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SIERRA VISTA — Want to learn more about the kinds of plants that thrive in our arid environment?
How about designing colorful landscapes with native plants?
You don’t have to be a horticulturist to create your own high desert garden.
 Jenifer Devine peruses plants from the Diamond JK Nursery booth Thursday at the High on the Desert Gardening and Landscaping Conference at The Palms. (By Mark Levy-Herald/Review) |
More than 160 people converged onto The Palms Thursday for the first day of a two-day gardening and landscaping conference.
High on the Desert, an educational event sponsored by Cochise County Master Gardeners Association, in conjunction with the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, drew plant and gardening enthusiasts from as far as Texas and New Mexico.
“It’s an excellent conference, one that exposes us to different speakers and different situations,” said Johanna Barr, a member of El Paso County Master Gardeners, who drove to the event with several other people from her club in Texas. “El Paso and Las Cruces are similar in elevation to this area, so we have similar gardening challenges. We get a lot of good ideas.”
The conference, designed to showcase the enormous potential that can be achieved through high desert landscapes, features a wide range of topics, with sessions that focus on food production, landscaping with native plants, composting, the importance of arthropods and insects in desert ecosystems, and water harvesting, to name a few.
Dave Barry, president of Arizona Cochise County Master Gardeners Association, said this year’s event is the best attended yet, with nothing but positive comments following presentations on the first day.
“It’s a good time of year to hold a gardening event like this,” he said. “Spring has sprung. People are starting to think about what they want to plant and how to design their landscapes, so this gives them some valuable ideas they can use.”
It takes between nine and 10 months worth of work to pull the program together, Barry said.
Busy manning a booth filled with packages of native plant seeds for people to try in their landscapes, Mary Alice Adamczyk is a member of the Sierra Vista area Gardener’s Club. “We harvest the seeds from our gardens and give them away,” she said. “Every year, this is a popular booth. When the first session breaks, people will flock in here for seed packets.”
Valerie McCaffrey, who says she loves using native plants in her landscapes, browsed around the vendor booths, asking questions and getting new ideas.
“I’m interested in combinations of native plants that bloom at different times of the year, so there’s always color in my garden,” McCaffrey said. Southeastern Arizona’s high desert presents some unique challenges. “The different vendors have books that help you with plant selection and the people here can give you some good suggestions.”
During one of the general sessions, garden designer and author Scott Calhoun read from a new book he had just finished writing, “Chasing Wildflowers,” a description of his travels as he followed blooming wildflowers through the Southwest. Inspired by nature’s beauty, color and rugged textures, Calhoun said that studying natural landscapes caused him to approach his own gardening efforts with renewed vigor.
“All of the best characteristics of arid landscapes were on display,” he said of his wildflower trek. “My interest is what is lovely in the wild and what could be lovely in a garden.”
Calhoun presented an array of photos featuring wildflowers in bloom along mountain slopes, mingled with grasslands and scattered among shrub plants.
Thick blooms of Arizona poppies in the foothills surrounding Patagonia were showcased, as well as different combinations of native grasses, verbena, white trumpet, Apache plume and purple blooming salvias, all contributing to Mother Nature’s spectacular palette.
The conference, which continues through today, will feature an assortment of topics, to include weed control, landscaping in the desert southwest, rainwater harvesting, San Pedro River ecology and an update on a pest called the glassy-winged sharpshooter.
REPORTER Dana Cole can be reached at 515-4618 or by e-mail at dana.cole@svherald.com.
Joe Hicks wrote on Oct 8, 2007 2:22 PM: