Subdivision: Petroglyphs
Owner/ Designer: Vicky Kimmel
Garden Type or Feature: 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.
Bringing it to life has been a lesson in persistence and willingness to find beauty in an entirely new environment. Vicky describes gardening in New Mexico as an extreme sport, with obstacles that include hard water, poor soil, infrequent rain and ferocious winds. She is learning by trial and error how to build on her 3/4-acre property’s strengths while enhancing its rough edges.
“I like to walk into any room and see beauty in the landscape and the further landscaping,” says Vicky, a photographer and interior designer. To that end she has sprinkled her property with groupings that please her eye, mixing living things with metal sculptures and dramatic boulders.
Several dozen boulders serve two purposes — sculptural accents in garden vignettes and seating on a site that isn’t kind to patio furniture. They were unloaded by crane in strategic locations, along the ridgeline for horizon viewing and on the patio for after dinner coffee and wine.
“It has been quite an experiment,” Vicky says, “but now I wake up every day to a beautiful sight.”
