e-book

Water Wise: Native Plants for Intermountain Landscapes

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In recent years, the Intermountain West (IM West), consisting of the mountains,
basins, and plateaus lying between the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada
on the west and the Rocky Mountains on the east, has changed dramatically. What
was once a vast open area with barely enough population to qualify for statehood
is still open and vast, but sparse settlements have metastasized into cities and suburbs.
People lured to the breathtaking beauty and endless recreational opportunities
of the IM West fuel this urban growth.

The shadow side to urban growth in the IM West is that it occurs in a high
desert with limited and intermittent water supplies. Domesticating these supplies
through subsidized dams and diversions brought a perception of water abundance
that fueled the current urbanization. The West is discovering that this perception
was only a loan. High legal, social, and economic costs, together with exhaustion
of suitable sites, have pushed new dams and diversions, and hence new water supplies,
to the point of extinction. Consequently, most of the urbanized areas in the
Intermountain West face growing demand that is outstripping supply, and they need
to learn to live within their water means.

In the urbanized areas of the IM West, anywhere from 30%–70% of all the
yearly water consumption goes on landscapes composed mostly of cool-season turf.
While recreational and trafficked landscapes are well served with a cool-season turf
such as Kentucky bluegrass, its use to carpet landscapes large and small is mindless
and impractical. A uniformly green and clipped turfgrass surface in a high
desert is unnatural and needs frequent, large applications of water to meet performance
expectations. A growing number of people, and increasingly institutions,
in the IM West are looking for alternatives to turf that require less water. Droughttolerant
native plants serve that purpose well, and native landscaping is now
entering the mainstream as a significant and appropriate means of conserving landscape
irrigation water.

Increasing interest in using native plants in low-water landscapes is not
only due to practical considerations of saving water. It is driven just as much by
people seeking a greater sense of place that is not the franchised uniformity of our
culture, finding its echo in our vast and often mindless expanses of turfgrass. If the
explosive immigration to the IM West is a back-handed compliment to its beauty,
then buried in that compliment is a desire to connect to and experience the plant life
that is an exquisite element of the native environment. Every visit to a sagebrush
basin, an alpine meadow, or a red-rock plateau is a pilgrimage to someplace new
inside yourself that promises coming away with something more than you arrived
with. Landscaping with IM West native plants reflects a movement from an adversarial
relationship with the surrounding desert and mountains to one that honors the
tenacity, toughness, and beauty of native plants and their habitats. However, using
these native plants in the landscape requires an understanding of how they adapt to
the environmental extremes in their native habitats. Knowledge of these adaptations
can then be used to create low-water-use, sustainable, and beautiful
landscapes.

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Ketersediaan

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Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

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Penerbit

Utah : USU Press (Utah State University Press)., 2003

Deskripsi Fisik

SB439.24.G74W38 - 635.9’5179--dc21

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

0-87421-561-7

Klasifikasi

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Tipe Isi

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Tipe Media

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Tipe Pembawa

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Edisi

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Subjek

BIOLOGI
BIODIVERSITAS

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

agus

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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