In the store’s garden section, I noticed an obscene display of small, inexpensive cacti. What caught my eye were tiny fake paper flowers that the grower had attached to each cactus. To me, this was foolish sacrilege, tarting up naturally beautiful plants to attract ignorant gardeners like the fussy lady who dared to speak her foul heresy aloud in front of me, the Smug Xeriscaper.
Fussy Lady: They have thorns and they’re ugly. Ugh. I hate desert plants.
Me (in the sweetest voice I could muster): Well, you’re ugly, and you have a thorny personality, but I don’t hate you. You must learn to appreciate the beautiful drought-resistant plants that naturally grow here in our lush Sonoran Desert, grasshopper.
Fussy Lady: Back off, Mr. Greenjeans. And don’t touch my azaleas.
Me: You don’t scare me, milkweed. I have been here longer than creosote, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that native plants rule. The grotesque shrubs in your cart need more water to live than Keiko and Shamu combined. Let me guess. You just moved here from Wisconnesota and you want your yard to look like Fern Gully.
Listen, Aunt Bea, my beavertail prickly pear, Opuntia basilaris, produces spectacular blossoms a million times prettier than whatever ridiculous pitiful “flowers” your laughable “foreigners” will ever produce.
Fussy Lady: They’re azaleas.
Me: Put them back. Go native. A couple of brittlebushes, some penstemons and a yucca would be a good start. While you’re doing that, let me tell you about my own journey from Azalea Killer to Smug Xeriscaper.
At my first house, like you, I ripped out all of the native plants. Season after season I would buy non-native plants that were more appropriate for Toledo than for Tucson, bring them home, kill them and then recite the Gettysburg Address over the baked and the dead.
“Four perennials and seven annuals ago I brought forth a new garden, conceived in mulch, and dedicated to the proposition that all flowers are created equal. I engaged in a struggle, testing whether any conventional garden so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure in this desert. I came to dedicate a portion of my yard as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that my dusty dry yard might look like Kensington Gardens. ”
I moved on to the second stage, ripping out the dead non-native plants and replacing them with dead non-native gravel.
Wife: Just what I always dreamed of. A yard that looks like the bottom of an aquarium.
Me: Oh, come on! It’s fun to watch the gravel grow!
My gravel didn’t grow. It died.
Next, I tried boulders, cow skulls, and a welded steel sculpture of scurrying quail.
Wife: Now our yard looks like the bottom of an aquarium with a “Bonanza” theme.
Me: Oh, come one! It’s fun to watch the quail rust!
And then, inspired by a spring visit to the gorgeous desert gardens of Tohono Chul Park, I went out on a saguaro limb and tried native plants, pillaging Desert Survivors and every cactus farm and native plant nursery south of the Gila River.
Now I have a beautiful, lush, maintenance-free Eden that is so beautiful in the spring that I have become know, far and wide, as the Smug Xeriscaper, Defender of Desert Flora!
Lawns? Sacrilege. Shrubs? Heresy. Death to all petunias!
Madam, those horrible plants in your shopping cart will be dead by June. Have you thought about succulents?”
Fussy Lady: You sick deviant!
Me: Maybe a euphorbia?
Fussy Lady: I’m calling 911.
I told her about cacti, succulents, bat houses, drip irrigation and indigenous wildflowers. “Working in my desert garden forces me to slow down, to stop and smell the desert marigolds, to hear the buzz of the bees working the agave blossoms; to listen to ‘Growing Native’ with Petey Mesquitey on KXCI, while spent palo verde petals drift to the ground all around me like golden snow. Xeriscapes rock.”
Fussy Lady: What are you on?
Me: Nature, woman, nature. And when the wildflowers and cacti bloom? Craziest thing you’ve ever seen. Every late spring there’s riot of color in my yard so intense the state police have to tear gas the penstemons and the hummingbirds.
I’d love to stay and teach you how to pry a Gila monster off a garden spade, and why you shouldn’t graze on Jimson weed, but it’s time for me to move on. Here, take these mesquite beans. And tweezers for the thorns. And here’s a fruit bat I’ve been keeping in my pocket for you. They’re amazing pollinators.
I must leave you now and rescue other gardeners from their profligate ways; for I am the Smug Xeriscaper, fighting for truth, native beauty and the drought-resistant way. Happy gardening.
