Their mission — and they decided to accept it — was to design a garden for a space the size of carport and install it in three days.
Sonya Becker of Northwest Landscaping LLC won the judge’s award in the third annual Growdown at Tucson Botanical Gardens in mid-March.
She also took a people’s choice award for best harvesting feature in her “Desert Delight” design.
Landscape designers Barbara Wilson and Dara Widner took a people’s choice nod for best garden art in their entry “Tucson Feng Shui.”
Margaret Joplin of Design Collaborations contributed “Simple Beauty.”
Their entries present innovative ideas on how to landscape a backyard. Here are six.
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Artful water harvesting, part 1. Becker’s winning system collects water from a steel patio roof into a gutter that from below looks like a beam for the roof.
From the end of that roof, the gutter stair-steps to guide water into a 3-foot-tall ceramic pot. Water overflows from the pot into a series of catchment basins, then through a channel directly into a bed of plants.
“This is a decorative approach to passive water harvesting and you get a waterfall effect,” Becker says.
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Artful water harvesting, part 2. Joplin’s design is not connected to the gutters around the house. Instead, a scupper on the roof shoots water into a gutter at the top of a steel pole. At the end of the gutter is a decorative rain chain.
The water flows down the chain into a huge steel bowl with an underground pipe. That pipe would guide water into the landscape of desert-adapted plants.
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Feng shui-inspired. Widner didn’t use feng-shui principles to affect the flow of chi, or life energy, in the garden. Instead, she used the Chinese philosophy of positioning natural elements as inspiration for art and decor.
She and Wilson packed the garden with those natural elements: plants that attract birds, a bubbling fountain to add water, a fire pit and stone gabions.
To reflect the use of constellations in feng shui, Widner embedded into the patio floor a compass mosaic made of pebbles.
