Mountain Oasis
Xeriscape garden: lush, low-impact
Photography: Paulette Phlipot
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“If you look at Google Earth (an online satellite imaging program), it is easy to spot our property,” says Morgan Brown. “Ours is light green, while most of our neighbors’ are dark green.”
As observed from several miles above the earth, the lighter color shows the significant difference in the amount of water Brown and his wife Rebecca Bundy use on their _land _in comparison to their surrounding neighbors. “We soak the garden only about once every two or three weeks,” says Bundy, a local architectural designer who created the landscape with her husband. “Most people around here water at least once a day.”
You might think one cannot have grass, let alone a flower garden, without irrigation. However, Brown and Bundy have proven otherwise. Their lawn doesn’t have an irrigation system. And yet it is green. A lighter shade than their neighbors, indeed, but still green. Instead of the common Kentucky bluegrass that is often watered daily and mowed weekly (using valuable water and contributing to air pollution), Brown chose a warm-season, drought-tolerant buffalo grass. With a minimal amount of hand watering to establish the lawn, it has thrived over the past few years and even survived their family soccer games. Brown is happy with it, but thinks he’ll experiment this year with a drought-tolerant, cool-season grass [thickspike wheatgrass] to test its durability in our high-desert climate.
The flower garden is the real showpiece of Brown and Bundy’s landscape. There is no lack of color here: vivid purple, blue and white flowers, including chives, penstemon, lupine, lavender and bleeding hearts, grow along the undulating berm that surrounds their one-acre Hulen Meadows property. The garden looks planned, but natural. It hosts many flowers one might see on an early summer hike through Adams Gulch, but the colors have been carefully chosen to fit Bundy’s purple, blue and white color scheme and she has purposely clumped the flowers instead of letting them spread. “I don’t want the garden to look like a meadow,” says Bundy. “I prefer clusters of color instead of single blossoms.”
And she has succeeded in creating a lush, naturalistic garden that thrives in our arid summer climate with very little water.
When Bundy and Brown moved from Seattle to Sun Valley with their family seven years ago they brought with them a passion for environmentalism. Brown has a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington and spent the first part of his career working in the high-tech industry. However an opportunity to relocate to Sun Valley presented him and his family with a chance to live a more friendly life in the sunshine of the Wood River Valley.
Here in Sun Valley’s high-desert climate the average humidity is only 30 percent, and there is a mere 15 inches of precipitation per year. In addition, the northern latitude creates long days, with up to 15 hours of sunshine in the summer. Brown and Bundy feel the importance of being “water-wise” when choosing to live in a climate such as this. “We both came from well-educated, environmentally-conscious families in Seattle, so our choices came naturally,” says Bundy.
Since moving to the area, Brown has founded Sun Valley Solar, a renewable energy company, and, more recently, Whole Water Systems, a company that designs natural pools, swim ponds and water treatment systems using plant-based water purification. Bundy’s firm, Rebecca F. Bundy Design for Sustainable Living, specializes in passive solar architecture and she has designed several “green” homes around the Wood River Valley.
Brown and Bundy had just completed their own model green, solar home, designed by Bundy, and launched the garden to fit into their eco-friendly plan for the property.
Bundy was lead designer for the garden project while Brown did much of the hands-on work, including laying the stone patio and building a recirculating stream down the center of the yard. Now, four years later, they have a garden awash with color, surrounding a lush lawn, a water feature filled with reeds and rushes that attracts the occasional thirsty critter, and a stone patio covered in soft thyme. They have it all without daily watering, let alone an underground irrigation system. >>>
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