Saskia’s Garden

Saskia begins work on her xeriscape garden

The first summer Saskia Makela spent in the first home of her own, she resented the time spent watering her lawn. “I’d look across the street at Knox Mountain and it was beautiful. There were grasses and a variety of colour—and no one was watering over there,” she comments. “On our side of the street, it was all just green lawns,” she adds. “We had lots to do inside our new home, yet we were spending all our time in the yard watering and mowing the lawn,” she explains.

Makela grew up in Kelowna and learned that the lush green vineyards, orchards and golf courses can be deceptive, like the deep blue lake that is a feature of the Okanagan Valley. It’s actually a very arid climate, with little natural precipitation. As it happened, that north end home was bought in the spring of 2003, which turned out to one of the driest years in recent memory.

A beautiful low-cost, low-maintenance xeriscape garden

“I didn’t have much money for plants, but I went out and bought anything that said it was drought tolerant. I accepted plants people had divided up and I found some irises in the alley. Since then, I’ve killed lots of plants, but I’ve learned a lot, and I just keep playing with it,” she explains. She calls it being cheap and lazy, but she says she’s found that it’s surprising how low maintenance the garden she’s built really is.

She now has two young children, so time is in short supply, but even in mid-summer, she only waters her garden a couple of times a month. New plants get a little more attention, but now even in pots on her porch, she uses drought tolerant ones which need little water through the summer.

The result – a colourful xeriscape garden with year-round interest