Project designed to show how to keep local yards beautiful as withering drought persists
Lauren Mcgue knows the beauty of plants all too well. She’s worked at the UNR Extension’s 7-acre outdoor educational Botanic Gardens on Paradise Road and Windmill Lane since she was a teenager, observing tall cacti basking in the dry Southern Nevada sun and beautiful blooms cultivated during the region’s winter months.
Now, she manages the place and is making it her latest mission to show locals that their yards can still be beautiful even amid strict regulations on water usage.
“People seem to be unaware of the choices that they can make to have a more attractive yet water-smart yard,” said Mcgue, who has managed the Botanic Gardens since 2021. “Desert landscaping doesn’t need to be brown and gray and unappealing. It can be colorful, and we can actually have attractive, cool landscaping here.”
The gardens this month unveiled a new exhibit featuring three miniature houses with water-smart gardens meant to emulate the typical front yard of a single-family home.
Each garden has a theme: year-round color, where at least one plant will bloom at every point of the year; edible landscapes, which include plants that can be consumed in some form; and the xeriscape that showcases some of the most
extreme drought-tolerant plants.
Dubbed the “Three Landscapes Demonstration,” the project has been in the works for about six years. M.L. Robinson, an extension specialist, and Angela O’callaghan, a former extension faculty member, originally had the idea to create an exhibit showing Southern Nevadans how they could incorporate landscaping suitable for the desert climate.
“It’s great to see this project come to fruition,” Robinson said in a news release. “They really provide some insight on what you can do with a landscape while still being water conscious.
As the landscapes mature and fill in, I think residents will really be inspired to make some changes to their own yards.”
The West is mired in a drought that’s lasted two decades and shows no signs of ending. Though water levels in the Colorado River improved because of a wetter-than-normal winter, water from Lake Mead will be alloted under federally mandated reductions for a third consecutive year, according to a recent report released by the Bureau of Reclamation.
The conservation efforts include the Nevada Legislature in 2021 passing a law that dictates the removal of “nonfunctional grass” by 2026 in a move officials say will remove about one-third of grass in Southern Nevada. Additionally, new homes aren’t allowed to have grass yards, because water used outside is wasted — whereas indoor use is recycled.
But that doesn’t mean the landscaping design has to be unappealing, Mcgue said.
“Many people are opposed to water-smart landscaping, because they think that it will be unattractive, or they think that xeriscaping is zero-scaping — like zero plants — and that’s not what that means,” Mcgue said. “I think it’s just important to know that, while turf grass may not be allowed anymore, you can still have attractive ground covers; you can still have a cool yard; and you can still have a beautiful green space.”
An average single-family home uses about 125,000 gallons of water a year, Southern Nevada Water Authority spokesman Bronson Mack said. Homes in general use about 60% of the water supplied to Nevada each year, and Southern Nevada consumed about 224,000 acre-feet of water — around 73 billion gallons — in 2022.
Through its Water Smart Landscape Rebate Program — which rebates residential properties, businesses, HOAS and multifamily properties $3 per square foot of grass taken out — the water authority said more than 210 million square feet of grass has been removed.
It’s a move that has saved over 170 billion gallons of water since 1999, even despite a population growth of more than 745,000 people, the authority said.
This is in addition to the Las Vegas Valley Water District’s service rules that prohibit grass and spray irrigation systems from being installed in new homes constructed after April 2022 to update a rule prohibiting grass in front yards and limiting it in the side and backyards of houses built between 2003 and April 2022.
Additionally, the passage of Assembly Bill 220 this spring by the Nevada Legislature paves the way for the water authority to limit water use for residential homes in Clark County to about 163,000 gallons a year when the region is hit with federal restrictions on the Colorado River, Mack said.
It was historic legislation, with Nevada becoming the nation’s first state to allow a water agency to limit use at residential homes.
Balancing needs
Mcgue said the design process involved “balancing all the different needs” of the gardens as well as the local water restrictions. Each of the yards follows water authority rules, including watering schedules that prohibit daytime and Sunday watering.
A big part of that conservation element is the type of plants used, Mcgue said. During the design process, she developed a database of the plants used and their bloom seasons to ensure the times all lined up.
Many of the plants — like the tequila agave in the edible garden or kurapia, a ground-cover plant developed for drought conditions — were chosen intentionally, Mcgue said. Even the local bees and other native pollinators were taken into consideration when Mcgue was choosing which plants they would be most willing to pollinate.
Although the plants are drought-tolerant, they still require some water to survive and get their fill from a series of drip irrigation systems installed to fit each demonstration’s needs.
Mcgue said the irrigation was another important aspect because “water restrictions really are focused on the use of water to irrigate the plants, it’s not the plant itself.”
“Most of the plants that we do have in the landscapes can be purchased locally, pretty easily because we didn’t want to show these landscapes and then have people unable to emulate them or do that kind of water-smart landscaping in their own yard,” Mcgue said.
Mcgue encourages locals to switch to these water-smart gardens in an effort to “prepare for the future” when conservation efforts could become even stricter.
The extension wants to help people get started. They are giving free seeds from the Botanic Garden’s Native Seed Bank, where some 40 species of plants are carried, including cacti and other plants incorporated into the demonstration.