Water is life, refreshment and ornament, political lever and community core, livelihood and plaything. Water is the spiritual link between the land and the people living on it, and a commodity to be bought and sold. Both too much and too little are a threat to property values.

Egyptians have been irrigation masters for five millennia; the Nile, their horticultural aorta. In New Mexico, however, looking to the Rio Grande as an infinite resource is the worst sort of denial. Modern attitudes toward water are filtered through the expectation that because it is so central to life, it will always be available. It’s time that we celebrate water and manage it more intelligently.
For several years, New Mexico has been experiencing a severe cyclical drought, yet 2004 was particularly generous both in the amount of rainfall we received and in the distribution of the storms through the seasons.

In response to the soaking rains of late February and April, the foothills and valleys of New Mexico were carpeted with wildflowers. The gold in the hills from Las Cruces to Deming was Mexican gold poppy, our native kin of California poppy. The medians of I-25 bore sheets of pale lavender scorpion flower and white tufted evening primrose. Sky-blue fendler penstemon and purple verbena brightened the Sandia, Manzano and Los Pinos foothills.

As usual, May and June were windy and increasingly hot. Bush penstemon burst on the scene, buoyed by moisture that had seeped deeply into the soil, but the benefit of the early rains soon waned. Then a storm at the end of June brought the moisture needed to push the warm season grasses into high gear, and a mediocre monsoon season was enough to sustain the summer sunflowers. Everywhere the wild landscape was, the soft green of grama grasses, dropseeds and sacaton flourished.

Those well-timed rains had me thinking about how and when we might water our xeric landscapes to get the most from every drop we expend on them. A few years ago I was surprised to learn that blue grama begins active growth with as little as one-hundredth of an inch of rain whenever the soil temperature is above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Break a sweat weeding your prairie and blue grama may respond with a few new leaves. That’s one of the perks of growing plants that want to live here.

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