Provides information on how to start and maintain a desert landscape, addressing concerns such as irrigation, planting wildflowers, and palm tree care; and features an almanac that offers month-by-month maintenance tips.

Plant/ Educate/ SustainFor decades, the Desert Botanical Garden has responded to our community's needs for knowledge about our desert habitat and resources for living responsibly in it. Over the years, the Garden has become nationally recognized as a champion of plant conservation, a pioneer of the care and display of desert plants, a respected leader in Sonoran Desert research, and an innovator in lifelong education.Supporting the Garden's mission to advance excellence in education, research, exhibition, and conservation of desert plants of the world with emphasis on the southwestern United States is the goal of the Desert Landscape School. We accomplish this by promoting environmental sustainability through demonstrating and teaching best practices in desert plant horticulture; providing education programs with emphasis on science literacy; and exploring and sharing the myriad relationships among plants, people, nature, and the arts.The School offers an exceptional opportunity for professional development and this Guide can be used as a self-directed learning tool for those wishing to learn how to create beautiful, livable, and sustainable outdoor spaces in a desert environment.

Tips and techniques for gardening success in arid climates with a chapter on growing wildflowers.

This survey of twenty-one gardens by Steve Martino, whose work blends colorful, man-made elements with native plants to reflect the sun-drenched beauty of the desert, is sure to inspire gardeners, landscapers, and admirers of California and the Southwest. For more than thirty years, Steve Martino has been committed to the development and advancement of landscape architecture in the Southwest. His pioneering work with native plant material and the development of a desert-derived design aesthetic is widely recognized. A recurring theme of his work is the dramatic juxtaposition of man-made elements with ecological processes of the region. His love for the desert--the interplay of light and shadow, the colors, plants, and wildlife--inspires his work. As Martino explains, "Gardens consist of two worlds, the man-made and the natural one. I've described my design style as 'Weeds and Walls'--nature and man. I use native plants to make the transition from a building to the adjacent natural desert." Though Martino's work is deeply connected to the natural world, he also has a flair for the dramatic, which is apparent from his lively color selections, sculptural use of plants, and keen attention to lighting, shadows, and reflections. Boldly colored stucco walls frame compelling views of the desert and sky, expanding the outdoor living area while solving common site problems such as lack of privacy or shade. Interspersed are custom structures molded in translucent fiberglass in vivid hues--colorful arbors, outdoor showers, and internally lit benches.

An inspiring and witty guide to landscape design in dry climates.

Offers the most comprehensive guide to landscaping with native plants available.

"All the wild and lonely places, the mountain springs are called now. They were not lonely or wild places in the past days. They were the homes of my people." --Chief Francisco Patencio, the Cahuilla of Palm Springs The Anza-Borrego Desert on California's southern border is a remote and harsh landscape, what author Lawrence Hogue calls "a land of dreams and nightmares, where the waking world meets the fantastic shapes and bent forms of imagination." In a country so sere and rugged, it's easy to imagine that no one has ever set foot there -- a wilderness waiting to be explored. Yet for thousands of years, the land was home to the Cahuilla and Kumeyaay Indians, who, far from being the "noble savages" of European imagination, served as active caretakers of the land that sustained them, changing it in countless ways and adapting it to their own needs as they adapted to it.In All the Wild and Lonely Places, Lawrence Hogue offers a thoughtful and evocative portrait of Anza-Borrego and of the people who have lived there, both original inhabitants and Spanish and American newcomers -- soldiers, Forty-Niners, cowboys, canal-builders, naturalists, recreationists, and restorationists. We follow along with the author on a series of excursions into the desert, each time learning more about the region's history and why it calls into question deeply held beliefs about "untouched" nature. And we join him in considering the implications of those revelations for how we think about the land that surrounds us, and how we use and care for that land."We could persist in seeing the desert as an emptiness, a place hostile to humans, a pristine wilderness," Hogue writes. "But it's better to see this as a place where ancient peoples tried to make their homes, and succeeded. We can learn from what they did here, and use that knowledge to reinvigorate our concept of wildness. Humans are part of nature; it's still nature, even when we change it."

Features 18 unique and rarely photographed private and public gardens between Santa Barbara and San Diego.

This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

A practical palette for visualizing, designing, and building innovative green schoolyard environments.