Click here to download the map for the 2024 Placitas Garden Tour.
1. Legacy Color Garden
Subdivision: Anasazi Trails
Owner/ Designer: Linda and Ted Heath
Garden Type or Features: Trailing Rosemary, Iris, Cherry Sage Salvia, Tansy, Rose of Sharon, Photinia, Forsythia, and a Montmorency pie-cherry tree create ground-level and upper-level interest. Two beds of colored flowers frame a courtyard fountain and the mountains. There is also a shaded flower bed inside the covered patio.
Artist in the Garden: Seung Youn
Description: Ted and Linda Heath have spent 20 years bringing to life a living work of art that showcases their love of gardening and artistic composition. Climbing vines lead the spring revival in their Anasazi Trails landscape, followed by flowering shrubs and perennials that provide color throughout the growing season.
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2. Seeding for Sustainability Garden
Subdivision: Anasazi Meadows
Owner: Julie and Tom Laub
Designer: Judith Phillips
Garden Type or Features: Colorful Maximillian sunflowers, Englemann daisies, penstemon and Major Wheeler honeysuckle are located closer to the house. Undisturbed natural areas outside the landscaping are sowed with conservation seed mixes, and rainwater is captured with swales, basins and soil sponges.
Artist in the Garden: Dana Patterson Roth
Description: Tom and Julie Laub remembered Placitas as the charming little place they came to adopt a Sheltie. After 35 years in Albuquerque and with retirement approaching, they returned in 2022 to start the next chapter on a view lot overlooking the western panorama of black mesas, Mount Taylor, Cabezon and the Sandias.
3. Maggie’s Garden
Subdivision: Anasazi Meadows
Owner/ Designer: Joanie and Brad Wood
Garden Type or Feature: To enhance a natural meadow to the south, Joan harvests seeds from her backyard natives, sprinkles them in front and relies on rain to help them germinate. To discourage rabbits and packrats in the unwalled front yard, Joan relies on plants with repellant aromas, like lavender, rosemary, catmint, Agastache and Mexican oregano. And to satisfy her fondness for yellows and purples, she planted Common groundsel, sunflowers, a yellow flowering Hesperaloe, dwarf Russian sage, purple penstemon, and even a purple rose.
Artist in the Garden: Jay Leutwyler
Description: In 2019, Joanie and Brad Wood traded the lush, humid environment of Washington D.C. for a high desert lot above a wide arroyo with stunning views. Then came the task of making the bare dirt into something beautiful. Armed with a design planned by landscape legend Judith Phillips and an eclectic sense of style, they set about making the property their own. Today it’s a colorful, comfortable work in progress they predict will take a few more years to finish.
4. Ridgeline View Garden
Subdivision: Petroglyphs
Owner/ Designer: Vicky Kimmel
Garden Type or Features: The property’s steep edges are defined with riprap that meets the mesa top’s rock mulch covering. It is planted with desert willows, New Mexico olive, Chinese pistache and crabapple trees for shade; shrubs like Spanish broom, Upright cotoneaster, Mimosa and smokebush; and natives like agave, ocotillo, and grasses that wave in the wind. Small beds carved into the hillside beneath native junipers hold flowering perennials like columbines geraniums, red hot pokers and Agastache. Succulents and cactus line the driveway.
Artist in the Garden: Barbara Morrow
Description: Vicky Kimmel’s mesa-top home is a world away from the suburban Sunnyvale, California, setting she left more than a decade ago. In place of the lush Asian garden she created there, she found herself on a small, arid ridge top overlooking a network of deep rain-carved arroyos. The far view from every window is spectacular, but the property around her house was almost bare.
5. The Zenful Garden
Subdivision: Ranchos de Placitas
Owner/ Designer: Yvette and Antowanette Wright
Garden Type or Features: So far they have established trees like Russian olive, silver leaf oak, and Japanese maple; and smaller grapes, mullein, coleus, succulents, hostas, calla Lillies, iris, tulips, and red-hot pokers. Yvette also enjoys growing herbs and flowering annuals from seeds given to her by friends. [these are examples she mentions: larkspur, evening sunflower, old fashioned, sweet William, nasturtium, petunia, sweet pea, Siberian wallflower, dahlia, elephant ear, caladium, four o’clock, chocolate flower, bachelor button]
Artist in the Garden: Karen Melody Shatar
Education in the Garden: The Bernalillo Master Composters will be demonstrating techniques in plant-based composting and the use of organic mulches to build healthy soils.
Description: Yvette Bennett-Wright has an artist’s love of color, something that was seriously lacking on the land around her Ranchos de Placitas home when she and wife Antowanette arrived two years ago. Aside from a healthy ring of junipers, the property looked abandoned when they bought it, Yvette said, “but I had a vision to turn it into a ‘zenful’ oasis.”
6. Books, Blooms and Seeds
Subdivision: 453 NM-165
Owners: Placitas Community Library
Garden Type or Features: The seed library is a pilot program made possible by a patron who collected seed packet donations from big box stores. Other patrons added seeds from their own gardens, including red yucca, hollyhock and Palmer’s penstemon seeds. Request seeds in person or online at https://placitaslibrary.com/seeds-gardens/.
Artist in the Garden: Steve McKibbin
Garden Education: The Sandoval Extension Master Gardeners will be present to answer your garden questions.
Description: Placitas Community Library, one of the seven properties on the 2024 Placitas Garden Tour, is known for more than its books. On Sept. 8 its native and xeric gardens, meditative labyrinth and new seed library will be open to visitors. Guests also can enjoy an exhibit of garden art, fall produce cooking demonstrations and the chance to make seed balls from soil, clay and seeds, meant to protect the contents until it’s time for them to germinate.
7. Placitas Stonehenge Garden
Subdivision: Camino de Las Huertas
Owners: Mike Myers
Garden Type or Features: Native trees and landforms have been left untouched or freed to return to the natural forms. Junipers and pinon pines grow around small arroyos that still channel water through the property, rather than around it. He has removed dying plants and is planting drought tolerant plants as a replacement. Fanciful sculptures are beginning to appear around the property including a metal alien and a bench overlooking the family’s memorial grove.
Artist in the Garden: Dale Laitinen
Description: Mike Myers describes his little slice of wooded paradise as eclectic and mystical. He moved to Placitas a few years ago from Texas looking for a place that has unique and green building features. He found it and perhaps more. An imposing Stonehenge structure greets visitors at the gate, a circle of large stones that define a special place to view the annual solstice as well as every sunset and sunrise.
