I live in the sand hills between the southern Manzano Mountains and the Rio Grande in a sea of threadleaf and purple sages. When the wind flows from the foothills along Pino Draw, as it often does, it sounds to me like waves rushing the beach. This is not an idle observation. I have a great deal of experience wave-listening. My attentiveness to water music has gradually evolved from a childhood spent following mostly languid creeks while watching water spiders and floating leaves to youthful independence, walking in icy surf foaming along the Atlantic in Maine and in the more welcoming Pacific near San Francisco. Over the years I have meandered the warm ebb and flow of the Gulf of Mexico in Florida and the Caribbean Sea on the island of Dominica. The best vacations involve ending the day on a balcony a few dozen steps from the Mediterranean, sipping red wine and listening to waves wash the sand. The power of water calms and energizes, restores and reshapes. In the desert we have more wind than water, a less restful but no less powerful force. Composer Claude Debussy played with the dialogue between wind and water in La Mer.

Landscapes shaped by wind might seem antithetical places for fountains or ponds, but natives of arid climates have known for millennia that the celebration of water is the soul of the garden. The ancient Persians’ paradise gardens moved water to tiled basins the color of lapis lazuli. Perhaps the apex of historic Moorish gardens, the Alhambra is a series of garden rooms with water flowing through sunken troughs, collecting in carved fluted basins, arching across shaded ponds in wire-thin streams, trickling along pebbled paths. Taken in its entirety, the scale of the Alhambra is palatial, almost as overwhelming now as it was meant to be when it was fully embellished five centuries ago, but feature by feature, it is a sampler of ideas for relishing the sight, sound, and scent of water. Here at home the acequias of traditional farming villages throughout New Mexico were and still are the circulatory system of those communities. They are the New World hybrid of native ingenuity and Moorish water savvy.

 

Now, drop for drop, modern drip irrigation is the most efficient way to water plants, but it sublimates the role of water, encasing it in pipes beneath the skin of our landscapes. In xeric landscapes respect for water’s scarcity keeps the resource at the roots, using as little as possible to yield the greatest good. Efficiency is the hallmark of “xerrigation” systems. Well-conceived water features, too, are modest in size, trickle rather than gush or mist, and are designed and placed in a shaded, enclosed space to minimize evaporation.

To read the complete story, please find Su Casa at your local newsstand or order it online here or by phone at 505-344-1783 or toll-free 866-256-4925.