Garden Tour: Roses on the Rio Grande
Last weekend we toured several private gardens in the little farming town of Corrales, just outside Albuquerque. It's actually a farming town gone upscale -- it still preserves the rough and messy working look of truck farms along the Rio Grande, but it's also filled with cafes, wineries, pubs and several fancy houses.
Fancy estates, really. Six opened their gardens for the garden club's tour. Each was a different style. There was Mediterranean style, a horse ranch, a tiled roof Spanish villa, a hacienda farmstead, and even a tropical swimming pool / tiki bar motif at another. But all featured green grassy lawns, roses, a water feature, and more roses. New Mexicans lurrrve their roses.
And wisteria. Even our neighbors in our own modest subdivision have arches of wisteria draping from their small portals. Here the tall adobe walls had even larger wisterias, well pruned and lush, but past flowering already.
Corrales is a full zone warmer than Santa Fe. It's only 40 miles south of us, but 1,000 feet lower and everything was well ahead of any gardens up here. And they all have green lawns, which gives a very different look to the traditional New Mexican adobe style home. It just looks so strange to my eyes with green grass all around.
The smell of fresh grass! I had forgotten.
It was a humid day -- I'd forgotten what that was like too. Corrales is right on the river and there's an aquifer below Albuquerque that provides water and the entire town is shady, green and wet. They get the same measly amount of rain we do, so they all have to irrigate to have such fine gardens, but their gardens are well watered and it looks and feels much different.
Did I mention the roses? Even where patio stones took the place of lawn, there were roses.
And because these were upscale estates, there was much garden sculpture placed about. This is one I liked. Turquoise Stonehenge.
This was also interesting -- I saw my first New Mexican Tesla parked among the roses.
Between the green grass smelling so sweet, the damp air, all the burbling fountains, and so much in full bloom so early in the season, I felt transported to another world. And here was my electric Tesla parked and ready to take me to the alternate universe of big estates, green lawns and roses on the Rio Grande. Whoosh.
Fancy estates, really. Six opened their gardens for the garden club's tour. Each was a different style. There was Mediterranean style, a horse ranch, a tiled roof Spanish villa, a hacienda farmstead, and even a tropical swimming pool / tiki bar motif at another. But all featured green grassy lawns, roses, a water feature, and more roses. New Mexicans lurrrve their roses.
And wisteria. Even our neighbors in our own modest subdivision have arches of wisteria draping from their small portals. Here the tall adobe walls had even larger wisterias, well pruned and lush, but past flowering already.
Corrales is a full zone warmer than Santa Fe. It's only 40 miles south of us, but 1,000 feet lower and everything was well ahead of any gardens up here. And they all have green lawns, which gives a very different look to the traditional New Mexican adobe style home. It just looks so strange to my eyes with green grass all around.
The smell of fresh grass! I had forgotten.
It was a humid day -- I'd forgotten what that was like too. Corrales is right on the river and there's an aquifer below Albuquerque that provides water and the entire town is shady, green and wet. They get the same measly amount of rain we do, so they all have to irrigate to have such fine gardens, but their gardens are well watered and it looks and feels much different.
Did I mention the roses? Even where patio stones took the place of lawn, there were roses.
And because these were upscale estates, there was much garden sculpture placed about. This is one I liked. Turquoise Stonehenge.
This was also interesting -- I saw my first New Mexican Tesla parked among the roses.
Between the green grass smelling so sweet, the damp air, all the burbling fountains, and so much in full bloom so early in the season, I felt transported to another world. And here was my electric Tesla parked and ready to take me to the alternate universe of big estates, green lawns and roses on the Rio Grande. Whoosh.
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