NM Gardens and Landscapes

Landscapes in the early days and up til the 1930s were nearly exclusively of harvested local plants. In the May, 1939 issue of New Mexico Magazine, Elizabeth Emerson writes that the first rule of planting was to make transplants “feel at home,” noting that “A cactus that has basked in the sun all its life isn’t going to be happy on the north side of the house under the drip from an eave.” Trees were transplanted in the fall, with a trench dug out around the tree to cut the horizontal roots, and then in spring the tree actually moved once new horizontal roots are forming.