Years ago, when the kids were small, we started replacing the traditional Christmas tree with a sagebrush. Going out into the desert to cut one was a family adventure and the result was always somehow miraculous. The trees looked windswept and architectural, beautiful in the way that asymmetrical Japanese-style flower arranging is beautiful.
These days when I am out hiking I am often struck by the unpredictable and graceful forms of many sagebrush. While sagebrush is not a good fit for many landscape projects, I think it is too often overlooked as design feature, especially in native and xeric projects. Next time you look at sagebrush in the wild, see if you find the structural beauty in its gnarly, off-kilter form.

Years ago, when the kids were small, we started replacing the traditional Christmas tree with a sagebrush. Going out into the desert to cut one was a family adventure and the result was always somehow miraculous. The trees looked windswept and architectural, beautiful in the way that asymmetrical Japanese-style flower arranging is beautiful.
These days when I am out hiking I am often struck by the unpredictable and graceful forms of many sagebrush. While sagebrush is not a good fit for many landscape projects, I think it is too often overlooked as design feature, especially in native and xeric projects. Next time you look at sagebrush in the wild, see if you find the structural beauty in its gnarly, off-kilter form.

Some plants respond to cold weather in beautiful ways. The woolly thyme in this photo from my front yard is especially striking when it turns purple in winter. Come spring, the foliage will gradually shift back to a beautiful soft gray-green. As shown in the photo, it is fun to combine different types of creeping thyme–and there are many–to highlight contrasting winter colors.
Evergreen groundcovers are among my favorite landscape plants, often great replacements for lawn.
The dark green at the top is an evergreen/groundcover penstemon–Davidson’s.

On a nice autumn day Winterfat, a native desert shrub, catches the slanting sun and is truly a thing of beauty. The Winterfat in this photo is full of seed. In the wild such plants provide valuable forage–‘fat’–for critters, thus the name.
The puzzle is: Why in my garden is this particular Winterfat so fuzzy and full of seed and other examples of Winterfat are not fuzzy at all?
I made a brief excursion on the internet to pose the question: Is Winter monoecious (male and female flowers on the same plant) or dioecious (male and female flowers on separate plants).
If some Winterfat plants in my garden are males and others (like this one) are females, that would explain why they look so different right now.
Here are some answers to the puzzle:
Winterfat plants
 “are dioecious”
 “are monoecious . . .and occasionally they are dioecious.”
are “monoecious or dioecious”.
Wow! Who knew that plants could be one or the other, either/or? This is the kind of little surprise that make amateur botany such an adventure.

Spring is here, and the lower foothills are popping with early blooming flowers. This one, Woolly Pod Milkvetch, or Pursh’s Astragalus, is one of my favorites. Notice them along the edges of trails right at your feet. In a few weeks, notice again and you will see the inflated, woolly seedpods that give the plant its common name.
I would love to be able to grow some kind of Milkvetch in my garden, but that hasn’t worked so far. However, some beautiful native plants need to just be admired in the places they grow naturally.

This photo shows one variation on a new Draggin’ Wing gardening concept we call “Xeric Tapestry”. A combination of low and mid-size, mostly evergreen plants grow into a densely-packed, ultimately low-maintenance, weed-free carpet of beauty.
Each Xeric Tapestry will be different, depending on the combination plants that is used. This one contains–among other things–Hidcote lavender, dwarf salvia, partridge feather, prostrate germander and various sedums.
The dense carpet of plants stops weed seeds from blowing in, reaching the soil and germinating. However, thorough weeding initially and for the first two or three years is necessary while the carpet is coming together.

Yuccas, like these in the Yucca corner of our demo gardens, provide a sharp accent of green in the gray of winter. This planting contains six different Yucca species, all native to the Western US. These plants are slow-growing, and none are old enough yet to produce their characteristic spike of white flowers.
Maybe you have noticed lots of rather floppy-looking dark green Yuccas around town.  Oddly, these common Boise yuccas (Yucca filamentosa, or ‘Adam’s Needle’) somehow arrived here from the Eastern U.S., where they are native. This is a shame, as they are a poor examples of an overwhelmingly beautiful group of landscape plants.
Western Yuccas are upright, stately and elegant. Although their native ranges are mostly south of Idaho, many of them are cold hardy enough for our climate. I used to think Yuccas were yucky—but not any more!