fall in love
Court your garden by raking leaves, fine-tuning your watering, and reveling in the beauty of the season’s last burst of splendor.
Glenna Goodacre’s Puddle Jumpers makes the most out of an autumn day, showing how a well-designed garden space—in this case, at Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe—looks good in any season.
Synthetic deck lumber saves trees in the forest and lets water pass through to their roots in your yard, too.
The yellow bloom of chamisa is a season-defining native and a fall highlight across New Mexico.
See our web-exclusive plant list at the end of this article.
Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. Growing up in the eastern woodlands of New York State, the rustle and crunch of leaves was miraculous to me. Standing under a grand canopy of branches as the red and gold, orange and bronze leaves fluttered down around me was all the reason I needed to be outdoors. Raking became my chore of choice—I could play in the leaves, the time sanctioned as productive. Transplanted to New Mexico, I found Olympic-class raking mostly a consideration in older neighborhoods where many large thirsty trees were planted generations earlier. Depending on the wind patterns, even if you don’t have mature trees, you may have your neighbors’ leaves to play in. Not everyone shares my love of leaf drop, but most people don’t wax nostalgic over the roar of leaf blowers either. So what is a New Mexican response to fall in the garden? What are some strategies for managing autumn leaves, and like everything in this arid climate, what’s water got to do with it?
Autumn in New Mexico is more about the contrast of golden chamisa and purple aster, or the late-season splash of Maximilian sunflowers hugging a fence line than it is about a russet rainbow of tree leaves. We can journey to our local highlands to ogle the aspens or seek out the few canyons in the Manzano and Guadalupe mountains where Western big-tooth maples straddle seasonal streambeds like flames against the dark-green conifer forest. Along with the pervasive aroma of roasting chile, there’s a titillating sense of change in the air. Farmers’ markets overflow with edible abundance. The panorama of our cities viewed from adjacent mesas or mountainsides gains intensity as trees begin to turn color, the banks of the Rio Grande transformed from a river of green to gold; our urban forests looking like so many hot air balloons inflated to launch in a mass ascension from their neighborhoods.
Indoors and out, people see and use space differently than they did decades ago. Today’s landscapes often call for more paved surfaces as the floors of outdoor rooms. Pairing the demands on the space with existing conditions on-site can result in easier maintenance and healthier plants. Trees, whether they are the mature remnants of an older garden or newly planted hope for the future, are essential to keeping hard surfaces cooler and more enjoyable, so paving and shade should be symbiotic in garden design. As regularly mowed lawn areas shrink, managing autumn leaves can create design quandaries. The area close to the trunks of existing mature trees, where the shade is deepest, is available as living space because the absorbing roots of these trees should be watered at the edge and beyond the branch canopy to keep them healthy. Looping emitter-imbedded drip hose covered with mulch in the trees’ root zones will use much less water than the lawn sprinklers did because evaporative loss is minimized, but weeds will crop up where water is available if there is nothing to exclude them. Planting competitive ground covers of modest water needs that can be mowed, raked, or blown seasonally such as dwarf plumbago or yerba mansa solves two problems: tree roots get the water they need and leaves can be cleaned up, shredded, and turned to compost when the ground cover is tidied up at the end of the season.
The spaces close to the trunks of trees might lend themselves to decking with composite lumber. Unlike real wood, which in this dry climate requires frequent refinishing, including sealing with products that may damage tree roots, composite lumber is a recycled material that requires almost no maintenance if installed correctly. Flagstone and concrete pavers set on sand or crusher fines without mortar also allow the roots to breathe but may need to be reset as the roots grow and change the grade beneath the paving. Leaves can be swept off these hard surfaces or caught in the mower bag when cleaning up. When planting new trees, you can opt for smaller trees such as hybrid elm cultivars ‘Athena’, ‘Frontier’, and ‘Prospector’ that seem resistant to both Dutch elm disease and elm leaf beetles; Texas red oak; or Chinese hackberry, which all grow to a more modest 40 feet tall. Russian hawthorn, Vitex, and fragrant ash grow half that height. These smaller trees use less water and produce fewer leaves; smaller leaves transpire less moisture and are easier to corral once they’ve fallen.
From the plants’ perspective, the essence of autumn seems paradoxical; energized by cooler temperatures, some plants give a last burst of splendor while others unwind in appealing gone-to-seed abandon. As night temperatures cool down and days become shorter, there’s one easy chore that needs attending to right now: reset your irrigation timer to water less often and slightly longer. There is good reason, besides water savings, to reduce watering in autumn. The high desert is known for its roller-coaster temperatures. Spring can be punishing, when a few weeks of warmth teases fruit tree buds to emerge only to have an arctic blast turn the promise to toast. Autumn is the bookend of uncertainty. Rarely do we sink slowly into winter with night temperatures growing incrementally colder until killing frost finally plays taps for tomatoes and the leaves of deciduous plants slowly sift earthward. No, autumn here is more likely to remain pleasantly mild, a great time to enjoy barbecues and watch the mountains turn pink in relative comfort. Then after only a few nights dropping into the mid-30-degree range, we wake up one morning to a thermometer that reads 16 degrees. Ouch! Some plants are triggered to slow growth and toughen up for impending cold as the nights grow longer despite the warm daytime temperatures. Other plants aren’t so discerning. The dormant cycles of many xeric plants are triggered as much by warm, moist soils as by air temperature, and the soil cools down much more slowly than the air does. Mediterranean natives are adapted to less extreme temperature fluctuations, so they are less likely to stop active growth until clobbered by frost. Unless gradually weaned of growth-inducing irrigation, they continue to produce new shoots and leaves until plummeting temperatures freeze their soft juicy cells, undoing all the end-of-season gains and perhaps killing whole branches of trees or causing shrubs to die back to the ground. For their generosity with moisture, gardeners may be rewarded with big pruning jobs and weakened plants.
Ideally new xeric plants should have three or four growing seasons of weekly watering when daytime temperatures are regularly 85 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer. As the plants settle in, the run time of the drip irrigation cycles should be gradually lengthened so water penetrates 30 inches deep into the soil, allowing plants to root extensively. By early September, xeric landscapes should have the irrigation cycle cut back to once every two weeks with a slightly longer run time than the summer cycle. This has several benefits. In early autumn roots begin a very active period of expansion, so deeper watering encourages still deeper rooting. Any soluble salts that may have begun to accumulate at the depth that the summer watering schedule regularly permeated are washed deeper, out of the most active rooting area. Top-growth slows or stops for the year, and plant tissues begin to toughen up so they will better endure freezing. If you have trees and shrubs such as Chinese pistache, ‘Raywood’ ash, and dwarf cutleaf sumac that turn shades of red, or cottonwoods, aspen, and apricots that turn shades of peach to gold, the color will be more brilliant when they are not being watered as often. In mid-November the timer should be adjusted again to water monthly or even less often if winter precipitation is better than average.
With water rates edging upward and water resources shrinking, sprinkler heads are less likely to pop up in parking strips and other spaces where turf has no value beyond its high maintenance costs, and landscapes are becoming more diverse in both the plants used and the birds and butterflies attracted to the cornucopia. Just when we thought all the low-hanging fruit had been plucked from the xeriscape tree, an amazing opportunity to conserve quite painlessly presents itself. According to Katherine Yuhas, Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority conservation officer, when you compare water consumption in April and May, two of the potentially driest months of the year, with September and October, two of the months when we are apt to have at least a few thunderstorms as the monsoon season winds down, 2007 records show that 1.4 billion gallons more water was used in autumn than in spring! These spring and fall months compare closely in terms of temperature, but in autumn we’re less likely to suffer drying winds day after day, and there’s likely to be more natural moisture available to plants.
The amount of unnecessary water used is staggering even considering that the spring of record followed an extremely wet winter, a wasteful phenomenon Yuhas says is repeated annually with little variation in response to the weather. At the end of a long growing season, perhaps wearied by too much of a good thing, people just seem to think about gardening less, but with simple adjustments to irrigation timers across the city, what savings could be realized! The bottom line is that we can substantially reduce the amount of water we apply to our landscapes as the growing season winds down while we improve the health of plants and maintain beautiful living spaces. Autumn is the season when less is definitely more.
A widely acknowledged expert and author on regionally appropriate gardening, Judith Phillips has designed more than 900 residential gardens, collaborates on design teams for public landscape projects, and teaches a native and xeric plant class at the University of New Mexico.
Apricots (Prunus armeniaca)
Aspen (Populus tremuloides)
‘Athena’, ‘Frontier’, and ‘Prospector’ elms (Ulmus hybrids)
Big-tooth maple (Acer grandidentatum)
Chinese hackberry (Celtis sinensis)
Chinese pistache (Pistacia chinensis)
Cottonwoods (Populus wislizenii)
Dwarf cutleaf sumac (Rhus glabra ‘Cistmontana’)
Dwarf plumbago (Ceratodtigma plumbaginoides)
Fragrant ash (Fraxinus cuspidata)
Golden chamisa (Ericameria nauseousus)
Maximilian sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani)
Purple aster (Machaeranthera bigelovii)
‘Raywood’ ash (Fraxinus oxycarpa)
Russian hawthorn (Crataegus ambigua)
Texas red oak (Quercus texana)
Vitex (Vitex agnus-castus)
Yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica)