Bordered by concrete sidewalks that bake in the afternoon sun, acres of velvety lawn carpet much of the UNLV campus.
People flock to these lush expanses. Students lounge on them between classes or play impromptu games of Frisbee. Joggers and walkers come out on weekends to enjoy the ambiance created by the cool grass and tree-lined walkways. UNLV's academic malls provide, in their own way, a quiet, verdant respite in the midst of a busy urban area.
Others visit the campus with a mission in mind: to research water-efficient plants for use in home landscaping. Examples of these plants abound on the UNLV grounds, most notably in the campus' xeric garden near the Majorie Barrick Museum of Natural History.
As one might imagine, none of this landscaping - not the soft, green lawns or the abundant desert flora - occurs by chance.
Maintaining and improving the landscaping at UNLV is the job of Dennis Swartzell, director of landscape, grounds, and arboretum, and his crew of 40 grounds maintenance workers. They spend countless hours each year planting, mowing, and maintaining the 335-acre campus.
While maintaining and improving UNLV's grounds are two important parts of Swartzell's job, he also seeks to educate, in keeping with the academic environment in which he operates.
He's excited about what the campus has to show the Southern Nevada community about plant and landscape possibilities in a desert environment, and he wants to share that information.
"We have so much to offer the public about plants and landscaping,"
Swartzell says. "People can come out here to learn about desert
landscaping, to take a look at what kinds of plants work well in our arid
environment."
The UNLV campus, all 335 acres of it, is a state arboretum - a designation bestowed by the 1985 Legislature. By definition, an arboretum is a place where trees, shrubs, and other plants are cultivated for educational and scientific purposes. Swartzell takes UNLV's role as an arboretum very seriously.
"We have self-guided tours that allow people to walk around the campus and take a look at our mature plants. All the trees and plants on the tour are labeled, which allows people to write down the names so they can ask for the plants at their nurseries.
"Sometimes people forget that a lot of our neighbors aren't from Las Vegas and aren't aware of the plants commonly grown here," says Swartzell, who was recently honored as the co-recipient of the President's Outstanding Professional Staff Member of the Year Award for 1996 at UNLV.
"So if somebody comes in from Cleveland or Florida or Washington state, they can take our tour and see some of the plants that are a little bit more common to the area that they may have never seen before."
Swartzell himself is a transplant to the area. He came to Las Vegas in 1982 from his native Georgia, where he earned a degree in agriculture with a major in floriculture at the University of Georgia.
He recalls that before he arrived here, he had never seen some of area's most ubiquitous varieties of flora, such as the European olive tree. Swartzell points out that that particular tree, though widely planted on the campus years ago, is now banned in Southern Nevada, due to its prodigious production of allergens. That is the kind of information he shares with campus visitors during his landscaping education sessions.
"We offer programs on Saturday mornings about once a month that are open to the public," he says, continuing his list of UNLV's outreach activities for home gardeners. Topics vary, but they usually include such favorites as new plants, transplanting, and pruning.
One subject that is discussed almost always, regardless of the announced topic, is water conservation, according to Swartzell. "It's almost a given now. We just incorporate it into the various programs that we provide."
Water conservation is also a concern on campus. It's one of the reasons that Swartzell is trying to reduce the amount of grass. Currently, UNLV has a sizable 60 acres or so of turf.
For those who value the campus' lush, green look, there's no need to worry, Swartzell assures. The academic malls will always be green, as will the athletic practice and playing fields.
Swartzell is focusing his turf reduction efforts on the small patches of lawn that can be found scattered around campus. He says it used to be the rule of thumb that if you had a small patch of ground, you planted grass because it was the easy thing to do.
Now, however, with increased emphasis on water conservation, it's best to save the grass for areas where enough can be planted to make it visually beneficial, he says. From a practical standpoint, eliminating small areas of turf is a good idea because small areas are typically difficult to water and maintain anyway, he says.
To begin the turf reduction project, Swartzell sought the help of UNLV architecture professor Mark Hoversten and his landscape architecture students.
"We asked if we could make the turf reduction master plan a class project," Swartzell says, adding that Hoversten eagerly agreed. Eight students worked on the project two years ago, dividing the campus into eight segments.
"As a result of the project, we were able to target approximately 18 acres of turf that we felt we could live without for one reason or another: they were inefficient, too small, too water-consuming, whatever. So that's our goal: to take 18 acres of that total 60 and put in other things.
"So we just chew off little pieces each year - whatever we can afford
to do - and try to make those conversions," he says.
The first conversion project tackled was the removal of a small piece of turf located just east of the Lilly Fong Geoscience Building. The campus' recycling coordinator, Tara Pike, who as a UNLV student founded SCOPE (Students Conscious of Protecting the Environment), suggested that students be included in the project.
"She proposed that we do something called 'stomp the grass' where the students could come out and participate in the actual turf removal," Swartzell says.
That successful project was the subject of a video produced by communication studies students; Pike then used the video as a fund-raising tool to promote donations for further turf reductions.
Two other areas have been tackled as a result of the donations - one near the Beam Engineering Complex and another north of Wright Hall. The donors so far have included Kleinfelder Engineering, Nevada Power Co., Kinko's, the Community Action Recycling Program (CARP), UNLV's student government, SCOPE, and Sigma Gamma Epsilon, the national geoscience honor society.
Swartzell predicts that the majority of the targeted grass can be removed and replaced with plants or groundcover without most people even noticing. Yet, the change will save water, money, and maintenance time, he says.
When the conversion to perennial flowering plants was done outside the geoscience building, Swartzell's workers installed a water meter so that the difference could be measured. The result, he says, has been a reduction of thousands of gallons a week.
While desert
landscaping was a hard sell for Southern Nevada homeowners for many
years, it's finally catching on, Swartzell says. The major reason, he
believes, is increased water costs.
Why was there a reluctance to begin with?
"I think most people have a misconception about water-efficient landscaping," he says. "People think everything is gray, thorny, and boring. Well, it doesn't have to be gray or thorny. It doesn't have to be boring. A lot of times water efficient landscaping can be very lush, very green, very colorful. It's just more water-efficient.
"Xeriscaping is a very pleasing type of landscaping that utilizes drought-tolerant plants," he says. "Xeriscaping embraces the concept of an oasis around the immediate living area." It should not, he warns, be confused with "xeroscaping," a type of landscaping that often consists of "a rock and maybe a cactus and a wagon wheel."
People interested in seeing a good sampling of the variety of water-efficient plants available in Southern Nevada, should stop by UNLV's xeric garden, Swartzell suggests.
"It's kind of our prize," Swartzell says of the small garden located on 1.5 acres just east of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History. Filled with more than 150 species of trees, shrubs, flowers, and groundcovers, the garden is popular with students and campus visitors alike.
It was recently expanded toward the north with the help of the master
gardeners, a group of citizens who have earned their title through a
cooperative extension program. Swartzell works with the master gardeners
on a regular basis.
One day during the expansion project, Swartzell stopped to show a visitor some of the new plants. "Smell that. Isn't that great?" he asked after snapping off a sprig of Mt. Lemon marigold. "And this one is called a licorice marigold," he added, proffering a piece of another aromatic plant.
Swartzell remembers well the creation of the garden in 1988 - particularly the activity that took place one cold February day when members of the two local cactus and succulent societies came out to help plant the drought-tolerant shrubs. Swartzell's crew had dug the holes in advance, but all the planting remained to be done. "It was 30 degrees with 40 mile-per-hour winds. We planted 700 shrubs in one day."
Today, the desert demonstration garden provides home gardeners a chance to get ideas of what might work in their yards. Swartzell suggests visiting the garden at different times of the year so that the plants can be seen in all their various stages.
Swartzell, who frequently writes for trade journals, recommends that every yard have a plan rather than being a haphazard arrangement of plants. For people who want grass in their yards, the best placement of it typically is in the high-use areas. Swartzell's own backyard, for instance, features turf near the living area so that his dog has somewhere to play. Beyond the turf are water-efficient plants, with the lushest plants located nearest the house. The farther from the house one goes, the more drought-tolerant the plants should become.
One common pitfall that Swartzell urges home gardeners to resist is making their yards in Las Vegas look just like their previous yards did in Baltimore, Seattle, Des Moines, or San Antonio.
"That's a real common problem here. For example, people bring in and want to use weeping willow. And weeping willows are just the worst trees for Las Vegas. They're just the pits when it comes to root problems, water consumption, susceptibility to disease, and insect problems."
Swartzell says that instead of looking to the areas where they lived before moving to Southern Nevada for landscaping ideas, Las Vegas gardeners should look to one of the desert models - either our own Mojave Desert, or the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, or Australian Deserts.
He suggests that from the Mojave, they might pick a creosote bush or a barrel, beavertail, or hedgehog cactus. If the Sonoran Desert is their model, they might choose an ocotillo or a teddybear cactus. The Chihuahuan Desert offers such ideas as the yucca, some native grasses, or the Texas sage.
"Native grasses fit into the landscape very well and are low maintenance. And many of them can be quite colorful. For example, we've been leaning toward the use of deer grass as of late," he says. "We're kind of excited about grasses, which seem to be the new trend in water-efficient landscaping. They add that soft touch."
Flora from the Australian desert can add variety to a yard as well, but Swartzell warns against relying too heavily on trees or plants such as eucalyptus and cassia. Australian species had become quite popular in Las Vegas until one winter when many were lost in a freeze. Homeowners who had gone too heavily in that direction found themselves having to replace many plants at significant expense.
"You can mix and match. There's nothing wrong with that," he says. "The important thing is that the homeowner have a yard that is unique to him or her. Homeowners shouldn't be afraid to try something different as long as the plants are suitable for this climate. The UNLV Arboretum can help them in making that determination.
"Also, homeowners should bear in mind that Las Vegas is perhaps one of the toughest locations in the country to grow plants," Swartzell says. "They should just think of it as a challenge and know that any success should be savored."
