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135 TheOutback it was a number of years before we addressed the issue of the outer garden, which we came to know as the Outback. There wasn’t much there when we arrived; three native mesquites, a small saguaro badly in need of care, a foothills palo verde in the farthest corner, and dozens of creosote. This area faces west for the most part, with most of it higher than the rest of the yard. It was, all in all, a hot, severe place, surrounded on three sides by the alleys. Along the wall that separated the Outback from the rest of the garden was a large oleander whose origins were baffling. Could anyone truly have planted it to face the abandoned area and the alleys? Perhaps—but all former owners were long gone, and both it and the bunny ears prickly pear (Opuntia microdasys) just seemed odd and out of place. We never watered the oleander or the prickly pear on purpose, and eventually took out the cactus when it had lived long past its prime and was in the way of other projects. But we did start a campaign to rescue the saguaro. I spend a lot of time with newcomers and novice gardeners and invariably , one of the things that baffles them the most is the care of succulents, especially cactus. Most have never lived with succulents, except perhaps for one or two in pots on the porch. I have come to understand that for many people these exquisitely adapted plants don’t register as “real” plants in the same way that shrubs, or trees, or salvias do. I have had people ask me in all earnestness whether cactus ever need watering. I have been bewildered by people who acknowledge the fruit on their cactus but insist it never 136 • A Place All Our Own bloomed. I have even had people ask me if they are in fact plants, and it is all I can do to wonder what else they think they might be. Many species of cacti, saguaro in particular, are native and more or less abundant throughout this area, and loads of gardeners here, experienced and not, imagine that they can just live on their own without any intervention from us, regardless of the circumstances. But here is what I have learned by living with these wonders for a long time and watching them grow in my garden and others. Where saguaros thrive in natural and exuberant abundance is where it is warm, like here, but where there is about twice the annual rainfall of the Phoenix area. This doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t grow here or elsewhere—they clearly do—but often they are either relics hanging on to a historic range, or they are in poor condition, or both. Given all that, I remain firm in my conviction that here in the low desert supplemental water about once a month in the summer is necessary to maintain a healthy saguaro, irrespective of its size. In addition, I have learned that it takes a large slug of water to rehydrate a severely depleted plant, and it is best if that water is delivered in stages rather than all at once. I am reminded of a starving dog: you can’t give it all the food it needs at once, it will just throw it up because its poor system can’t handle all that bounty at once; but let it absorb a bit by little bit over time, and its entire system understands once again how to absorb and take in food. It is much the same with badly abused plants, including saguaros, and boy have I seen a bunch of abused ones. The greatest sin visited upon these wonderful plants is to take large ones, yank them out of the ground, put them in a new place and fail to water them at all under the delusion that they are native so they can grow just fine. Well they could if they had a functional root system, which of course they don’t right off, or if they had much the same watering schedule over time that they had in their former home, which is an iffy proposition at best. So when I looked at the little fella out in the outer garden and saw how depleted he was, how tiny the expanse between its ribs had become, and how soft the skin was, I knew it would...

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