welcome to the scottsdale xeriscape garden at chaparral Park I'm Jennifer Davidson a water conservation specialist with the City of Scottsdale this demonstration garden is a fantastic place to come to pick out low water use plants for your yard the idea of a demonstration garden is for people to come and see what things might look like in their own yards so we have a variety of plants such as trees ground covers and shrubs blooming at different times of the year in addition to hardscapes so homeowners can come and see the ideas but they might want to incorporate in their own low water use yards our drab to fab backyard rehab winner and our Landscape Architect will be here a little later to take it look at the possibilities but first let's join them in Lisa's backyard hi Lisa I'm Janet Weibull I'm a landscape architect I'm here to help with the drab to fab program and see what you want to do in your backyard I want color and I would like to have things that attract hummingbirds and wildlife things like that perfect very good we can work those all in so it would be really important for me to have an herb garden out here because I do a lot of cooking and I don't use a lot of fresh herbs so that would be really helpful herb gardens are great if you put them in a raised bed they and we use emitters here which are very low-flow irrigation devices they work great so I have a pretty good sized dog are there any other concerns that I should have about having a garden and landscaping so my dog doesn't destroy it well if there are chewing issues there are some plants that have pods and flowers that are poisonous would want to be careful about that so the backyard has a South exposure and you've got a huge advantage because you have huge trees back there the summer Sun still is going to go straight overhead so it's gonna get pretty warm so I think you can benefit by a few properly placed and sized trees that will give you a little more shade in your new living space when we need of the Scottsdale xeriscape garden you'll see a lot of plants on display and I think you'll be very impressed I love taking people to the Scottsdale xeriscape garden because there you can see all the plants on display beautiful pathways that are shaded by big Palo Verde trees and the hard scape materials they've used you can see how low-maintenance it really is the gratings been done to capture rainwater and allow it to flow nicely through the site and it's just a wonderful display of all the xeriscape principles so I really like this because I would like to have year-round color in my yard and I have hummingbirds will this attract my hummingbirds yes the color and the shape of the flowers will bring the hummingbirds in they've incorporated all kinds of things here it's a shady area you got artwork you got changing grade you got contrast colors Boggan vias look different here because they don't get as much sunlight so they're a little looser a little more relaxed few less flowers which isn't a bad thing because sometimes the building beads can create a lot of litter the Texas olives bloom in the wintertime also see at the white flowers and foliage there this is a looka phylum it's also called the barometer bush last week it was in full bloom because it responds to the weather and puts out a full show of purple flowers here they've done a really nice job combining textures and colors and forms with the white bark of the Palo Blanco tree and the white flowers with a Texas olive and the lightish cast on the medicinal aloes right here so here's those three plants we were talking about earlier and this is a good example of a composition you've got the yellow Lantana the red bird of paradise and the really in the background so we've seen some great plant materials and xeriscape landscaping here at the garden today I'm going to go back to the office and get to work on a plan using some of the things we saw today and I'm gonna go to the nursery and we'll be back in a couple weeks