Water-Saving Landscapes Yield Profits for Firms in Semiarid Regions

At first glance, the baroque bronze and marble Esplanade Fountain, with its abundant flow of crystal-clear water cascading amid the lush, bluegrass lawns of Denver’s City Park, looks like any public fountain in any public park.

But there’s a striking difference. The water in that fountain--and, indeed, much of the water pouring from fountains and faucets here on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains--is water that has defied the laws of gravity.

Because there is not enough water on the eastern slope of the Rockies to meet the needs of the “Front Range Megalopolis”--the scattered chain of cities running from Albuquerque to Cheyenne--local governments have filled the gap by moving water across the Continental Divide.

A multibillion-dollar array of dams and canals, high-powered pumps and tunnels moves fresh water hundreds of miles from the western slope across the mountains to the thirsty cities here on the high plains.

Because the water infrastructure throughout the arid West was built largely with federal dollars, westerners historically have had little economic incentive to preserve their sparse water.

In fact, the people of Denver and other cities throughout the West are far more profligate in water use than their cousins back East.

Today, though, with federal funds drying up, water is becoming a costlier commodity throughout the mountain and basin states. And that has created a new economic opportunity for companies selling a new idea: water conservation.

A whole range of new products and services have sprung up in this region over the past five years or so to help folks cut their water bills by cutting consumption.

But among the more ingenious of the water-conservation businesses have been those offering a new line of landscaping and horticultural products grouped under the general term xeriscape .

Xeriscape, a neologism coined from the Greek root xeros, or dry, is a back-to-nature business based on the idea that certain flowers, grasses and shrubs have flourished for centuries in desert climates.

By planting those species in place of the familiar rose gardens and bluegrass lawns imported here from the more humid East Coast, homeowners, businesses and governments can dramatically cut their use of water.

In eastern cities like Washington and Baltimore, average water use per person each day runs about 120 gallons (a little more in summer, less in winter). In Denver the per capita daily usage is almost double--230 gallons. In Phoenix it’s 250 gallons. Out in the middle of the Arizona desert, in the retirement community called Carefree, people consume about 750 gallons of water each per day, according to the Fresh Water Society, a conservation group.

This is not because people in Carefree take more showers than Baltimoreans, or because Denver makes more iced tea than D.C.

Rather, the difference in consumption is almost all outside, where people, businesses and parks departments water their lawns and plants. Since Carefree gets less than one-fourth as much rain each year as Washington does, its residents run the sprinklers much, much more.

The theory underlying xeriscape landscapes is that these consumption figures could be drastically cut if people in this dry land would switch to dry-land plants.

The name xeriscape and much of the impetus behind this emerging idea came from the Denver Water Board, which supplies fresh water to cities and suburbs along the Colorado Front Range.

The water board began an intensive search some years back for a landscaping alternative to the lush but thirsty lawns grown from eastern grasses. John Wilder, a Denver conservation officer, found an obscure text on the topic entitled “Xerophilic Plants.” A light flashed in his head, and the term xeriscape was born.

Today, the xeriscape philosophy has become a hardy perennial and a top producer for seed companies, landscape firms and garden-implement makers throughout the West.

“We have had a sizable increase in business--sizable--over the past three to five years by selling low-water-use plants,” said Lon Carbaugh of Anderson Seed Co., a Greeley, Colo.-based nursery and seed catalogue house.

“The business comes mostly from new construction, from landscaping in cities and around new building sites,” Carbaugh said. “We have golf courses buying these low-water-use grass seeds too. The initial cost of the seed is more expensive right now because the demand is so high. But with the water rates going up, there are real savings down the line with these new grasses.”

Nearly every nursery or seed company from Montana to Arizona now offers a wide variety of xeriscape plants and grasses, and there are firms sprouting throughout the region that deal solely in unthirsty plants.

Judith Phillips noticed during hikes in the New Mexico desert that nature has spawned a huge variety of plants that survive beautifully in this arid region without hoses or sprinklers.

She turned that observation into a business in Albuquerque, Bernardo Beach Native Plants, that is flourishing on trade with landscapers and real-estate developers seeking an alternative to the familiar, but thirsty, bluegrass lawn.

The idea has spread as well to some of the national seed companies, including the biggest of them all, W. Atlee Burpee Co. The newest Burpee catalogue includes several pages of drought-resistant flowers like gaillardia and Texas bluebonnet and low-water native grasses like feathertop.

In addition to plants, the xeriscape idea has also sparked business opportunities for garden implement firms--companies like California-based Rain Bird Irrigation, which sells a surprisingly varied line of water-conserving sprinkler and garden-irrigation systems.

Developers in Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque and Tucson now regularly boast in full-page ads that their new subdivisions come with xeriscape lawns.

But does xeriscaping mean that every lawn or park has to look like the Sonoran desert? Not at all, say the advocates of the new idea.

“One of our biggest jobs is getting across to people that xeriscape is not a bunch of sand and rocks with a couple of yucca plants and cactus,” said Ed Reutz of the Denver Water Board. “Xeriscape lawns can be all green. Xeriscape gardens have as much variety of flowers and colors as you’d find in a formal English garden.”

The most common xeriscape alternatives to the bluegrass or fescue lawns transplanted here from moister climates are buffalo grass and blue gamma, which happens to be the official state grass of Colorado.

Such lawns are generally grown from seed. They look richly green until about the end of June, when the western summers turn dry and windy. Then they go to a greenish-yellow for the rest of the summer, and come back green again the following spring. Unlike bluegrass lawns, a lawn of blue gamma generally needs no watering other than the sparse summer rains.

From a distance, a blue gamma lawn looks like bluegrass, at least until the dog days of summer. Up close, though, it’s easy to see that the dry-land grasses don’t provide the same thick blanket of coverage as an eastern lawn, and they don’t have the same springy feel underfoot.

In the flower garden, species like gaillardia, or “blanket flower,” a deep red daisy-like flower with petals tipped a bright yellow, and the soft blue Rocky Mountain penstemon, the perfectly formed yellow cinquefoil, and orange or red coreopsis all make easy-to-grow non-thirsty alternatives to zinnias and marigolds.

There are hundreds of flowering plants native to arid regions; more and more have been domesticated and put on sale in nurseries because of the xeriscape boom.

“We started with a basic catalogue of real safe xeriscape stuff,” said Pat Hayward of the Little Valley Nursery, a big plant wholesaler in Brighton, Colo. “Now it contains about 1,000 varieties.” While demand for low-water-use plants is growing--particularly among landscaping professionals--Hayward said, “the concept requires a little more education for a lot of home gardeners.

“We don’t call them ‘xeriscape’ plants. That seems so complicated,” Hayward continued. “We call them native, or dry-land, or water-smart. And they sell. Every time one of these towns around here has a water-rate increase, they sell even better.”