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You are here: Home / New Mexico / My Garden In Drought

My Garden In Drought

April 26th, 2014 by Sallie Bingham in New Mexico 2 Comments

Garden, Spring 2014 Garden, Spring 2014 Garden, Spring 2014 Garden, Spring 2014 Garden, Spring 2014 Garden, Spring 2014 Garden, Spring 2014 Garden, Spring 2014

This spring, for the first time in my twenty-three years in Santa Fe, I will not be planting a flower garden.

At least, it will be much diminished: five large pots of annuals rather than twelve—all requiring three-times-a-week watering, and we are now only allowed two—and a strip outside my bathroom rather than a big expanse of English–type annuals and perennials, which were never suitable to the southwest even in wetter years but were the sign and signal of east coast and west coast refugees.

I still have the bluegrass lawn an earlier owner planted, now so deep rooted I can’t beat to pull it out, although I did replace a small patch with gravel. The bluegrass is watered by buried irrigation pipes; that doesn’t lose as much to evaporation as hand watering does, but still…

And now I’m debating resigning from my health club because it uses unconscionable amounts of water for its golf course—golf courses should never have been allowed here. A news photo shows an above-ground sprayer soaking a cement sidewalk.

This spring, for the first time in my twenty-three years in Santa Fe, I will not be planting a flower garden.

But back to my garden. The plants that do thrive here are the same plants I see on my hikes; they adapt well to drought and the thin sandy soil. These plants really don’t require any watering at all. But they are spindly and prickly and harsh, as befits the desert, and bear no resemblance to the flowers and leaves that evoke Andrew Marvell’s “Green thought in a green shade.”

The desert plants are handsome and strongly defensive—several of them have slashed my legs when I passed too close. They remind me of the skinned-off patches I’ve seen here and there on the trunks of the Ponderosa, strips carved off by hungry Native sheepherders on their way to market in Santa Fe. They chewed the bark until it was soft and the saliva that produced took the place of food, at least for a while.

I wonder how we who seems so soft, even swollen now, with our comforts that have become necessities will adapt to what’s coming.

A wire-service article in the New Mexican reported that scientists have begun to study the species that will be able to adapt: those that are not picky about what they eat.

I think of the fussiness we have all come to accept as our natural right: no sugar, no salt, no saturated fat, no allergy-provoking nuts, no cow’s milk, and now no gluten. We’re not like the desert salamander that will eat anything that crawls or flies past. We are more like the rapidly disappearing Pinyon Jay who will only eat the nuts of a tree that is itself dying from the drought.

And yet, there is hope in these spindly, sharp-edged desert plants. One of the cactus pushes up a ten foot tall spike with a bloom on top every ten years, and then dies. It reminds me of Sido, Colette’s mother, who turned down a chance to visit her beloved daughter in Paris because a once-in-ten-years plant was about to bloom.

I think the harshness of what is coming, for all of us, may produce some rare blooms.

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In New Mexico drought My Garden

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Jim Voyles says

    April 26th, 2014 at 10:55 am

    I love getting these essays from Sallie. Any writing of hers is always worthwhile. Last week, in the Loire Valley, we often saw the symbol of the salamander which was supposed to eat fire.

    Reply
  2. Eric Gent on Facebook says

    April 27th, 2014 at 6:06 am

    Yes, it looks likes it will be a rough one.

    Reply

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