Desert Bloom

When I was revamping my PowerPoint presentation for MASTER GARDENER training the other day, I came across a slide that I’d entitled “What can you grow in a garden?”.

Some flowers actually seem to enjoy our summer heat. We hear about one.

How about choosing desert native plants for the home landscape?I know, I said, “desert natives” and some people groan, thinking I’m going to talk about spiky, poky, unfriendly plants.

Most of us don’t have big acreage for our gardens. That’s why we try to pack so much into them. Sometimes, though, we do get carried away, putting the least amount of space required between plants. That’s how usually I practice gardening.

In the dead of winter, so many trees look skeletal – bare branches with dead leaves on the ground surrounding them. Even here in the desert southwest, you can see leafless limbs. In other parts of the country, this would mean it’s time to stay indoors, sipping mulled wine and browsing through seed catalogs. We do that here, too, but we don’t necessarily have to stay inside. In fact, since our coldest average temperatures are about 50 degrees during the day, the winter’s an ideal time to clean up our landscapes. I have family and friends back east who’d be dancing in shorts and t-shirts if it were 50 degrees anytime between December and February.

Much as I love life here in Southern Nevada, our springtime is remarkably short. You scarcely have time to get your vegetable seeds into the ground before temperatures pop up into the nineties. I often talk about “cool season” and “warm season” plants, but we don’t spend enough time thinking about hot season crops.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about doing a Desert Bloom segment on weeds, just weeds in general, but there’s so much to talk about with these plants that I figured it would be better to narrow my focus. After all, even the definition of weed has a lot of variants.

Non-functional turf grass isn’t legal in lots of locations anymore, thank goodness. Green is nice, but does a green lawn in front of a bank or a lawyer’s office inspire more confidence than any other kind of planting? I don’t see how. Of course, individuals can choose their own home landscaping, even a lawn, as long as the irrigation system isn’t pouring our limited drinking water into storm drains.