For spring color, it’s hard to beat a Xeriscape.
April brought us drought-loving tulips plus a jewelry box of gem-colored phloxes and lavender-blue veronicas and catmint, set off by golden alyssums, aurinia and thermopsis. By May and June, every tint in the artist’s palette spills across the garden.
Autumn is equally exuberant, especially so this past year, when shrubs and trees appeared to catch fire to burn in scarlet, vermillion, claret and gold for weeks on end. Even in winter, the xeric garden puts its heavily watered counterpart to shame as grasses ripen to tawny, silver and crimson, playing off evergreen manzanitas, fernbush, brooms and yucca and the red-blushed winter foliage of eriogonum, iceplant and penstemons.
Only in midsummer does the xeric garden stop dead in its tracks. In response to relentless heat and lack of rainfall from mid-June through the arrival of mid-July monsoons the xeric garden goes dormant (translates to “turns brown”), a state of affairs guaranteed to displease conventional neighbors and covenant-control inspectors who patrol looking for just such signs of neglect.
It may be nature’s rhythms, but good luck trying to tell your homeowners association or municipality’s code-enforcement agent that, just as the fields on the outskirts of town take a rest at this season, so, too, should an environmentally responsible landscape. Your intent to be a conscientious world citizen may be misinterpreted as growing “weeds.”
If a Xeriscape is to go anywhere but behind a tall privacy fence (in some places, this may not be safe either — inspectors have been known to peer over fences), a good plan is to include a smattering of xeric wildflowers that are tough enough to defeat the heat of midsummer. (Keep your receipts just in case you need to prove the flowers aren’t weeds, either.)
While there aren’t hundreds of choices, there are enough pretty flowers to divert attention away from your otherwise dormant garden. Perennials that really take off when things get toasty include blue Russian sage, English lavender, orange-red zauschneria (hummingbird’s trumpet), burgundy drumstick onion (Allium sphaerocephalon), Golden Baby goldenrod, pink-flowered prickly thrift (Acantholimon spp.), coral-red or yellow hesperaloes and, when spring rains were generous, all manner of yuccas.
A couple of shrubs debut in the hottest days of summer. Fernbush is one of the best, with sprays of white flowers that bees adore. A relative newcomer and instant favorite in my garden is the Great Plains introduction, Clematis fruticosa Mongolian Gold, a shrub clematis with sweet yellow dangling blossoms.
Then there are the Timex watch plants (they “take a licking and keep on ticking”). A few stalwart flowers start blooming in June and never slow down through first frost. Plains zinnia (Zinnia grandiflora), wild petunia (Ruellia humilis), prairie coneflower (Ratibida columnifera), Plant Select’s Clematis integrifolia Mongolian Bells, Salvia pachyphylla, Moonshine yarrow and Shimmer evening primrose all are good taste-police repellants, proving that the xeric garden can look respectable even at midsummer.
Marcia Tatroe’s most recent book is “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West” ($29.95, Johnson Books). E-mail her at mtatroe@q.com.
