City Nature

In the midst of ongoing news about Southwestern water scarcity, Martha Retallick sees an opportunity. For 20 years, she has been transforming her central Tucson home into an urban oasis. The secret to her success: Water harvesting. Since Retallick purchased her central Tucson home in 2004, she has incorporated two types of water harvesting – passive and active – into her landscape. Passive water harvesting is simply the act of sculpting the landscape to direct the water to where it should be – like plants – and away from where it shouldn’t be – like a home’s foundation. Retallick’s landscape incorporates three passive water harvesting features – basins, berms, and drainage swales. Collectively, these earthworks eliminate the need for landscape irrigation that’s connected to the municipal water supply, which is served by Tucson Water. According to Tucson Water, approximately 40 percent of water use in Tucson is outdoors. This includes residential uses like landscape irrigation and garden watering. Retallick’s irrigation-free landscape also includes two active water harvesting features, a 1,500-gallon cistern that collects rainwater for use in the back-yard vegetable garden, and a laundry-to-landscape greywater harvesting system that diverts wastewater from the washing machine to three fruit trees. City Nature is illustrated with more than 60 of Retallick’s color photographs, which show the wide variety of plant life on her property, the birds she shares it with, and her various do-it-herself projects, the most notable being a kinetic sculpture created from a recycled chandelier. The book also includes a list of suggested resources that encompasses books, websites, organizations, and businesses that can aid readers interested in desert gardening and landscaping, and in water conservation.