By Lauren Springer Ogden

	An Ogden garden transitions seamlessly to the wild landscape with low-growing conifers, perennials, and grasses. The path beckons with unwatered, luminous penstemons, catmint, sages, mulleins, and various grasses. Landscape design: Lauren and Scott Ogden www.plantdrivendesign.com

The rugged natural beauty of the Rocky Mountain West comes with a price: scarce water. Xeriscape describes a garden that responds to both this beauty and aridity. All too often, however, such an attempt comes off stark, sparse, and limited in its plant palette. How can a xeriscape be made more romantic, evocative, and lush?

First, the site needs to be romanced. If there’s a chance for a view or an open feeling, this should be exploited. Meadows, rock gardens, and steppe plantings are a few of the landscape styles that can reflect this western aesthetic.

Intimacy in the garden develops through the fine-tuned interplay of plants and nonliving materials—boulders, flagstone, cobbles, gravel, or wood. A sculptural succulent can be embraced by a billowing mass of golden alyssum, set off by a gently rounded, lichen-encrusted boulder. Maintaining a natural grace in the garden requires blurring the edges of any architectural surface. Nonliving materials or hardscape offers microclimates and water storage or diversion as well as interesting design opportunities, but it is best not given top billing. Plants should always come first, gently dominating and softening whatever structures they grow near.

As for those plants, the stars: A wide variety of tough, beautiful, drought-resistant, and soil-adaptable plants can make their homes in xeriscapes. Penstemons, poppies, salvias, and hyssops are showstoppers. Dwarf spruces, pines, and firs give year-round evergreen interest and lend an instant settled, rugged air that helps to age a new garden. A variety of grasses celebrates this region’s wind and light and lends a graceful looseness.

A great number of the best plant players are native to the Rocky Mountain West, Great Plains, and Southwest, but many other superb choices come from the far reaches of the globe, such as the Mediterranean, Central Asia, and southern Africa, where similar climatic and soil challenges exist. All can be a part of western gardens that not only conserve water but are rich, colorful, and diverse.