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Especially during this drought, you seldom hear a good
word about those thirsty bluegrass lawns that currently
wither across the inhabited areas of Colorado. Even so,
they have their defenders, and any day now, I expect to see
a bumper sticker that says I will give up my lawn when
you pry my cold dead fingers off the nozzle.
Rather than delve into that controversy, though, we should ponder why we have lawns and lilacs. After all, they're not native to our high desert. They didn't just sprout. Somebody had to plant them and arrange for a water supply to maintain them. That's a lot of work.
So why would our pioneers go to all that trouble, especially when they had so much else to do back when they were defrauding Native Americans, watering railroad stock, promoting worthless mines, hustling federal subsidies, exploiting immigrant labor and exterminating the grizzlies?
When you read the history of many Colorado towns, be they in the mountains or on the plains, you see a pattern. The townsite promoter (generally associated with a railroad subsidiary) acquires some land, subdivides it, and starts selling lots at inflated prices.
The first order of this land-office business is to snag a post office, but even before the first saloon or whorehouse gets off to a good start, let alone an opera house or schoolhouse, they're digging irrigation ditches that lead to the trees they're planting along the streets.
That's only part of the pattern, though. The bigger picture is that instead of adapting themselves to the landscape, the Colorado immigrants of 1860-1900 worked very diligently to adapt the landscape to themselves.
They didn't look at such plants as grew around here and find uses for yucca and prickly pear. Instead, they cleared fields and dug ditches and sowed the plants they were familiar with - wheat, barley, oats, potatoes, apples, peaches, etc. They didn't find a way to domesticate the bison that roamed the prairies and mountain valleys; they exterminated the bison and imported more tractable Herefords.
And when they built towns, they constructed their settlements to conform to their visions of what towns should look like. By and large, they were from the Midwest. That meant the railroad depot was at one end of the main commercial street (think of Union Depot at the bottom of 17th Street in Denver). The streets were in a grid, rather than radiating from a plaza or village square.
They planted trees and lawns to make the place look more like the Iowa or Illinois that they came from, places that get 40 inches of precipitation a year instead of 15. Further, they didn't plant native flora - they planted the familiar varieties, the bluegrass and maples and all the rest.
And to bring this vision to completion, they built
expensive waterworks to make the desert bloom.
This
was all for aesthetics - to create a Midwestern environment
of tree-shaded walks and lawns and gardens, an aesthetic
that traces back to soggy old England.
The New Mexico colonists who got here a little earlier had their own visions of how towns should look. The plaza with the church, not the railroad depot, was the focal point. Rather than build frame houses that needed extensive heating systems, they used thick adobe walls fabricated from local mud. Rather than install yards with lawns for greenery, they built sheltered courtyards so that the harsh sun and wind wouldn't desiccate their plants.
If the pictures I remember from my Sunday-School books are accurate, that was also the architecture of the Levantine deserts - houses of sun-dried clay constructed as little fortresses with small courtyards within, rather than set amid the verdant fields and forests made possible by large-scale irrigation projects.
A competent cultural historian could probably trace this architecture from the eastern Mediterranean across North Africa to Spain to the New World where it blended easily with Pueblo construction along the Rio Grande, but I just have to guess that this is how it happened.
At any rate, if Colorado towns and cities had been built with Mideastern architecture, rather than Midwestern, then our communities probably wouldn't be suffering from a drought, since we wouldn't be using nearly as much water because we wouldn't have yards with lawns and trees.
But then, I look at my own domicile. Without the shade from the water-wasting trees, the house would be beastly hot, so I'd likely need to install air conditioning. If there were no trees and gardens along the sidewalks, with their shade and evaporative cooling, walking would be so unpleasant that I'd end up driving more.
In other words, we might save water by adopting a different architecture, but there would be other costs, like rebuilding most of the state so that every residential block looked something like Bent's Fort.
You can adapt to the desert, or make the desert adapt to you. The founders of modern Colorado took the latter course, and we're still trying to make it work.
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