A very short ten years ago I couldn't imagine myself living in the desert - a mountain girl in the Pacific Northwest in need of white peaks, towering green trees, water and soft, needle-bedded trails under my feet. But a friend in northern Nevada tempted me into moving to the Reno/Tahoe area, where I spent the next six years falling in love with fire-red sunsets, orographic rainfall patterns, harsh temperature fluctuations, alkaline soils, gritty dust storms, the wide open, unprotected spaces and the itchy cactus underfoot. There's a strange breathing rhythm, an erratically beating heart to the desert. And it pulses and throbs away unnoticed under what non-desert-lovers see only as dead, dry land.

But I feel it. And I found my own heartbeat in the dust, and now I can't imagine living anywhere else. Even here in Colorado I've chosen the state's driest, highest desert near the New Mexico border - a region that sees only seven inches of rain a year (on a good year). We bought five acres of heaven here, as far as I'm concerned, but with one small price.

We have no trees. Our land sits at the far edge of the alluvials of the Blanca Massif, just before the landscape flattens out again into valley. The tree line with all its charming grottos and hammock-friendliness is a good mile or more up the slope. We've got beautiful chamisa, silver thread grasses, prickly pear cactus, even a few sprinklings of indian paintbrush. But nothing more than two feet high, and nothing sturdy enough to provide shelter from the wicked winds that blow across the area. So shortly after we purchased the land, we set off to plan our planting strategy... Read Full Article

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