Desert Cottage Garden

Finally, a gardening book for Las Vegas by local gardening guru Michele Chambliss, aka The Perennial Garden Consultant

Few books exist for Southern Nevada gardens. Traditionally, we’ve relied on the many garden designers and horticulturists who write and garden in Tucson, Phoenix, and Palm Springs, where conditions most closely resemble ours (though the match is imperfect). That’s changing with a new book by local garden designer Michele Chambliss.

I profiled Michele on Mojave Gardener earlier this spring, and I’ve followed her work for years. She writes a quarterly newsletter called Designer’s Notebook that any southwest gardener would benefit from. Her debut book, Designing With the Desert: A Thoughtful Approach to Desert Garden Design, takes all that hard-earned wisdom and organizes it into a single resource.

Finally, a book for Las Vegas gardeners

Many of us move to Vegas thinking we can grow anything that southern Californians and central Arizonans can grow. We can grow many of those plants, timed appropriately—soft-leaved succulents are winter plants here, for example—and with plenty of water, but a more place-appropriate garden is possible. Michele shows us the way.

The book is organized into multiple sections, but the overall argument can be divided into two large sections. The first half considers the work of garden design, including hardscape, space use, and water restrictions. The second explores individual plants and how they can be used in specific gardening styles.

Design-centered gardens, with special attention to the old and inherited

Michele begins by taking readers through her approach to designing a garden. She identifies common gardening scenarios and problems that Las Vegas gardeners are likely to encounter. These include starting a garden from scratch, planning a small garden, or renovating an inherited one.

This last piece—on inherited gardens—is an important contribution to garden design literature; it has not often been considered. But most of us come to a ready-made garden—even if that garden is mostly hardscape. “In many cases, the inherited landscape displays a haphazard layout and an uninspired plant selection,” she observes. However, the perceptive gardener doesn’t have to throw it all out and start fresh. It’s possible “to amplify the good, mitigate past mistakes, and see new possibilities.”

In my garden, I inherited a well-thought-out hardscape with a traditional Mediterranean/90s planting scheme: lots of oleanders, palm trees, and a stunning carob tree that is the heart of the back garden. There was also a lot of pittosporum and some lawn.

I was selective in removing oleanders (they need hardly any water at this point in their lives, and I adore their musky vanilla scent in spring), and I tore out the turf under the carob tree. It has not been too happy, but I hope it will recover with deeper, more infrequent watering, and the planting underneath (agaves, columnar cactus, and aloes) has benefited from the shade the carob provides. But I wish I had found Michele’s book first, because it would have given me the courage to be more aggressive with my overhaul, instead of forcing some plants to work.

Michele offers a list of questions to help guide the renovation process, with particular sensitivity to preserving the site, where possible. For example, she asks if the planting tells an important historical or cultural story. “If the home is in a historical area…mature trees could reflect the plant palette from the time they were planted and represent a story worth preserving, even though tastes and water use have since changed.”

In a land where our default mode is to demolish and build new, that sort of discriminating approach could go a long way to creating gardens that truly reflect this beautiful and difficult section of the Mojave.

As a horticulturist, her love of plants shines through

Michele is a plant lover, and two-thirds of the book’s page count is devoted to plants. She details plant types, forms, and arrangements, including well-thought-out lists of trees, native plants, vines, and perennials (the lists alone are worth the price of admission). She also provides expert planting tips, enough for the amateur gardener to get started and a great refresher for the experienced gardener.

But my favorite part of the book—and one many readers of this newsletter will appreciate—is a section on specialty gardens. I enjoyed Michele’s careful approach to three specific types of gardens: container gardens, edible gardens, and desert cottage gardens.

A persuasive case for a new kind of Las Vegas garden, the desert cottage garden

Regardless of where you are in your garden journey—just getting started, or a lifelong gardener like me—we can all benefit from Michele’s nuanced and sensitive approach. A good example of this nuance is her discussion of lawn conversion. “Grass in and of itself is not ‘bad’,” she says. “Yet the fact is, across the country, attitudes toward turf grass have been changing for some time now, shifting from the 1950s’ mindset of lawn as an absolute necessity, a ‘matter of success.’”

So what does success look like now?

If Michele has a style (I think she does, and it's one many of us would do well to emulate), that style is desert cottage. It could very well be the new marker of success.

One of the main problems with turf removal has been a problematic and lazy approach: we lay down gravel, throw in a handful of ill-pruned shrubs, and then pat ourselves on our backs for using less water. But then the high temps come, and our little gravel pits raise the temperatures around our houses substantially. A cottage garden, packed with low-water plants, cools our homes and gives us something to look at year-round—vibrant flowers in the fall, winter, and spring, stunning structure (cactus, agave, stone, and shrubs) in the summer. For my money, this style of gardening says “success” in a way that a labor and resource-intensive lawn does not. For one, it is bespoke. A cottage garden speaks to the owner’s unique style and interests. It suggests a certain level of care and intrigue (and success) that a lawn lacks, and that a gravel yard repels.

While cottage gardens are traditionally associated with the dreamy and lush greens of our British gardening forbearers, Michele makes a strong case that they can (and should!) be adapted to Las Vegas. The result is something entirely new. A little like how experimenting with new flavors in an old recipe can turn the same dish into something altogether different.

For new and experienced gardeners

I have been a Vegas gardener for nearly four years and suffered immense failure in those four years (our unique climate, with multiple growing seasons, means you can fail multiple times a year!). I thought, when I moved here, that I would be able to easily translate my high-desert Master Gardener experience into an instantly stunning low-desert garden. I was wrong. Had I had Michele’s book sooner, I might have avoided some of those costly and heartbreaking mistakes.