Preparing the Desert Garden and Embracing Summer Routines

Preparing the Desert Garden and Embracing Summer Routines

I've spent the last two days working in the gardens, getting them ready for summer. Summer in the Sonoran Desert is completely different from the experience in the Midwest, on the East Coast, or on the West Coast. I always tell people on my hikes and walks that our winter is really our summertime, when we tend to stay inside and only venture out very early or late in the evenings when the sun has gone down. I’ve been getting up around 3 am and adjusting my routine to this earlier time.

As far as the gardens go, a lot of the indigenous plants slow down, and some go dormant. They'll pop right back up with the next monsoon rain. Our garden is well-established, so I've been moving plants around, remembering what I learned in master gardener classes: right plant, right place. With the sun moving in different directions through the seasons, I can relocate plants to places where they'll actually survive the summer. Not many flowers here in the summer heat. We try not to have thirsty plant beings not accustomed to the heat. Most plants are just learning to survive the exhausting temperatures. All our plants are low-water—if they're not indigenous to Arizona, they're indigenous to a desert or dry place somewhere on this Earth.

One thing I was really pleased about: when Greg and I were driving through Morocco and Spain—Andalusia specifically—I saw oleanders growing in the wild. It was odd because I'd only known them to be domesticated here in Arizona, but it turns out that in that part of the world, they're indigenous. I have a new appreciation for our oleanders now. When I look at them, I remember the Atlas Mountains, the countryside of Marrakesh, and the beautiful drive from Madrid to Granada.

How the Plant Nations Respond to Summer

The Sonoran Desert is the most biologically diverse of the four North American deserts, with 2,000-4,000+ plant species, 350-500+ bird species, and approximately 1,000 bee species, representing the highest known diversity of bee species in the world. What makes this place so remarkable is the bimodal rainfall pattern—two distinct rainy seasons that bring life in different ways. Summer monsoon storms arrive between July and early September, bringing half the annual rainfall, sometimes in a single storm. These rains follow the hottest and driest season, and they're critical for the plants, animals, and insects that depend on this cyclical relief.

Many of our native plants are drought-deciduous, intentionally losing their leaves during dry spells and regrowing with intensity after heavy rains. Creosote—that plant responsible for the intoxicating smell after the first monsoon rain—makes a dramatic transformation, turning from dry brown to lively green in a very short time. The palo verdes, ocotillos, and brittlebushes growing in the wild will all begin to slow down, conserving their life force for the monsoon rains.

Summer precipitation produces shallow soil moisture that plants with shallow root systems can utilize, while winter rains percolate deep into the soil for deeply rooted vegetation like mesquite. The mesquites have taproots that can grow deep into the ground, helping them hold fast in monsoon storms. Saguaros—those iconic beings that define our landscape—grow visibly plump after a wet monsoon season, their extensive shallow roots capturing ephemeral moisture before it evaporates. They obtain most of their moisture during the summer rainy season.

But not all the plant nations automatically attempt to reproduce every year—they wait until sufficient rain has fallen to make the investment of energy worthwhile. Brittlebush blooms most years generously but holds back its yellow flowers during drought. This is the kind of intelligence and agency that gets overlooked when we think of plants as passive organisms.

Morning Walks and Consciousness

My newest favorite podcast channel has been accompanying my morning walks. This morning's episode was on the science and study of consciousness, and it reinforced some of my belief systems about "plant being" and our relationships with all living beings.

The episode explored panpsychism—the philosophical view that consciousness or mind-like qualities are fundamental and universal features of reality, not just properties of brains or living organisms, but of all matter. Rather than seeing consciousness as something that emerged from complex biological processes, panpsychism holds that it's baked into the very fabric of the universe. This doesn't mean a rock thinks like a human—instead, even the simplest particles possess an extremely rudimentary form of subjective experience, and human consciousness is simply a highly complex variation of this universal quality.

This resonates so deeply with my work in indigenous foodways and desert ecology. When I teach about Sonoran Desert plants, I'm not just talking about botanical specimens; I'm talking about beings with whom we share this place, beings that have consciousness and agency in ways we're only beginning to understand. The indigenous communities I work with have known this for thousands of years.

The Tohono O'odham—the Desert People—plant tepary beans, squash, corn, melons, and other crops biannually to take advantage of the rhythm of summer and winter rains. Their fields are designed to catch water washing across the land after storms, channeling it to areas prepared for planting. They scatter their desert plots widely among several washes to maximize the chances that even scattered thunderstorms will soak at least one field. This is a relationship, a conversation between people and the land.

When I watch my garden plants and the desert plants on my morning hikes drop their leaves, conserve energy, and wait—they're making decisions. When the saguaros expand and contract with water availability, when the creosote releases its oils after rain, when the brittlebush decides whether to bloom this year or not, these are expressions of consciousness, of being. We're all part of the same fabric.

The Cats and the Heat

The heat is also changing routines around here. Our cats—Stretch and Chica, who are inside-outside cats—are adapting. Stretch is feral, a hunter. Over the past week, he's brought two dead birds to the back door. Today, as I was getting ready to paint planters in the garden, I watched him tossing around a little squirrel before eating it all. Greg always laughs at me because I think Stretch is the pickiest eater, but then when I see him crunching on those things—more than grossing me out, I think, oh, that's his nature.

One thing I really like about our cats is that they have some sense of that hunter instinct. That's why I don't put birdseed or anything in the yard—I don't want to contribute to the mass murder of birds. They go somewhere, find them, bring them back, and drop them in the backyard. Very kind of them, but they can keep it back there as far as I'm concerned.

Outdoor Living

I'm preparing the yard for summer by painting pots and tidying things up. I've been cooking outside more now than I do inside. All my meats, vegetable grills, bacon—anything that needs heat, I'm at peace in the outside kitchen, and I’ve put together a little space outside where I sit and write in the morning.

We'll hit triple digits for multiple days next week, and then it'll only keep rising from there. The desert—and all of us who live here, plant nations and animal relatives alike—are shifting into our summer rhythms, waiting for the monsoons that will bring the next cycle of life.


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