Su Libro

something different

It’s time to dive into Santa Fe’s standout gardens and old-time lore, plus learn how your home can make the world a better place.

By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Summer 2010 Su Casa

Gardens of Santa Fe, by Anne Hillerman with photographs by Don Strel, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, hardcover, $30.

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“Earth laughs in flowers,” according to a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson inscribed in stone at the Healing Garden of the Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center. If that’s true, then Santa Fe must be hilarious. Just flip a few pages of Anne Hillerman and Don Strel’s beautiful Gardens of Santa Fe, and you’ll find Earth twittering like the crowd at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Blooms and blossoms everywhere. But there’s more to the story. Gardens aren’t all lilacs and day lilies. They’re stone and structure, sculpture and views, water and forest. And gardening isn’t all pruning roses. It’s an invitation to slow down, to immerse in life, and to center yourself among the processes of nature.

Hillerman leads us through public and private gardens and includes sections for the latter focusing on old-style Santa Fe, water-wise and critter friendly, artists’ gardens, and so on. Strel’s photos range between broad establishing shots, intimate vignettes, and loving portraits of individual blossoms and buds. Hillerman writes as much about the people as the plants, giving a sense of the challenges they faced in establishing the gardens, their plant-selection processes, their tips and tricks and techniques. After all, she writes, “Gardening in Santa Fe is not for sissies, nor for the faint of heart.” A gardener must accommodate, defend against, or accept the arid climate, clay and caliche soil, winter snows and summer drought, hailstorms and drying spring winds, rabbits, gophers, bears, bobcats, and mountain lions. And sometimes grasshoppers.

The people profiled in Gardens of Santa Fe provide the right mix of inspiration and advice. The message is, you can do it, too, and here’s how to make it look great. Hillerman talks to newbies and veterans, experts and amateurs who lean on the experts. Most are transplants from out of state—how typical for Santa Fe—who have learned to adapt their garden aesthetic to the demands of their new hometown’s environment.

Diversity reigns over Hillerman’s choice of gardens. Here’s one with a massive rock waterfall—I mean, a real waterfall tumbling into a pond big enough to paddle a canoe across—with a stand of aspen nearby filling in 150-year-old ruts of the Santa Fe Trail. Here’s another with more than 70 sculptures, many by the artist/homeowner himself. Here’s one with a model railroad winding its way among the greenery, another with a pleasing mix of hardscape—paths, walls, an horno—and desert plants, plus an orchard and berry bushes, and a third with a spiraling labyrinth. And how about this: one gardener, when confronted with a large anthill, turned it into living art, encircling it with a low stone wall and leaving out beads for the ants, which they incorporated into the hill’s cone, sparkling blue in the sun. I can’t think of a better way to express connection to the earth.

Give me a trowel and a wheelbarrow full of compost! Let’s get started. That’s the kind of enthusiasm Hillerman and Strel pass along from these avid tillers of the soil. Knitting together this wide range of gardens and gardeners is a shared sense that their work in the yard is more than a pastime or mere hobby. Gardening relaxes them, therapeutically, and energizes them, creatively. It draws them into the web of life, teaches them to be responsive to nature, and keeps them young. As professional gardener Donna Boner tells Hillerman, “I don’t know how I could be alive if I didn’t garden. It takes me beyond myself and connects me with everything, including myself. I like being nurtured and nurturing, and I like the silence, the quiet of the garden, the birds, the air, the sound of water. Gardening feeds me completely. It takes me out of my body. I can fly while I’m doing it. I can imagine doing this in my eighties.”

Building to Endure: Design Lessons of Arid Lands, edited by Paul Lusk and Alf Simon, University of New Mexico Press, hardcover, $45.

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In the introduction to Building to Endure, editors Paul Lusk and Alf Simon issue a powerful challenge, which is the premise of their book, that “all changes or additions to the built environment should enhance the performance of the natural environment or they should not be built.” In other words, your project—your house, folks—should make the world a better place in a measurable way. It’s the ethical thing to do, they suggest.

If you don’t buy the philosophy, you won’t read the book. If you think they’re on to something but wonder, “how in the world…?” then take heart, as Building to Endure offers a fusion of practical guidelines, usable examples, and larger ideas. And while even Lusk’s remarkable personal project at his home on three acres in Albuquerque’s South Valley hasn’t solved every aspect of sustainability, the results are promising.

An anthology bringing together mostly academic writers and architects, the book starts by looking to the past for lessons about how to live in an arid climate. Thus in the first section we get essays on Chaco Canyon, Hispanic settlement patterns in the New World, and modern desert cities in the United States compared to examples from North Africa. Then the book moves on to “system components”—what shapes cities in this kind of landscape, and what should. The last section looks at case studies of what Lusk would call ethical responses to living on the land, which might be the most readable and engaging section of the book for the casual reader.

A few essays stand out. Lusk’s chapter “Urban Form in Arid Lands” suggests specific approaches to building and development that result in sustainability and resilience—meaning a community that functions in a kind of healthy symbiosis as part of its large ecosystem. Such an approach minimizes our impacts on the environment through energy use, water use, pollution, and other forms of degradation. Lusk talks about “compact urban inserts,” by which he means big buildings that provide housing, shopping, and work places in much higher density than we’re accustomed to out west. But with features like living roofs and decks—vegetated for a variety of practical reasons—and architecture that accommodates our needs for space, privacy, and long sight lines, it starts to make sense. Such a place can create pure air, create pure water, and store rainwater in a three-dimensional urban village setting. It’s cool, maybe a little Syfy channel for some, but visionary nonetheless.

Another standout piece comes from Stanley Crawford, the writer-farmer from Embudo, New Mexico. Famous for his lyrical writing on the lifestyle shaped by acequias and flood irrigation in our rural villages, here he testifies to his awakening to drip irrigation. Besides water savings, improvements from installing more than a mile of plastic tubing on his farm included increased germination rates, more intensive plantings, and ultimately greater crop yields, which kept him in business farming.

Later chapters talk about existing high-density projects, one of which we covered many years ago in Su Casa, called Arbolera de Vida in the Sawmill neighborhood of Albuquerque. Another real-world example comes from The Commons, a cohousing community in Santa Fe that’s approaching 20 years and continues to flourish. In another chapter, Lusk talks about his own home (see Green Home in Su Casa’s Summer 2008 issue), a rich demonstration project of all kinds of low-tech, super-clever solutions to energy efficiency, water use, and all-around sustainable living.

Building to Endure is one smart book. Neither anti-human nor anti-technological, it offers concrete ideas readers can move forward with. If you’re suffering from a case of environmental depression or the global-warming blues, read it and rekindle your hope.

Santa Fe Tales & More, by Howard Bryan, Clear Light Publishing, paperback, $16.95.

Drawing on period newspaper reports, author Howard Bryan recounts a couple dozen tales of old Santa Fe, events that were undoubtedly the center of gossip and speculation at their time but have fallen out of public consciousness over the last, oh, 150 years or so. My, time passes.

Anyone who read the Albuquerque newspapers through 1990 knows Howard Bryan, who wrote Off the Beaten Path, a column in the Albuquerque Tribune that told quirky stories about New Mexico in a traditional journalist’s plainspoken tone. These brief yarns fit that mold, focusing on events and character as revealed by action. And it’s quite a cast of characters: crazy, stolid, outlandish, famous, obscure. We’ve got Hispanic lady gamblers, gringo gunfighters, ghosts, 19th-century UFOs (contact!), Apache warriors, transplanted Yankee sea captains, and U.S. presidents, all immortalized by the newspapers of their time. When Sting penned the lyrics, “history will teach us nothing,” he hadn’t read books like Santa Fe Tales & More, which instead reinforces Mark Twain’s observation that history might not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. That came to mind as I read about the riot between Democrats and Republicans in 1871. And it’s now an election year.