Your desert yard doesn’t have to be a dry, empty wasteland. Some of the Valley’s best landscape experts have unique ideas to bring a little life to your home’s exterior.
Jeff Berghoff and his company, Berghoff Design Group, has become a local favorite for luxurious landscape design. This landscape designer is an Arizona native and knows all the tricks of the trade when it comes to planting in the hot desert climate. “I can’t think of a better place to be doing what I do just because of our seasons and our growing season and just how Arizona is a place where you want to be outdoors,” Berghoff says. “You really get to celebrate nature and what a great place to do what I do.”
Despite having his roots in the Sonoran Desert, Berghoff isn’t known for his work with desert landscapes. Working on larger estates, he has come to find that they aren’t usually the place for a native design. “The homes we do are homes that typically embody a greener garden or a garden that is not so cactus-y or not so Sonoran.”
When the firm got its first commission in 1997, Berghoff decided that saguaros and citrus trees just didn’t mix. “Usually with these estate-type homes with big grounds there will be parts of the home that might be more native and as you get up to the home, people typically want lawns for the kids, lawns to entertain or they want to have maybe a softer palette that’s not so native.”
To do this, he brought in green plants that work in the desert environment. Knowing that water is so precious, he tries to use low water-use plants whenever possible. Luckily, he has discovered a few different species that do just that. He gets a lot of his green from the sage and salvia plant families. “The salvias usually have a deeper green leaf and then have a very colorful flower; some are purple, some are red,” he explains. “The sages come in silvers and greens. They have blooms that are more purple-y; some are white some are more lavender looking.” Another favorite to bring some green to the dry area is the Live Oak tree, which also uses low amounts of water. One important factor that he says must get attention is sun exposure. He said the trick is to know which exposures work best for certain plants.
The signature part of many of Berghoff’s designs is moving away from the typical purple or yellow flowers that thinks he “can feel very institutional…commercial or shopping center-like.” Instead, he likes to go with white. “To me, in a garden, white pops,” he says. “I like to just get that sparkle of white.” 480.481.3433, http://berghoffdesign.com/.
