Dallas landscape contractor Jim Martinez is in such high demand in Marfa, Texas, for his brand of drought-tolerant, self-reliant, native-plant gardens that he's building a second home there so he can sleep in his own bed.
Marfa, in far West Texas near Big Bend, is ahead of Dallas and its suburbs in the practice of xeriscape gardening. That is, eschewing turf grasses and water-needy perennials, shrubs and trees in favor of native and adapted plants that can flourish in heat, humidity and on natural rainfall with little, if any, supplementary irrigation.
Denizens of this high desert learned long ago that it is easier to work with the natural climate than try to outwit it. Marfa has a tougher climate than Dallas, or so we assume; water resources there always have been precious and carefully meted out.
But with a continuing drought, stressed water reserves and our extremes of heat and humidity compounded by hot summer nights, Dallas is a less hospitable place to garden – at least as this city has done it, as if we have all the water in the world.
Though he has lived in Dallas for several decades, Martinez has never created an English-style garden for himself or others here. He grew up in northern New Mexico, a high-desert setting similar to Marfa. His Native-American heritage, with its reverence for Mother Earth, also played a role in his development as a landscape designer who works with the climate, not in spite of it.
At his Oak Cliff residence near Methodist Hospital, Martinez gardens on top of what natives call chalk rock, part of the limestone escarpment that stretches from San Antonio through Austin and the Hill Country to North Texas. Nutrients are thin, at best.
Martinez, who considers himself a soil scientist, believes understanding the native soil and amending to enrich it is key to healthy plants and abundant growth. "If you manage the soil correctly," he says, "then you don't have to manage the plants so much."
The jagged terrain in front of Martinez's Austin-stone house is downright florid. There is no front lawn to mow (the annual acorn crop is nuisance enough). Stone footpaths wind through perennials and reseeding annuals that tumble, weave and spike at will – nature's will, not the gardener's. Because he allows plants to have their way, Martinez's garden changes with the seasons; birds plant seeds via berries they ingest, wind-blown seedheads settle and sprout far from the mother plant, and several species send runners to form new colonies.
He is happy to let his garden surprise him.
"I like to use natives so people can see how beautiful they are," Martinez says. He counts the many species of Salvias and Penstemons among his old reliables as well as native wildflowers he can grow from seed.
It is in Marfa where Martinez has fallen head over heels for native grasses and their hybrids. Though he uses showy hybrids singly in Dallas projects for effect, in Marfa grasses substitute for lawn, flowers, shrubs and specimen trees.
Like the artwork that put Marfa on the international cultural map, many of Martinez's landscapes there are minimalist in design and execution. One property is planted with a precise grid of muhly grass, whose graceful, tall, pink plumes in fall stand out against the soft grays of Marfa's adobes.
"I use a lot of native grasses, which is something that's happening now. Grama grass is sacred in Apache land, you know," says Martinez, who was raised near Albuquerque and Las Cruces, and counts among his ancestors those who came from Spain with Cortez in 1593.
"Even though the high desert is a minimalist landscape, why does it have all this energy about it?" he asks rhetorically, casting his arm in a broad arc. He's referring to the Texas sky, the grays and greens of plant life, the black lava flows, frozen in time, and the Quaker-plain colors of the birds that hide in sparse vegetation; there's an indefinable power that fills the spirit.
Instead of planting live oaks, Martinez says he offers his clients Emory oaks, alligator oaks, persimmons, Mexican elderberries and desert willows, tough trees whose genes evolved to survive the West Texas climate. Instead of annual bedding plants, such as begonias and impatiens for intense summer color, he plants hardy native perennials, including many species of succulents, and annuals that are easy to grow from seed. He plants them once, then the flowers' natural cycles generously take over from there.
Martinez's modus operandi makes sense for landscapes whose owners might visit this remote town once a month or less. It also makes sense in a city such as Dallas, where water can no longer be taken for granted.