Books: Desert Mastery

What designer is not a fan of Steve Martino? And this book tells you everything you want to know about the ways to achieve harmony between residence and garden and the landscape beyond. In Desert Gardens of Steve Martino (Monacelli Press, 2018), author Caren Yglesias and photographer Steve Gunther outline Martino's signature designs with brief garden descriptions and beautiful images that show detail after detail, from the vividly colored stucco walls that frame distant views to native plants and elements like an illuminated yellow fiberglass roof, a fence made from rebar, and stunning water features and pools.

The book includes 21 gardens, and one of them is Martino's own experimental garden in Phoenix.  His backyard courtyard garden is enclosed by walls of different colors so he can experiment with hues and see how they perform in sun and shade.  He grows native plants in containers and moves them around to study compositions and the way the plants perform. 

In an introductory essay, you may be surprised to learn that Martino has no formal training in landscape architecture.  Rather, he describes his work as "weeds and walls," which he says is "the juxtaposition of wild landscapes against my refined structures. I thought of the 'garden' as a man-made place that would represent nature at its best and man at his best....I thought that a garden should have a respect for nature rather than be a place to dominate it."

Martino's site plans and drawings add to the lovely nature of this book, one that any designer would treasure forever.