 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. This water-wise Phoenix yard is what landscape designer Cary Nimmer calls a salvage garden. Cary, can you tell us what you mean by salvage garden? Sure, Curtis. A salvage yard or salvage garden is one that contains plants that have been basically taken out of harm's way. We have a lot of development in the Phoenix area and when the bulldozer comes there are some very valuable plants in the way such as Suaro, Akatiyo, Blue Palaverdees and many of the things that are in this landscape we have actually brought in that could have been totally obliterated. What are some of the plants here that you've salvaged? Well, normally an Akatiyo would be a very valuable salvage plant but we were lucky enough to have one here so we left it and we're taking good care of it and it's looking pretty good right now but we also have Blue Palaverde would be one and the Little Leaf Palaverdee which are actually there's on estate trees. We've craned in a few of those. We have a lot of fire barrel cactus. Even common plants such as a jojoba when it's salvage is very beautiful and tortured looking so we've brought those in too as well as some hedgehog cacti and even the wildflower seed I must mention has been harvested many times from the wild and brought in so we have a large variety of life forms in this garden that have been salvaged. Do these plants have any special requirements? The first requirement would be to transplant them at the proper time of year. We generally are not transplanting most of these trees except maybe a mesquite tree in the dead of winter. We would prefer to transplant them when they're beginning to actively grow in late spring, early summer. Another requirement would be watering. You have to give them water to establish themselves because a salvaged plant is an injured plant and we don't want to flood them but during that time year when it's warming up and temperatures are in the 90s and then into the 100s these trees are going to be needing water. How fast will these plants grow? That's a great question because actually many desert trees grow very quickly sometimes as much as four feet in a year if water is applied when they're actively growing. Can we see one of these trees? Yes, let's go over here. This is a really large Palo Verde. How did you get this one in here? That's a good story actually because this is a salvaged tree that was brought in by a crane on the back of a very large truck that basically this tree's roots were cut off. It was put in a box. It was lifted out of the ground. It was brought here from a tree salvaged yard. This is a desert to Verde in this case and actually lifted into the air and set very gently into a pre-dug hole. Don't do this at home yourself. This is not something you can go out with your shovel and do. No, I would say you might better work with a professional landscape architect or landscape designer because you can imagine how many tons of tree this might be dangling in the air. Are there any legal requirements when you're salvaging a tree? Well yes, they have to have permission to do it and the salvaged trees and cacti for that matter will have a special tag on them which is why you shouldn't be buying this stuff off the side of the road. And once you get it here, is this something you'd want to prune into a single trunk tree? Oh, that's a great point. You can see how many beautiful trunks this tree has and the natural form of a desert tree would be multi or many trunked, many stemmed. They don't like to be pruned into little lollipops with one stem. And this tree is much more valuable because it has several large trunks. I think it's a lot prettier because it has multiple trunks. Well, I'm glad you appreciate that because certainly it gives a lot more shade also and it's not as injured so it ended up doing very well for us once we put water on it. This is a really amazing garden. Yeah, we call this the bodacious landscape also. It's not just amazing. This is a great thing to do to go out and salvage plants that would otherwise be lost because there's so many wonderful native plants nearby. And that's the name of the game. Appreciating the beauty that's all around us as we create more homes and develop properties we really need to keep a sense of place and that's what the native plants do give us. Thank you.