festival celebrates one plant that is documented to be over 100 years old. And still blooming!

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I had considered adding Hall’s Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica ‘Halliana’) to this list because it is so very fragrant, but even in hot dry climates is is highly invasive.  Like Cat’s Claw (Macfadyena unguis-cati) it will take over wherever it’s planted.

If you want to add white, night-blooming plants to enjoy during hot evenings, visit our June newsletter for suggestions about what to plant this Spring.

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

Birds and cactus on the move

On Christmas Day the Audubon Society turned out thousands of its members for the 122nd annual bird count.

The goal of the bird count is not only to calculate how many of which birds are where, but if there are any changes. Changes like non-appearance of certain birds which could mean that a bird species has moved to a new area or, in the worst case, become extinct.

While the results and post-count analyses of the 2021 Christmas Bird Count have not yet been finalized, results of previous years’ counts have.

And what past bird counts tell us is that almost all North American birds are under pressure by the changing climate to move northward. For example, in California the ranges of many bird species are now 200 miles north of their traditional habitats.

NOTE: There is a new international bird count in the works called the Great Backyard Bird Count. It is held later in the year.

What does this have to do with hot gardens?

Yellow finch on Sunflower

Depending upon how severe the changes are in your area, birds that formerly ate pesky or damaging insects may be long gone. New species may arrive in your neighborhood from further south, but they may have different diet needs. It may be that the newcomer birds are seed eaters or leaf-lovers like the Yellow Finch in this photo, rather than bug eaters.

For other birds the impact is more complex. As an example, take the Cactus Wren which makes its home in saguaros. In the Saguaro National Park, the saguaros are now “moving uphill”–growing at higher elevations on the hillsides. According to a SNP naturalist the saguaros will only grow within a specific elevation range and no higher. They are close to that maximum elevation now and their range has become much narrower. So as the older cactus die out at lower levels that means fewer homes for Cactus Wrens and less food for saguaro pollinators like the white wing dove and the long-tongued Mexican bat.

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So what’s a hot gardener to do?

Well, I’m not going to recommend that you build a bat-house in your back yard. (And–yes–there is such a thing as a bat-house as you can see in the photo on the left taken at the Tucson Mission Garden.)

New Year’s Resolution No. 1: feeding the birds

But hanging a bird feeder, especially if you live in a winter-snow part of the desert, and keeping it stocked can help birds in your area. Mourning doves, like the ones shown at the top of this post, have moved northward and definitely need food help surviving over winter.

Resolution No. 2: plant a large shrub or two

While almost every environmental group is recommending planting large trees to shade the earth, I think water-wise shrubs--large ones like Desert Willow (Chilopsis linearis) in its shrub form or a fast-growing Photinia (Photinia x fraseri)–provide better nest habitat and shelter from predators for birds as well as adding cooling shade to your hot dry garden.

For whatever it is worth, Mourning Doves have made a home in a Mexican yellow oleander (Cascabela thevetia) in my back yard for years as you can see in the photo at the top of this post. I don’t recommend planting a Thevetia, however, because it is highly toxic to humans, but the Mourning Doves don’t seem to mind. And I love to wake up in the morning to their calls.

So make planting a bird-friendly shrub one of your New Year’s Resolutions.

Resolution No. 3: keep tabs on what’s happening

Set up a free gardening blog/journal online and post something daily to keep track of how your garden is changing as the climate changes.

What to post? To make it easy, keep it short. So how about…
– a single flower photo
– a sentence or two about what is new in your garden
– notes of dates you installed plants or planted seeds
– a picture of your Little Free Plant Stand
– a photo of children playing in the garden or
– snow covering everything
If posting daily is too much for you, post weekly.

You will have to pick a name for your online journal/blog and I’d recommend that you include your location in that name. For example: CatherinesLasVegasGarden or SamGardensinSydney.

And keep this in mind: this online gardening blog/journal is primarily for yourself to help keep track of changes caused by climate change, so don’t be concerned about having or building followers. That can end up taking all your gardening time and then some! Interested people will eventually find what you are posting and enjoy it. Free blogs are available at WordPress.com and other sites.

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Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

3 trees for Fall color in desert, but beware

With the limited color range in gardens in hot, dry desert climates–usually shades of brown and muted greens–having a tree outside your window that blazes with reds, yellows and oranges in Fall is a happy choice.

(I have a warning for you about leaves turning yellow at other times of year…but more about that later.)

First, let’s look at 2 big, beautiful, drought-tolerant trees and a small one that signal the change of seasons with their leaves.

These drought-tolerant Chinese Pistache (Pistacia chinensis) trees are still young. When mature, they are excellent shade trees at 40 feet tall and about 30 feet wide. Every Fall their leaves on the male trees turn from summer green to yellow to gold to blazing red–often with all those colors on the tree at one time as you can see in the photo at the top of this post. The female trees simply turn golden yellow. Strictly ornamental trees, they produce small non-edible red berries.

  • Rio Grande Variety of Fan Tex ash tree

The ‘Rio Grande’ cultivar of Fan-Tex ash (Fraxinus velutina) in this photo is about 14 years old. Not only is it a fast grower, it can be ideal for summer shade and winter warmth, after the leaves fall and the sun shines in. Once established, it is drought tolerant. While there are other ash trees that grow well in hot arid gardens — for example, the very fast growing ‘Modesto’ ash–only the ‘Rio Grande’ Fan-Tex ash leaves turn gorgeous gold in Fall. Click on photo to see it in summer.

And a colorful Fall and Spring tree for smaller gardens

If you do not have space for a very large tree, consider planting a crabapple (Malus) tree in your garden. They grow to about 15 feet wide and 15 feet tall. While needing regular watering, the crabapple flowers beautifully in Spring and the leaves turn a lovely orange/red in Fall. See second photo for spring blooms. If you should decide to buy one be sure to ask what the Springtime blooms look like. Some bloom white, some pink, some almost red and some are single blooms, others doubles. And the fruit is edible as a jam or pickle when cooked properly.

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Beware of some yellow leaves

You may notice that the leaves on one of your shrubs are turning yellow — but the veins stay green–and it isn’t even Fall. This is an indication of plant chlorosis due to problems with soil conditions, specifically iron deficiency. There are commercial treatments you can use, like Kerex or other iron chelates and other spray-on treatments. They work short term. But improving the overall condition and chemical balance in the soil should be your next step after spraying for longer term results.

Where to get a free or cheap tree for your home.

Listen to Mother Nature

Mother Nature plants in Fall and so should you. By planting at this time of year when the soil temperature has cooled off, the shrubs and trees have the opportunity to develop deep roots over winter and are, thus, stronger plants when they start to grow above-ground next Spring.

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

A one color garden–no, make that two

Gardening writer Vita Sackville-West’s ‘White Garden’ at Sissinghurst Castle in the U.K. was revolutionary in 1950. And inspiring to this day.

Instead of a garden filled with billowing rows of mixed-color flowering plants–a style that had dominated English gardens for generations–Sackville-West installed only plants that bloomed in one color: white. According to her weekly gardening column she decided that the plants themselves must have either green or gray leaves. No yellowish or reddish leaves for this garden.

In fact, despite what she said, it was mostly a green garden because the white flowers bloomed only once a year for a brief time. The green color leaves endured year round.

While a garden as lush as seen, above, in this recent photo of Sissinghurst, would be challenging and an utterly wasteful use of water in a hot dry climate, the idea of a one or two color garden continues to appeal to garden designers.

One color and water wise in Las Vegas

Back in the early 2000s a one flower color, water-wise garden took root in Las Vegas. Garden designer Victoria Morgan told me that her primary goal was to create a water-wise green garden. Even back then, the water level in the Colorado River which supplies Las Vegas was falling so drought tolerance was a must, she said.

The flower color that she chose was yellow–and not much of that: just a few Lantana montevidensis by the fountain and nearby. Some additional color came from non-plant sources: painted furniture under the arbor, tiles around the fountain and large blue pots in front of the home, as you can see in this slide show.

grape vines with colorful patio chair and table

Another requirement she set was low maintenance, so there were no flowers to dead-head or fertilize. Shrubs like the Korean boxwood were trimmed once or twice a year. And the tall, shady nut trees that took up a large part of the garden needed attention primarily during harvest. For more photos of this very soothing orchard garden, go here.

Morgan’s use of green with yellow was a natural choice for a Southwestern U.S. hot, dry garden: many native plants (or non-natives like Lantana which thrives in our climate) bloom yellow. Some cacti, of course, produce pink flowers, but yellow is the dominant flower color in the desert, especially when rain comes and sweeping fields of yellow wildflowers spring up among the cacti.

Where to get a free or cheap tree for your home.

Yellow blooming plants and shrubs

Should you decide to plant a green-plus-yellow garden here are a few plants–some native, some not–you could include. In order they are:
Brittlebush (Encelia farinosa)
Mexican Gold Poppy (Escholtzia mexicana)
Desert Marigold (Baileya multiradiata)
Lantana (Lantana montevidensis)
And for larger shrubs:
Mexican bird of Paradise (Caesalpinia mexicana) and
Thevetia (Thevetia peruviana), sometimes called Yellow Oleander, it is pretty but poisonous. (I have one in my backyard; someone else planted it.)

A good tree to include in a green/yellow garden is the wildly popular native Palo Verde (Cercidium parkinsonia). Planted in home gardens, parking lots and growing naturally along dry washes, it is the Arizona State Tree. Blooming brilliant yellow in Spring, it doesn’t offer much shade, however, because its leaves are tiny.

And for yellow color in the Fall–plus shade in summer–a good choice can be the Fan-Tex Rio Grande Ash, below.

Of course, you could choose another color for your one color garden–reds, pinks, purples and magentas–but yellow seems to be a natural garden design choice for the hot dry gardens of the Southwest. Most native plants bloom in yellow.

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

So your garden died. What’s next?

While there are two ways to combat plant death-by-dehydration, it is probably too late for many in the U.S. Southwest, especially Arizona and Nevada, after a weeklong stint of record setting heat. (For those of you outside of the SW, there were high temperatures of 110-120F (43-48 celsius) for 8 days in a row and it continues.)

If you still have hopes for some plants in your garden you can do this:
1. Deep water plants more frequently than usual.
2. Hang shade cloth over your plants.

Realistically, however, dead plants — especially vegetables that were planted not long ago–are the new normal in Southwest gardens.

So what comes next?

For starters you can add those dead plants to your compost pile, so all is not wasted! And do not regularly fertilize any plants during summer months in desert climates. Even sturdy native plants are simply hunkering down and trying to survive until cooler weather arrives. Give them water, and in late summer, a tiny taste of fertilizer–that’s all.

Replanting right away is, obviously, not a good idea. Many gardeners now seem to be considering planting only natives when they replace what they lost this summer, but wisely they are waiting until Fall.

I’m thinking about pots on my patio overflowing with non-native Lantana (L. montevidensis) which seems to be able to survive almost anything and continue to flower.

Adios tomatoes and peppers

My vegetable growing experiment of this year will not be repeated. It has become a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I can buy organic veggies and support organic farmers while I eat healthy.

While I have stopped wasting water trying to help my sunflowers, tomatoes and peppers survive, I am still trying to help birds and other wildlife stay alive. I’d suggest that you do this, too.

Set out a shallow plant saucer filled with water and refill at least once a day. It can be a lifesaver for birds, insects and other creatures suffering from the intense heat and scarcity of water.

I’m not sure which creatures drink from this water source on my patio, but at least this Mourning dove has. You could also set up a trail camera to learn which wildlife comes to visit your garden.

Turning your garden into a kind of wildlife preserve may be the best use of that space as climate change brings hotter and dryer conditions. This extreme heat may not be the last.

Where to get a free or cheap tree for your home.

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

There outta be a social media law against lawns

*shriek!* Some postings on social media gardening sites drive me crazy!

I just read a post on a Facebook gardening group from a newbie who has planted a big green lawn next to his new home in Arizona. It was, he said, like the one he had Back East. He proudly included photos and thanked other members of the group for all the advice they gave to him. He “couldn’t have done it without them”.

What??!!?

I wonder who told him that a grassy green British lawn was a good idea in a hot, dry climate? That it was a good idea in a land where water has to be imported hundreds of miles across a desert so he can turn a faucet and spill that water on to desert soil where it soaks in an inch or two and/or evaporates almost instantly.

Blame those green lawns on the Brits

Yes. Neatly trimmed green lawns originated in the rainy, damp British Isles. They are not common around private homes in Spain or Italy or Germany or elsewhere in the E.U. or most of the world. And even in the U.K. lawns are a relatively recent innovation that had something to do with wealthy landowners raising sheep or impressing the neighbors or something. Sadly, the lawn idea took hold and jumped across the Atlantic where it spread across the continent–even into Southwest desert communities.

American home builders also are to blame for the U.S. lawn obsession because they planted lawns in massive housing developments particularly after WWII because turf grass in the front yard is easy, cheap and fast landscaping.

Serious drought…really serious

I wonder if that newbie lawn guy, and other well-meaning, but poorly informed, participants in that group, realize how serious the drought conditions are in the U.S. Southwest as the U.S. Drought Monitor shows.

And how fast water tables in towns across the Southwest are falling as local water districts–the ones not relying on Colorado River water–pump more and more local ground water to new housing developments where new homeowners are planting wasteful lawns.

And I wonder if they realize that ground water isn’t being replaced in reservoirs and rivers with rain falling from the sky. The soil just gets drier and drier. The local wells have to go deeper and deeper. And choosing to plant a lawn becomes more and more absurd.

One woman in Pasadena CA pulled out her front lawn and turned it into an astonishing and somewhat bizarre front garden complete with blue bottles and plastic ornaments. This is the strangest lawn replacement I’ve seen. But to each, her/his own!

Local government officials are trying to handle current and future water usage. Efforts to slow down and re-allocate usage of water imported from the Colorado River show up in things like golf courses closing or being converted to dry landscaping and towns passing laws to ban lawns in front yards.

But there are other choices.

Before I show you some attractive lawn-free gardens for hot dry climates I’d like to suggest that if your heart is really set on the look of a lawn consider planting Buffalo Grass (Buchloe dactyloides) an Arizona native grass that many are planting as turf. Originally known as the grass that American buffaloes (bisons) grazed on, it grows green in summer, dies back to brown in the Fall and needs no irrigation and almost no mowing after it is established. [Note: This is not the invasive Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare), an African native that is overwhelming plants in the Sonoran Desert. ]

Beautiful replacements for grassy lawns

So here are a few examples of front yards that are lawn-free.

A front yard filled with blooming perennials including kangaroo paw, sea lavender, rosemary and flat grey dymondia groundcover. This garden is located in Pasadena which gets about 17 inches of rain each year.

A desert-style garden in Springtime when the aloes and other plants are in bloom. This garden is located in Tucson which receives about 12 inches of rainfall a year.

These homeowners added berms, small “hills”, to their previously flat front lawn and planted drought-tolerant shrubs and trees that need almost no maintenance. Goodbye lawnmower! Berms need to be carefully designed to channel rainfall away from the house foundation.

This landscaped garden includes a dry creek bed as an ornamental feature surrounded by agaves and blue-gray fescue grass and taller green deer grass. As with adding berms in a garden, adding a dry creek bed has potential problems. Dry creek beds are not always dry and should be designed so rain water flows away from a home’s foundation.

I think of this front yard with its large decomposed granite space as a Mexican Garden because it reminds me of plazas and courtyards I’ve seen in Mexico. The “bare ground” decomposed granite suppresses weeds and is surrounded by drought tolerant plants that bloom seasonally. Zero maintenance and it requires only the water from the sky.

I was also going to write about silly social media posts praising decorative backyard ponds, but I have ranted enough for today. Those weird backyard ponds are as wasteful as grassy green front lawns in hot dry climates. If you have one, convert it to a flower fountain with plants on each level.

A postscript: there are now over 6,000 Little Free Plant Stands in Arizona! Vastly more than when I wrote about them back in March.

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

Little Free Plant Stands and other tips for Spring gardens

Many of you may have heard, seen–or even used–the Little Free Libraries. They are those small boxes erected in front of homes where neighborhood people deposit books to be given away for free to anyone who wants a book.

Then, recently I saw some Little Free Pantries. It’s a similar concept where non-perishable food is kept in a small box posted in front of a home or business or community center for anyone to take for free. (Here is a link to the post I wrote about little free pantries in Tucson.) Which bring this to the Little Free Plant Stands…

Swap your plants at a Little Free Garden Stand

This concept of hyper-local donation “boxes” has now extended to Little Free Plant Stands. It’s like a public neighborhood plant swap that operates by itself unattended. It’s an ideal way to freely exchange plants, etc. while maintaining social distancing.

As far as I know this movement does not have a national organization, unlike the Free Libraries or Free Pantries. I like that! It’s a purely spontaneous local activity by neighborhood gardeners and it seems to be proliferating like wild.

How to set up your own free plant stand

If you plan to set up one of these, you will probably need to “prime the pump”, so to speak, by placing plants, cuttings, seeds, old worn pots, gardening books or tools–whatever you have to spare–on the shelves of a little stand like this green one. This green “stand” is clearly home made and very charming. This generous gardener in Phoenix even added a bowl of freshly harvested lemons.

Photographer Danica Tuxbury retains all copyrights.

A plant stand doesn’t have to be elaborate. I saw another plant stand that was simply concrete blocks with painted boards laid across them–like a bookshelf, but filled with small plants and old pots. Definitely fast and easy to assemble.

If this inspires you to set up a stand similar to this, check out the growing number of Facebook groups in the categories of “Little Free Plant Stand” and “Little Free Garden Stand” for ideas and suggestions. You may even find some near you. But if you don’t, you can easily set up a FB group for your town or neighborhood to spread the word about your Little Free Plant Stand and to encourage other nearby gardeners to get involved.

Be mindful that your city or Homeowner’s Association may have rules about stacking stuff in front of your home. And it may turn out that you have more takers than givers and everything could be gone overnight.

One solution may be using “drinks cart” or tea cart with wheels that can be rolled out in front of a home during the day and back inside at sunset.

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Free Flower pots

Keeping with the idea of free stuff for your garden this Spring, take a look at these “flower pots”–every one a conversion of an old object into a useful plant container instead of being tossed in the garbage. I especially like the last one in this slide show where all you need is a newspaper and some folding skills!

While you are out in the garden take a good look at your patio furniture. If it is looking drab or sun-bleached, you can revitalize old furniture–even those cheap and oh-so-useful plastic chairs–and refresh your outdoor living space for the cost of a can or two of spray paint.

Next, make this year the one you string white Christmas tree lights on the inside of your patio table umbrella to let you enjoy outdoor dining later into the night. Come July you will love it!

Happy Springtime!

working after retirement ebook and paperback

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

Don’t let rainfall escape. Capture it.

Saving rainfall for your garden

(This post was originally written about winter rains, but is now even more applicable for desert gardens in the summer of 2023.)

Rain has finally arrived in the American Southwest.  After an almost rainless summer which made our serious drought even worse, storms are now arriving one after another from both north and south Pacific. So now is the time to capture that rain water.

Use one or more of the following methods to keep water in your garden by encouraging it to stay on your property for future use or percolate down into the soil now rather than run off into the street.

Build basins

The simplest way to capture rainfall for the plants in your garden is to dig shallow circular trenches or basins around your trees and shrubs. The basin edge should be 3 feet or more from the tree trunk and not very deep. Creating a basin all the way out to the tree canopy’s edge is ideal. An inch or two depth will create a basin to hold a good amount of water while it sinks into the earth. 

Be careful not to damage the root crown at the base of the trunk. In fact, the basin shouldn’t start right at the trunk of the tree. You want to water to go to the smaller roots further out.

While most flower beds are mounded — hopefully because you add a thick layer of organic mulch twice a year — you may want to consider digging small basins in the center of the beds to capture as much rain as possible. Again, be careful not to damage the roots of your plants.

If you plant in raised boxes, I hope you have good drainage on the bottom or during a heavy downpour your planter may flood and drown the plants.

Infiltration–high priced or on the cheap

Infiltration, in its expensive form, involves digging a sizeable pit on your property which will receive water from rain runoff from your roof. This means rain gutters and downspouts must be installed. The pit must be lined with a strong but permeable material and have an overflow to channel excess water safely away from your home. Water will seep from the pit into the surrounding soil, thus “irrigating from underground”. Consult a landscape architect or soils engineer if you plan to do this.

In the less expensive version of infiltration, dig or drill narrow, deep holes spaced apart in a circle around trees and shrubs. These holes will fill with rain which will then seep into the soil. To do this effectively, you may have to line the holes with strong but permeable material to help prevent the sides from collapsing into the holes while allowing water to escape into the root zone. Some people recommend using French drains, the drain pipes with holes, set vertically into the soil so they are mini-wells.

In the super-cheap version, really coarse gravel or small rocks may also keep the holes from collapsing. Deep watering like this will encourage trees and shrubs to grow deeper, stronger roots. And deeper roots mean more stability when winds howl across the landscape in Spring and Fall.

Add a cistern or rain barrel… or seven

Our last suggestion is to add a cistern or rain barrel to capture rainfall which you can use later by pumping the water out for irrigation. Unlike infiltration which is designed to allow water to spread out underground during a rain storm, a cistern is supposed to hold water in the container, not diffuse it.

If you want to add an underground cistern–which is essentially a well filled with rainwater–you should consult with a landscape architect or soils engineer because there are certain critical engineering issues involved. The sides and bottom must be sealed to prevent water from escaping and the system must have an overflow drain. If water overflows in the wrong direction you may have serious and potentially expensive erosion problems.

On the other hand buying a big plastic barrel or one of the large above ground cisterns–prices start at about $100 and go up depending upon the size–can be a quick and easy method to store the rainfall from the downspouts on your roof until you use it later.

Are cisterns illegal?

In Colorado and Utah having a cistern on one’s own property to collect water used to be illegal. But no longer. Now Coloradans can have 2 rain barrels with a total capacity of 110 gallons of water for use on their own property. In Utah homeowners can save up to 2500 gallons in above or below ground cisterns to store water for use on the same property. In both these states, please check for specific local regulations.

Many other states, including Nevada and California, have regulations or are planning to enact them, about water harvesting and usage. California, for example, is encouraging water harvesting. To see if your state has regulations, go here.

Read our 8 most popular newsletters

  1. Hot Days, White Nights, How Design a Moon Garden
  2. Australian Plants for a Desert Garden
  3. Cover up that naked wall
  4. Best and beautiful native shrubs for extreme heat
  5. Five fragrant plants for your garden
  6. Where to get free or cheap trees for your garden
  7. Four desert trees good for soil, 4 toxic ones
  8. Plants that bloom even in mid-summer scorching heat

Happy Solstice – winter and summer!

My wish on today’s Solstice is that this year will be a better year for everyone! 2020 can’t end soon enough!

The light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is brighter now that the roll-out of COVID 19 vaccines has begun.

Now, you can make the natural world better this coming year by planting a tree that’s suitable for your climate to cast shade on your garden and home. The world continues to grow warmer and a tree will help cool it down a bit over the coming decades.

And, if you still have a grassy lawn, make this the year you remove it and plant water-wise shrubs instead. Lawns are fine in wet climates, but an unwise use of water in hot dry gardens.

And, keep in mind that by planting long-living shrubs and trees you are also providing homes for Mother Nature’s other creatures, especially birds and insects.

May your garden thrive this year!

Carol Lightwood
Hot Gardens

The photo at the top of this page was taken at the Tucson Botanical Garden in December 2020.