Desert Bloom

What the lantana is trying to tell you

Las Vegas gardener Norm Schilling shares the easiest flowers to grow in the desert — from self-seeding wildflowers to fragrant citrus, aloes, and native blooms.

Las Vegas arborist Norm Schilling explains how to prune trees for desert wind, why most people remove too much, and how to spot a bad tree trimmer before it's too late.

Norm Schilling, an experienced gardener, discusses the beauty and benefits of incorporating cacti and succulents into gardens.

Norm Schilling discusses the importance of trees for air quality and cooling urban areas due to climate change.

Sage is a lot more than the spice you occasionally sprinkle over all kinds of food. As Norm Schilling tells us, sages of all kinds are around us, and they love the desert.

Norm Schilling shares his expertise on growing and caring for bougainvillea in Southern Nevada.

When I was revamping my PowerPoint presentation for MASTER GARDENER training the other day, I came across a slide that I’d entitled “What can you grow in a garden?”.

Some flowers actually seem to enjoy our summer heat. We hear about one.

How about choosing desert native plants for the home landscape?I know, I said, “desert natives” and some people groan, thinking I’m going to talk about spiky, poky, unfriendly plants.

Most of us don’t have big acreage for our gardens. That’s why we try to pack so much into them. Sometimes, though, we do get carried away, putting the least amount of space required between plants. That’s how usually I practice gardening.

In the dead of winter, so many trees look skeletal – bare branches with dead leaves on the ground surrounding them. Even here in the desert southwest, you can see leafless limbs. In other parts of the country, this would mean it’s time to stay indoors, sipping mulled wine and browsing through seed catalogs. We do that here, too, but we don’t necessarily have to stay inside. In fact, since our coldest average temperatures are about 50 degrees during the day, the winter’s an ideal time to clean up our landscapes. I have family and friends back east who’d be dancing in shorts and t-shirts if it were 50 degrees anytime between December and February.

Much as I love life here in Southern Nevada, our springtime is remarkably short. You scarcely have time to get your vegetable seeds into the ground before temperatures pop up into the nineties. I often talk about “cool season” and “warm season” plants, but we don’t spend enough time thinking about hot season crops.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about doing a Desert Bloom segment on weeds, just weeds in general, but there’s so much to talk about with these plants that I figured it would be better to narrow my focus. After all, even the definition of weed has a lot of variants.

Non-functional turf grass isn’t legal in lots of locations anymore, thank goodness. Green is nice, but does a green lawn in front of a bank or a lawyer’s office inspire more confidence than any other kind of planting? I don’t see how. Of course, individuals can choose their own home landscaping, even a lawn, as long as the irrigation system isn’t pouring our limited drinking water into storm drains.

I was talking with someone about roses the other day. Ok, we were both bragging about our roses, and how well they grow, despite our challenging environment. As flowers go, roses are impressive. For good reason; they’re gorgeous. They’re among the most widely celebrated flowers around. Not that everyone grows them, for many reasons, but they’re not all as hard to grow as you might think. Despite record breaking heat and life in southern Nevada, my roses continue to survive. Not that they’re thrilled with drought and record high temperatures, but unlike too many other shrubs, they won’t just keel over and die unless their soil’s dry.