It is the colonist’s default position to import his culture rather
than give in and go native. I learned this early, growing up in
Prescott, a town that for most of its history has tried to be more
Midwestern than the Midwest.
For several generations, Anglo Arizonans tried their best to grow
green lawns and annual flower beds in their heat-blasted yards,
figuring they could ignore nature’s unbending rules in their gardens,
just as they had when they dammed the rivers and paved over the desert.
Fortunately, this trend has been dying for a long time, and today,
there’s no shortage of gardeners, garden designers and garden writers
who advocate the use of only native, or at least desert-adapted, plants
in Arizona gardens. Tucson is a leader in this new golden age of
nativism, and one of the movement’s most passionate heralds is local
writer and garden designer Scott Calhoun.
In The Hot Garden: Landscape Design for the Desert Southwest,
his third book for Rio Nuevo in the last four years, Calhoun includes
what he calls “The Desert Gardener’s Bill of Rights for Homeowners’
Associations.” The list of eight “rights” is also a perfect
distillation of the few simple truths that the desert gardener should
remember: Grow native plants found in the wild within 50 miles and at
an elevation within 1,000 feet of your lot; harvest rainwater; let
plants grow according to their own wild hearts instead of pruning them
into submission; let your garden go dormant during the cold and the dry
months; plant wildflowers; and design your garden or yard so that it
invites outdoor living—which means plenty of shade and
interesting, personal aesthetic touches.
Perhaps Calhoun’s most cogent message, and one he has repeated in
each of his books, is that we need to look to the desert itself for our
garden-design inspiration. His most trustworthy design tools, he
writes, are his hiking boots.
“The best Southwestern gardens are closely wedded to surrounding
wildlands,” he writes. “These gardens are built by people with hiking
boots who travel into canyons and know exactly where a ragged rock
flower grows, or what sort of wildflowers will colonize a sandy wash,
and how a hedgehog cactus can thrive atop a rocky outcrop.”
Several times in this useful, entertaining, and beautifully
photographed and designed book, Calhoun writes about letting plants
have their “dignity.” His point is, I think, that the desert’s native
flora will thrive only under natural conditions; you can’t keep a wild
thing hemmed for too long before it revolts, or dies.
That’s not to say that he advocates tossing some seeds in the
backyard and seeing what happens. More, Calhoun seems to subscribe to a
liberal interpretation of a Japanese design principal which he
translates as “borrowed landscapes.” In the book, Calhoun talks about
borrowed landscapes in relation to the Southwest’s mountain ranges, and
how a “picturesque view is preserved and framed by plantings.” In
Tucson, where the Santa Catalinas and other sky-island ranges loom over
just about all of our yards, this is a particularly useful
technique.
But Calhoun takes this concept a step further. He wants us to
“borrow” not only the “million-dollar views” of the desert, but the
entire wild landscape around us to create a kind of controlled
wilderness where plants and humans can find common cause. To Calhoun,
the garden is a sacred space where we should be reminded that we live
in a rare and exotic land that deserves to be celebrated every day. The
desert garden also has its utilitarian aspects, Calhoun shows us.
Throughout the book, there are myriad sidebars called “Eat Your
Garden,” where he provides harvesting instructions and recipes for
prickly-pear fruit, mesquite beans and other native edibles.
The Hot Garden—along with Calhoun’s two other books,
Yard Full of Sun (2005) and Chasing Wildflowers (2007)—belongs in any library of gardening books, or, indeed, in
any collection of books about the Southwest. There is one warning I
should mention: If you are only a casual plant-lover, be prepared for
an uptick in your enthusiasm for digging in the dirt. Calhoun’s casual,
friendly writing style, and his hot-blooded love of the Southwest and
all its weird, contradictory bounty, is infectious in the extreme. Read
his work at your own risk, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself
sweating in the backyard, installing your own little patch of
desert.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.