Desert Book - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

Planting a Desert Garden • • •
The author calls the garden in
the back yard of his Altadena,
California, home a "Sisao" (oasis
spelled backwards). To accentuate
its arid land theme, he scattered
rusty horseshoes, volcanic
rocks and other desertland objects
among the thorny plants. Besides
being informal and easy to care
for, this garden is fun to create.
By GEORGE C. JORDAN
T ALL started the day Mickey
came home from college with the
back of his car full of weird desert
plants. As I stared in amazement
at the gnarled mass of green and yellow
vegetation, he explained:
"I'm a little short of money, Dad,
and being's this is your birthday I decided
to give you the cactus garden
you've often said you'd like to have.
I dug up these plants on a friend's
ranch near college."
Since Mickey had not violated the
law by collecting the native flora from
the public domain or from private
property without permission of the
owner—and since I could not throw
away so thoughtful a gift, there was
nothing to do but stick the plants in
the ground.
Fortunately, there was an ideal place
for the plants right in the middle of
our back yard. An oval-shaped 18x25foot
flower garden was long overdue
for some spade work. As a site for a
cactus garden, this weedy blight was
a natural.
That evening the family held a
landscape conference and mentally
plotted a scheme into which the cacti
and other plants Mickey had brought
would fit. It was decided that our
first planting would take the shape of
a half-circle around one side of the
oval.
Patch Is Cleared
The following week end I was out
early with hoe and rake. Ruthlessly
I cleaned out both weeds and flowers,
except for a circle of carnations around
the sun dial in the center of the patch.
These flowers Mrs. Jordan refused to
have uprooted. They are still there,
and while they hardly belong in a
desert garden, they provide a welcome
splash of color and I have gotten over
being technical about their presence.
Besides, one of the most pleasant features
of my garden is that it is strictly
informal. Anyone can develop a similar
plot according to his own likes and
MARCH, 1959
tastes, and there are as yet no conventionalized
standards by which it can
be stated that it is wrong to plant this
or do that. You put in whatever desert
plants and related articles (wagon
wheels, Mexican pottery, bleached cow
skulls, rocks) that please you and
your family, who have to live with it.
This type of garden I call a sisao
(oasis spelled backwards). From the
beginning, it was clear that what we
had launched was not a cactus garden,
strictly speaking. Included in the first
planting were century plants, agave
americana of the amaryllis family;
Spanish bayonet, a yucca related to
the lilies; and other thorny non-cacti
species.
The whole development took some
weird turns right from the start.
Among the friends who contributed to
my hobby is an engineer. One of his
most prized gifts was a pair of rusty
mule shoes he had found near an
abandoned camp in Arizona.
The word sisao is corny, but it stuck.
Our friends who enjoy roaming the
deserts remember it easily, and have
brought me everything from a pair of
antelope horns to purple sun-darkened
bottles. The project has become an
expanding one leading into avenues
never dreamed of at the start.
More plants we had to have, and
the third week end after Mickey's
The author and his son, Mickey.
birthday surprise, Mrs. Jordan and I
began making the rounds of the nurseries.
Although we got a beautiful
red Arizona barrel cactus (ferocactus
acanthodes) from one nurseryman,
our search quickly narrowed to several
places within easy driving distance of
our home that specialize in cacti and
succulents. Any roadside cactus sign
is enough to stop our car and head it
off in search of adventure. Every
nursery is a potential "attic," to be
rummaged through for treasure. Altogether,
we now have more than 40
kinds of cacti and almost as many
non-cacti desert plants.
Cacti Research
One of the most rewarding and
stimulating aspects of our garden is
the research we have done on our
backyard plants. What makes a cactus
a cactus? How many kinds of cactus
are there, and how do you tell one
from another? How do you plant and
transplant? How often should the
plants be watered? How did cacti
evolve? How can a beginner learn
the correct names of the thousands of
varieties of these plants?
These were some of the questions
which sent us scurrying, first to the
public library, then to bookstores to
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