Part of the S’W Arc Garden’ featuring plants from the SW US. My Cupressus grayii Sulphurea showing the damage wrought by a rutting buck last fall. The low berm was created from the material produced by regrading the abrupt drop to the sidewalk. The rock was used here and in back. I also collected a couple tons of rock to use from elsewhere on undeveloped parts of ‘Dry Canyon Village’ and placed an additional almost 20 yds of topsoil.

We’ve just gone through our second summer season in the new garden beginning with a blank slate other than the local weeds. While I grew up here we’d been ‘gone’ in Portland where we lived, worked and gardened between the Fall of ’85 and ’22. It’s a world of difference here three USDA hardiness zones colder where our last two winter’s have subjected us to long Zn 6b conditions, -5F while Portland experienced its far shorter winter and cold down into the mid-teens, which is colder than their new ‘normal’ range of lows which puts them in Zn 9. One of the biggest differences is that in the past rain year, running from Oct. 1 – Sept. 30. we’ve received only 6.66″ of precip around 2.5″ less than our 9″ or so normal. It’s colder here; the growing season is far shorter, yesterday, Oct. 5, we dropped to 30ºF; drier; the wind blows more consistently and the solar radiation is more intense at 3,000′; all of which greatly effect both what you can grow here and how it performs. Gardening ‘know how’ can only get you so far. I’m not really going to get into the deer problem here and it is a problem as we are on the edge of town adjacent to a major Mule Deer wintering area. Anyway, as gardening is always at least a bit of an adventure, these last two have been far more than a ‘bit’.

When I say a blank slate I mean that this is a new house, in a new development with

Home, almost finished, in Oct. ’22. As is typical of most builders, they compacted the hell out of the entire site to provide a stable base for construction, which I appreciate, but made no attempt to break up to benefit plantings, which they in their infinite wisdom assured me was just fine. ‘Just add water,’ they said. I spent hours and hours breaking this up with a spade a process which allowed me to unearth many pieces of building debris they buried on site, debris I tossed on to their unsold and undeveloped proper…which I feel absolutely no guilt in doing.

heavily compacted soil, a thin layer on top of what is probably a 5 million year old lava flow. This is the High Desert and this is a region built up by volcanic activity over topped with eroded and likely wind blown sediment. In its last iteration, this was part of a dairy farm and was occupied by exotic pasture grasses and the usual weeds that accompany pasture. There was no cache of native seeds awaiting release in the soil seed bank. As you can see the developers  made little effort  a token landscape I pulled and tossed made up of entirely climate inappropriate plants and a drip system that only reached a small portion of the front yard, which I ripped out adding four more valves and stations with drip as I developed my plan and planted, each zone independent so I could adjust the run schedule to meet the needs of those plants, a consideration that I was pretty strict with as I planted.

The ‘finished’ landscape, compacted, covered with rock and decomposed granite in front, nothing at all in the large, dirt back ‘yard’. The grade around the house is almost dead flat. Apparently, as this is desert, that’s not supposed to matter. When it did rain or snow melted quick enough, water would pool around the foundation in several places so we added gutters and a drain line from the near house corner to the rock ‘gallery’ in the foreground. We regraded the entire front and reset the larger rock in a more pleasing pattern.

I’m adding an inventory of what I have at this moment. Most of it is in the ground with the exception of those plants labeled Zn 8 and warmer. Most of the Zn 7 plants are with a few ‘test’ exceptions growing in pots, all though some of these, which I consider experimental, as they haven’t been tested here at all, are in the ground. The other thing you will notice is that there are a few more conventional gardening plants such as you might find in Willamette Valley gardens. I haven’t been concentrating on this part of the garden and it is the smaller part by far. What I can say about these is even though they may be cold hardy here they do not perform in a manner I’m used to…as I expected. For them water isn’t an issue. They are in mulched beds with drip irrigation on their own independent valve. For these I think it is a matter of light intensity and the desiccating conditions which can so easily burn tender leaf margins. The wide daily temperature swings may also be a factor and of course the deer as many of these plants with their tender, lush, new growth seem particularly attractive to deer. Anyway, here’s my current list which will surely change over time as larger plants grow in, some fail and I acquire newer, more uncommon plants in the trade. While there are a few excellent dry-side nurseries around, because the market for many of these plants is quite small nursery growers can’t be expected to offer them all. I’ll have to sharpen up my seed collecting and germinating skills!

I didn’t make a formal ‘plan’ for the garden. To the left is my scale drawing of our lot over which I laid vellum and sketched various alternatives as I formulated a plan in my head. The potential plant palette was so different than what I’d been working with, over the previous 37 years, that I didn’t want to constrict myself at the outset. I began making multiple plant lists, each coherent, while researching plants available in the trade and through studying the flora of the physiographic regions I’d chosen. So, I started with a ‘theme’, a xeric, regionally appropriate palette with different sections dedicated to plants of different compatible regions such as local natives. But I found that I wanted to have sections containing plants of other regions, which are still ‘arid’ but significantly wetter than ours like the plants of the Colorado/Rocky Mtn. By including plants of the desert SW I needed to be able ‘mimic’ the monsoonal rainfall pattern of that region and another for the plants from the mountains east of the Cascades which follows that of the local High Desert, but is consistently wetter…and of course there are exceptions.

While living with the site, I walked it regularly using ‘flags’ and scuffing my feet to lay out comfortable/sensible paths and then defined the bed areas. This is when I started ‘spading’ them up to relieve compaction. In Spring we hired Matt Thenon of Sundog Garden Works to do the regrading work, extend the pipping and add four more irrigation stations, install the patio pavers, replace the larger boulders and set the massive front steps to improve and better define the front entry. They did a great job. As a horticulturist, I am picky in how the work is done, because these ‘little’ things do matter. Additionally, as I had only had a total hip replacement in the previous February, I was still unable to do much of that work myself and, even at my strongest, there was no way I could have done the heavy rock work myself.

Plant Sources

While there are several garden centers in the area, most are very limited in their offerings, selling plants readily available almost anywhere. Redmond has two such centers from which I’ve purchased some things. Otherwise what we have are the ‘big box’ stores which tend offer the same plants at any of their stores. This is fine for your display containers and some have the typical assortment of succulents and tropicals suitable as houseplants.  Most of my local purchases are from Wintercreek and Great Basin, who provide regionally appropriate natives they’ve propagated and grown on themselves. Madras Garden Depot, about a 60 mile round trip from home, is a garden center that works hard to source regionally appropriate plant, many from the Plant Select program as well as growing and selling some she’s started from seed. Other than these local garden centers are kind of hit or miss. For Cacti Smith Rock Cactus has a good local selection of cold hardy cacti. Wintercreek has some as well. I do still go to the Valley and when I do I visit some of the specialty growers there like Cistus Nursery and Xera, both in Portland. There are of course many quality mail order nurseries in the arid Intermountain West, whose catalogs I’ve perused, but so far, have not purchased from as I want to support local growers all I can. I’ll be looking to them over the years more for accent and more rarely offered plants. Places like Cold Hardy Cactus in Lakewood, CO, Ethical Desert in Pueblo, CO and Draggin’ Wing High Desert Nursery and Geoscape Desert Nursery, both in Boise. A road trip is in order!!!

The abbreviations in the ‘Origins’ column are: BC – British Columbia; BM – Blue Mountains; CO – Colorado; CP – Columbia Plateau; EC – Eastern California; EW – Eastern Washington; GB – Great Basin; NC – Northern California; RM – Rocky Mountains; SC – Southern California; SW – Southwest; UT – Utah;