The Woman Who Sells Phoenix Back Its Own Desert

Futures presents conversations from worlds that don't exist yet. Desiree Quintero is one of them — for now.

Phoenix's residential water allocation runs on a tier system that most residents track the way their parents tracked gas prices. Tier 3 restrictions have been triggered four years running. Outdoor irrigation is capped at levels that make traditional landscaping functionally illegal.¹ The Colorado River delivers roughly half what it did a decade ago.² A fifth of what remains leaks out through aging pipes before it reaches anyone's tap.³

Desiree "Dez" Quintero, 51, runs a landscape architecture practice called Prior State out of a converted nursery in south Tempe. For six years she has designed what she calls "memory gardens" — residential landscapes planted with Sonoran Desert species now in documented decline: foothill paloverde, velvet mesquite, ocotillo, creosote bush, triangle-leaf bursage.⁴ Before Prior State, she spent eleven years as a plant ecologist at the Desert Botanical Garden. Her gardens require supplemental water. Her clients can afford the surcharge. She does not advertise.

We met in her nursery at 6 AM, before the propagation house became unbearable. She was repotting saguaro seedlings the diameter of a thumb. A saguaro takes about fifty years to grow its first arm.

You spent eleven years at the Desert Botanical Garden. Why leave to do this privately?

Dez: I love that place. They're doing real work. But institutional conservation has a pace to it that started to feel like triage performed very slowly. I wanted to put these plants where people actually live. Where someone walks past a paloverde every morning and it becomes part of how they understand their house, their block. The Garden preserves species. I wanted to find out if you could preserve an experience.

What experience?

Dez: You know what creosote smells like after rain? That smell. That's what half my clients are actually describing when they call me. Nobody says "I want Larrea tridentata in my yard." They say, "It used to smell a certain way after a monsoon and it doesn't anymore." They're hiring me to reconstruct a sensory world. The plants are just the delivery mechanism.

Your gardens use supplemental water in a city under Tier 3 restrictions. How do you square that?

Dez: Poorly. I can give you the numbers. A Prior State garden uses about 40% of what a traditional grass lawn consumed in 2010. These are desert-adapted species, not bermudagrass. But 40% of a lawn that shouldn't have existed is still water the city would rather I didn't use, and I know that. My clients pay the overage surcharge. Some of them pay it happily, which tells you something I'd rather not examine too closely.

Examine it anyway.

Dez: Someone writes a check to feel something about ecological loss and then drives home in a vehicle that contributed to the loss. I'm not going to be sanctimonious. I drive too. But there's a circularity I can't escape. My wealthiest clients are purchasing the experience of a landscape that was partly unmade by the consumption patterns of people exactly like my wealthiest clients. And I'm the one cashing the check.

Do they see that?

Dez: Some of them see it better than I do. I had a client last year, a retired water attorney who knew the Colorado River allocation history chapter and verse.⁵ She wanted a full Sonoran understory garden with a saguaro anchor. She told me:

I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't.

Is what you do conservation or consumption?

Dez: Both. Simultaneously. The Desert Botanical Garden keeps species alive in cultivation. That's conservation. I keep the same species alive in someone's backyard for money. What is that? Same plant. Same water. The intent differs, maybe, but the saguaro doesn't care about intent. It cares about water and temperature and whether something is going to eat it.⁶

What I actually do is sell people a relationship with a version of this place that's leaving. Whether that's conservation or therapy or a luxury product depends entirely on where you're standing, and I've given up trying to pick one angle.

A 106-year vegetation study found over 80% of Sonoran species are climate-sensitive. Buffelgrass is converting fire-free desert into grassland.^{7 8} You're planting species that may not survive the century outside of cultivated settings.

Dez: (long pause)

I repot saguaro seedlings every Tuesday. A saguaro I plant today, if everything goes right, grows its first arm around 2085. I will be dead. The client will be dead. Phoenix may or may not still have residential water service. I am planting something that won't mature until a world I can't predict, for a person who won't see it, in a city that might not water it. Every Tuesday.

I keep doing it because I tried not doing it, and that was worse. At the Garden I had data. I watched the ocotillo monitoring plots on south-facing slopes just thin out, year after year.⁴ Watching and measuring is a kind of violence when you can't change the trajectory. At least now I'm putting something in the ground. Even if it's temporary. Even if the water runs out.

Are your clients mourning, or avoiding mourning?

Dez: I think those are the same activity performed at different speeds. You sit in a garden that smells like the desert used to smell and you feel something. Grief, comfort, recognition, I don't know. Is that mourning? Is it avoidance? My therapist would probably say it depends on what you do next, but my clients mostly go inside and start dinner. They're not converting the experience into political action. They're just living near something they miss.

Which is what I'm doing too. I just invoice for it.

If water weren't a constraint, what would you plant?

Dez: (laughs) The entire spring wildflower carpet. You know what that looked like? Fields of yellow and blue and pink across the desert floor after a good winter rain.⁸ I've seen photographs. I caught the tail end of it, maybe, twenty years ago. My clients' kids have never seen it at all.

If water weren't a constraint, I'd plant the whole memory. But water is the constraint. Water is always the constraint. So I plant what I can keep alive and try not to think too hard about the difference between a garden and a museum.

Is there a difference?

Dez: A museum knows it's preserving something dead. I'm not there yet. Ask me in ten years.

Dez Quintero's practice, Prior State, operates in Tempe, Arizona. She requested we note that she is currently accepting no new clients, as her water allocation for the fiscal year is fully committed.

Footnotes

1. Arizona Department of Water Resources projects severe water rationing scenarios for Phoenix by the late 2020s under current consumption trajectories. https://climatecosmos.com/climate-news/12-u-s-cities-facing-water-shortages-by-2030/ ↩

2. Arizona's Colorado River allotment has faced reductions of 30% or more under Tier 1 shortage declarations, with projections suggesting the state's share could shrink to less than half its historical 2.8 million acre-feet. https://thecounter.org/arizonas-future-water-shock/ ↩

3. Phoenix loses roughly 20% of its water supply through aging infrastructure leaks. https://climatecosmos.com/climate-news/12-u-s-cities-facing-water-shortages-by-2030/ ↩

4. Long-term vegetation monitoring in the Sonoran Desert documents decreases in foothill paloverde, velvet mesquite, ocotillo, and creosote bush in response to rising temperatures and declining winter precipitation. https://www.nps.gov/articles/plant-responses-to-climate-change-in-the-sonoran-desert.htm ↩ ↩²

5. The Colorado River's water is delivered to Phoenix via a 336-mile concrete aqueduct operated by the Central Arizona Project. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-phoenix-is-preparing-for-a-future-without-colorado-river-water ↩

6. The saguaro cactus is a keystone species supporting over 100 taxonomic groups; sustained temperatures above 120°F begin killing saguaros outright. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/10/the-slow-death-of-a-desert-giant/ ↩

7. A 106-year dataset on a Sonoran Desert plant community finds more than 80% of tested species are sensitive to climate. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37882101/ ↩

8. Buffelgrass introduces a novel fire regime to the previously fire-exempt Sonoran Desert, potentially leading to "grassification" — the replacement of diverse desert ecology with invasive grassland. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/10/the-slow-death-of-a-desert-giant/ ↩ ↩²