The best landscaping ideas are those that mimic nature and are organic. These kinds of landscapes are not only unique but are refreshing in a way that conventional landscaping is not. In some cases, designing your landscaping to make it look like a natural environment makes your outdoor space easier to manage and less expensive.
For homeowners whose homes are in or near a desert environment, Keyrenter Premier Management advises that designing their landscaping to mirror the beauty of the surroundings is one of the best ways to increase their property’s value. Desert landscaping consists of a range of features, such as drought-resistant plants and other low-maintenance backyard elements.
Think about this; how often do you feel like taking a hike in nature? But what if you have nature right in front of your home because your landscaping is a beautiful desert? That is what you get from creating a lovely desert landscape in your yard; you experience nature every time you look out of your windows.
How can you get started transforming your yard to make it look like the desert?
Just because your home is in an arid region doesn’t mean you don’t have to work hard to create a desert landscape. This post discusses a few ways to create a gorgeous desert landscape in your yard. These ideas are not comprehensive. So, for the best results, you may want to talk to a landscaping company that specializes in this type of design.
8 ideas for turning your home into a gorgeous desert landscape
The first thing you should know is you cannot completely replicate everything you see in nature. That would be too much work. Also, there is simply no way you could fit all the variety present in nature into your tiny yard. The goal here is to capture the major features of a desert environment in your landscaping.
Here are some ways to do that.
1. Reduce the lawn size
One of the benefits of a desert landscape is you cut down on the amount of water you use in the yard. Do this by reducing the size of your lawn or removing the lawn altogether and replacing a tiny portion of it with artificial grass. Typically, you will want to get rid of more than two-thirds of your lawn. But you may want to retain some grass for your kids and pets.
2. Use raised garden beds
Raised beds – framed with rocks – let you include a garden in your desert landscaping. To make a raised bed you need sandy dirt, organic compost, black lava rocks, small rocks, and cactus soil as the top layer.
Some of the plants you could use on the raised bed include Fox-tailed Agave, Rainbow Giant, and Wooly Espostoa. You may also choose to leave the garden bare (preferably filled with white rocks).
3. Add different desert plants
Deserts like all-natural environments have diverse fauna. The three types of plants you want in your landscaping are palm trees, cacti, and succulents. Cacti have hair, while succulents are large fleshy plants that store large amounts of water. Adding low-growing flowering plants is also highly recommended.
4. Install low-water use drip emitters
Exchange sprinkler heads which use a lot of water for low-water drip emitters. These are more well-suited to the moisture needs of desert plants. How the irrigation system is installed depends on the proximity of the plants to one another. It is always a good practice to have plants with the same moisture requirements in the same location.
5. Decorative rock mulch
You may use this as a border for the remaining patches of grass in your landscaping. Decorative rock mulch also does a good job of mimicking desert environments that have rocks strewn around. You may use decorative rock mulch to create the impression of a sparse landscape
6. Hardscaping features
When we visualize the desert, we sometimes think of bare rugged rocks. You can recreate that look in your home with large rocks, boulders, and a walkway or steps made with natural stones with rough edges. You may also incorporate what already exists in your environment into the design. If you have a sloping hill in the backyard, you may adapt it into the design
7. Water features
Although water is sparse in a desert environment it is still present. After all, oases are only found in the desert. You can use a water feature in a way that makes the arid nature of the surrounding more pronounced. For instance, you may add a pool to the yard and ring it with palms to mimic a desert oasis.
8. Dry stream bed
Empty stream beds that only fill with water after an occasional rainfall are a common feature of the desert. Creating a shallow running swale filled with pebbles and framed by desert plants is not so hard to do. If you have naturally occurring slopes in your yard, creating this feature becomes a lot easier.
There are a lot of ways to make your landscape look natural and incorporate desert elements into it. Desert landscapes are low maintenance and save water.
Thank you to our guest blogger Ryan Erwin with Keyrenter Premier in Scottsdale, Arizona for this desert landscape article.
Deborah Munoz-Chacon
Sonoran Oasis Landscaping