Desert-first — a Phoenix campus that gave up its turf

The campus had been built in 1998 with a Midwestern landscape imported wholesale: fescue lawn, London plane trees, spray irrigation running before dawn to limit evaporation losses that were unavoidable anyway.

By 2022 the water bill had become a line item somebody was asked to explain every quarter.

Challenge

Staff genuinely used the lawn — for lunch, for occasional all-hands gatherings, for the shade under the plane trees, which were the only comfortable outdoor space between May and September. Removing the turf without removing the use was the actual brief.

Shade, not grass, was what people were there for.

Solution

We kept twelve of the plane trees, removed the rest, and rebuilt the ground plane in decomposed granite with sculptural agave, ocotillo and palo verde. A long steel canopy walk on the western edge does the work the lawn was never doing: real shade on the route people take from the parking structure to the door.

Irrigation moved to subsurface drip on a two-year weaning schedule, after which most of the planting is off water entirely. Measured landscape water use is down about seventy percent against the 2021 baseline.

The gathering space is now the shaded gravel court under the retained trees, which is where people had been sitting anyway.