Xeriscaping as a planting plan
Denver Water's seven principles, translated into a Front Range yard that is planted, not graveled, with hydrozones and a smaller lawn.
Xeriscaping started as a Denver word. Denver Water put the term into use in 1981 for a landscaping approach that fits a semi-arid city. Denver Water’s own handbook lists the seven principles as plan and design, soil amendment, efficient irrigation, mulch, plant zones, alternative turf grasses, and maintenance.
Older write-ups say “practical turf” for the same idea as alternative turf. The order on the utility’s page is the one to follow. They are a sequence, not a shopping list, and they are not a synonym for gravel.
A yard of rock, a single yucca, and a plastic weed barrier fails the plant principle and usually fails the soil principle. It also fails in July, when the rock is too hot to stand near and the soil underneath has never been improved.
The region this site covers is larger than Denver Water’s service area. The principles travel. The plant list does not.
A Wasatch bench, a Cheyenne lot, and a Santa Fe adobe yard share the aridity and not the catalog. Use this page for the sequence, then the regional plant pages for the species.
Start with a plan that names the water
Draw the yard as places you actually use. A place to sit, a path to the door, a patch of lawn no bigger than the game or the dog requires, a vegetable bed near the hose, and a planted area you are willing to water only while it establishes.
Everything else is a candidate for plants that, after the second summer, live on precipitation plus an occasional deep soak in a drought. That drawing is the plan principle. It comes before you rent a sod cutter.
Group plants by water need. The irrigation page calls these hydrozones, and drip explains how to valve them. A vegetable bed, a new tree, a buffalo-grass panel, and a penstemon slope are four schedules. One sprinkler clock running all of them is how xeriscapes get a reputation for looking dead or for using as much water as the lawn they replaced.
Soil, then plants, then rock if you still want rock
Improve the soil where you are planting, not where you are pouring decorative gravel. Compost worked into a planting bed helps root growth in the clay and the thin mountain soils described by CSU. It does not mean you turn the whole property into a vegetable garden.
A xeric bed still needs roots to leave the hole. Dig wide, set the crown at grade, and water the plant in. The alkaline soil test matters here. A xeriscape full of acid-loving shrubs is an expensive way to learn about pH.
Then choose plants that fit the soil and the cold, from the Front Range, Wasatch, high plains, or northern New Mexico pages. “Drought tolerant” on a national tag is a hypothesis. A plant with a local record is a plan. Leave space for the mature size. Overplanting a xeric bed and then watering it like a nursery bench cancels the water savings and the plant health.
Mulch comes after planting, with a material that will stay in the wind. Wood chips for shrub beds, small gravel for plants that want sharp drainage, nothing piled on the crown.
The mulch page is the detail. Rock as the only surface, wall to wall, is the look that gave xeriscape a bad name. Use it as a path or as a narrow mulch, not as the design.
Turf is a tool, sized to the use
Practical turf means a shape you can water efficiently and a species that matches the sun.
A skinny strip along a hot sidewalk, a north-side patch in full shade, and a postage stamp on a steep slope are all impractical.
They are hard to irrigate and, in shade, impossible for buffalo grass. The lawn page compares buffalo grass, blue grama, and the smaller traditional lawn. Mow and water that area on purpose. Let the rest of the yard be something else.
If you are removing lawn, do not spray and gravel the same weekend and call it finished. Kill or strip the grass, amend the planting areas, install irrigation, plant, and mulch. A summer conversion without water on the new plants is a conversion you will do twice. Fall planting, where your first-frost date allows roots to grow, is often kinder than July.
Maintenance is the seventh principle because the other six decay
Xeric does not mean no work. It means different work.
Weed the beds while the weeds are small, because a mulch layer collects windblown seed. Check emitters. Replenish mulch. Water new plants the first summers.
Cut back perennials at the season that suits them, which for many Western perennials is late spring rather than autumn, so the crowns have a little cover through winter wind.
A yard that is “finished” and then ignored for three years becomes weeds in gravel, which uses neither the beauty of a planted bed nor the water savings you paid for.
Irrigation systems drift. A zone that was balanced when the plants were plugs will overwater them when they are mature, or underwater a tree whose emitters are still in a tight circle.
Walk the system in June with a probe. Adjust. Efficient irrigation is a habit, not a purchase.
A small Front Range sequence
For a typical lot around 5,000 to 6,000 feet with clay and full sun in the back:
- Keep a lawn panel only where people sit or play, in a simple shape a sprinkler can cover. Consider blue grama or buffalo grass if the sun is all day.
- Put vegetables in one or two raised beds on their own drip, near the kitchen door.
- Plant the parking strip and the hellstrip with grasses and perennials that tolerate heat and salt, not with a thirsty annual display.
- Use a small tree that can handle the soil, from the tree page, placed so it will not heave the walk. Water it for two summers.
- Mulch the shrub beds with chips. Leave a gravel path if you want the sound and the drainage.
- Budget a weeding hour. Write it down. The design depends on it.
A mountain-town version of the same sequence uses less buffalo grass, which dislikes shade and a very short season, and more of the hardy perennials and shrubs that actually live at that elevation. A Santa Fe version leans on the high-desert list and on summer monsoons that the Front Range cannot count on in the same way. The sequence is the same. The palette changes.
Checklist
- Draw use areas and hydrozones before you buy plants.
- Improve soil in planting beds. Do not expect gravel to be a soil amendment.
- Size the lawn to a shape you will water, in sun if you choose a warm-season grass.
- Put each water need on its own valve.
- Choose plants from a regional list, and water them through establishment.
- Mulch with a material that matches the plant and the wind.
- Maintain the yard. Xeriscape is not abandonment.
- Skip the all-gravel, all-fabric shortcut.
Sources
- Denver Water, water-wise landscaping and the seven xeriscape principles developed for the Denver region beginning in 1981.
- CSU Extension, Colorado Vegetable Guide, on semi-arid precipitation near 15 inches.
- CSU Extension, Iron Chlorosis of Woody Plants.
- Plant Select, the Denver Botanic Gardens and Colorado State University plant introduction program, for regionally trialed ornamentals.