Our third day of wonderfully cool temperatures in a row has got me out nosing in the garden again, tidying up here and there.<\/p>\n
During my week stay with my parents in Las Vegas, I continued to be very much impressed with the xeriscape designs along the streets and medians as well as the very small, but well-landscaped yards. Two-thirds of Las Vegas didn’t exist when I lived there as a teenager. The desert is bull-dozed as new development is laid like a giant grid in the valley and the landscaping is newly installed, a bit crisp, clean and artificial like the houses. All the neighborhoods are sheltered from the major streets with cinder block walls. Most of the newer developments also include a wide (not greenspace but) planted space between the street and the walls. The design of these xeriscape spaces is delicately fluid and much more attractive than either mown grass or decorative rock landscapes of my past.
\n
\nThe yards tend to be very small. Most have no lawns. The plantings are geometric, but not overly so. People have discovered a much wider range of plants for the xeriscape garden than cactus. These yards look nice with a minimum of fuss.<\/p>\n
This has fed my growing dissatisfaction with my yard, which is more a mess of plants than a garden. I can’t be away from it for more than a few days without it looking shabby. Something must be done. I’m tired of fussing over it. Maybe I need to borrow some of Tom Spencer’s Soul<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bear with me. I know I’ve been grousing about this all year. I think it’s time for the spade and shears. Fall will bring a change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How long does your garden look nice without you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5258,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions\/5258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}