RANCHO DESERTA II
Twenty-five years after photographing Rancho Deserta in black and white, I returned to the Mojave—this time in color. I revisited the homes and gardens of Twentynine Palms, Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, and California City, and added Lake Havasu City, just over the Arizona border.
While Rancho Deserta explored ideas of habitation, emphasizing the tension between site and structure, Rancho Deserta II, examines how we landscape the desert to make it our own and how these efforts interact with the homes they are intended to beautify and ground. Unlike the ad hoc yards of the earlier work, most - but not all - of the gardens in Sanctuary II appear professionally created. Rooted in precedent, these spaces express a collective sense of place, identity, and values. They reveal an intentional relationship between people and the land they inhabit.
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The images reflect the complexity of our nascent modern desert life—made possible by air conditioning, insulation, and imported water. These 20th century technologies don’t just enable year-round living; they allow us to forget how lethal the desert can be without them. From this comfortable remove, romance becomes possible, if not inevitable.
The romanticization of the desert reaches full bloom in Lake Havasu City, home to the transplanted London Bridge. In 1958, chainsaw magnate Robert McCulloch bought a huge stretch of barren desert on the eastern banks of the newly created Lake Havasu and hired the designer of Disneyland, C.V. Wood, to lay out a new town. In 1968, McCulloch bought the bridge—then being replaced in London—had it dismantled, shipped stone by stone, and reassembled in Arizona. Intended to saddle the old world banks of the Thames, its surreal presence in the desert speaks volumes about the mythmaking at work.
The here-in-the-desert-anything-is-possible attitude is everywhere on display in Lake Havasu City. In sharp contrast to today’s highly regulated planned communities, Lake Havasu is demonstrably Laissez Faire, and its residents are free to landscape as they please. Creativity abounds.
As for the homes that comprise Lake Havasu City and the aforementioned Mojave Desert towns included here, their ranch-style and Mediterranean designs originated elsewhere, in less harsh climates, where lush greenery softened their exteriors and provided privacy. Denied this in the desert, the homes appear here naked and exposed, many appear fortresslike. Intensifying matters, opaque, one-way window blinds are drawn in nearly every window of every home, lending them a hermetically sealed, unreadable quality—as closed off and inscrutable as their front yards are open and transparent.
In regards to the landscaping, the planting palate is restricted to desert natives. Even the toughest exotics—weeds included—are quickly vanquished by the heat and aridity. Every garden then, by design or by default, speaks the language of the desert. The ways in which they do so—and what these reveal about how we interpret and inhabit this terrain—lie at the heart of these photographs.
One detail that stood out: artificial turf. Rarely used in useful swaths, it often appeared in small, lonely patches—less practical surface than nostalgic symbol. These odd green squares seemed to gesture toward some imagined, greener “back home.”
Many gardens simplify the desert to its essence: openness interrupted by the occasional ocotillo or yucca. Echoes of the desert’s extractive history—miniature ore carts, rusted tools—reappear as visual shorthand for myth and memory. In their restraint, many of these gardens achieve an unexpected grace. Like the desert itself, they express much with little.
These gardens hold joy and sorrow, isolation and hope. They reflect both our attempts to transcend nature and our enduring optimism in the face of adversity. The simple act of making a garden, however modest, is after all, a wager on the future.
