U.S. Water News Online
BOISE, Idaho -- It's not immediately obvious this city was built in a semi-arid basin of sagebrush and bunch grass.
These days, huge green lawns surround corporate buildings; towering oaks and maples shelter Boise's scenic old neighborhoods. A river runs through it all with poplars on the banks.
But Boise gets only about 12 inches of precipitation per year. Now various gardening and water-conservation groups are trying to return the city's landscape to its desert-like roots for both practical and philosophical reasons.
A nursery that features only drought-tolerant plants recently opened in Boise. The nonprofit Idaho Rivers United is offering grants to homeowners who want to tear up their thirsty Kentucky bluegrass and replace it with water-thrifty native plants. Idaho Botanical Garden and United Water holds classes on drought-tolerant gardening.
And a new group called the Arid Gardening Alliance is bringing together landscape architects, botanists, and others who want to teach Boise residents there are low-water landscaping options beyond rocks and cactus.
"Using the native plant palette would be a huge step in honoring this area we live in -- a beautiful place," said Katie Wilde, a landscape designer who helped form the alliance. "There is so much unique character out there."
History has it that Boise was named in the 1880s by French settlers who were thrilled to see trees (and exclaimed "Le Bois," meaning wood, or forest). They were likely referring to the riverbank poplars -- the area's only native trees.
The settlers who followed brought their own plant varieties from home, and now it's not just the fast-food restaurants and other chain stores that give Boise that look so familiar to other U.S. cities. With carpets of acorns decorating the ground in the fall and the always-popular rhododendrons and azaleas adding color to corporate landscapes, Boise's plants also reflect what settlers missed about life in the East.
"That's what the settlers knew; that's what they were comfortable with," said Katie Wilde, a landscape architect with the Arid Gardening Alliance. "Isn't that the idea behind chain stores? It's the comfort of having familiar surroundings, regardless of where you are."
But those decades-old oaks, elms, flowering pears, lindens and sugar maples need a lot of water, and that water is expensive.
"There are insects, there are diseases, but in my mind, the biggest problem is water," said Dennis Matlock, who works for the city's Community Forestry Department. "People are beginning to water less and less. More homes are not owner-occupied; renters don't want to go to the expense of paying for water."
Boise engineer Mike Stambulis got $2,000 from Idaho Rivers United program last year to replace his lawn with about 60 local varieties.
"We had always had the idea to do more drought-tolerant plants; we just didn't know how to do it," said Stambulis, who got technical help from the Arid Gardening Alliance.
The arid gardening movement isn't new. The Denver Water utility has held the trademark on Xeriscape -- a now nationally known water-saving approach to landscape design -- for 25 years. The Denver Botanic Gardens copyrighted the name Water-Smart Gardening in the early 1990s.
Last summer, the city of Flagstaff, Ariz., offered homeowners $500 to replace their lawn with rock or low-water plants.
Change has come slowly to Boise, where automatic sprinkler systems have kept trees, lawns and shrubbery flourishing for decades. But Idaho is growing faster than almost any other state in the country, and farmers, fishermen, and other water users are competing for a limited resource -- generating enough interest for the Arid Gardening Alliance to come into being.
"People are skeptical; they say, `we love our lawns,"' said Elizabeth Wasson, who helped start the group.
But nobody loves paying high water bills. And using native plants is easier, said Panayoti Kelaidis, a spokesman for the Denver Botanic Gardens. "One reason I try to encourage people to grow more arid flora is that it's what surrounds us naturally, and it's extraordinarily beautiful," he said. "Idaho is a land of sagebrush and gaunt, dramatic mountains, and I think there's sort of an aesthetic discord that occurs when people create an environment that's alien from their natural environment."
That's what Diane Jones observed when she opened her new nursery, which offers only drought-tolerant plants.
"Once we begin to look at and appreciate the natural landscape that existed here before, we as a society become more inclined to want to protect it," Jones said. "Understanding where you live, and having an appreciation for where you live, translates into protecting where you live."
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