The water bill is not a bill. It is a warning.
In Phoenix, 70 percent of residential water consumption goes directly into the ground — through grass roots, through evaporation, through the daily indignity of irrigation systems running at 6 a.m. while the temperature is already climbing past 85. The Colorado River compact, written in 1922 during an anomalously wet decade, allocated water that was never reliably there. The reckoning is not coming. It arrived.
"Bermuda grass is a liability dressed as a lawn. It requires a climate that the Sonoran Desert has never promised to provide."
Restraint is not deprivation. It is design.
The assumption that a xeriscape is a compromise — brown gravel and a cactus, a concession to drought — is the assumption we dismantle. A properly designed desert landscape has more visual complexity than a lawn. Decomposed granite carries texture. Agave holds architectural form in August heat that would collapse any perennial border east of the 100th meridian. The shadows that a mature palo verde casts at 4 p.m. are something a Kentucky bluegrass lawn will never achieve.
70%
of residential water in Phoenix goes to landscaping
3×
average water bill increase in Maricopa County since 2018
60%
less water required by xeriscape versus conventional lawn
2031
projected year Colorado River compact allocations collapse
A lawn demands maintenance. A landscape rewards patience.
Bermuda grass requires mowing every five to seven days during the growing season. It requires fertilizer, weed control, overseeding with winter rye, then killing the rye in spring. It requires your Sundays. A Dryland installation reaches maturity at 18 months and thereafter asks almost nothing of you — while looking, in late summer, like something a landscape architect flew in from Marrakech to build.
"Our completed projects look sharper in August than they did the day we installed them. That is the only metric we care about."
Completed Yards,
Not Renderings
Arizona State University — Landscape Architecture, M.L.A.
14 years practice in arid-climate design
120+ residential and commercial installations
Former senior designer, Desert Botanical Garden
I grew up watching the desert get paved over in the name of curb appeal.
My parents bought a house in Chandler in 1991. The backyard was bermuda grass. Every August, my father stood at the kitchen window watching it die in patches, then spent three weekends in October bringing it back. He did this until 2019, when the water bill crossed $400 a month and he finally asked me what to do.
I redesigned it over a winter. By the following August, the water bill was $94. The yard looked, my mother said, like something out of a magazine. Not a compromise. Not a consolation. A design.
Dryland exists to do that for every homeowner who has watched their lawn fail and wondered if there is a better way. There is. It has been growing here, slowly and without irrigation, for 10,000 years.
Marcus Reyes
Founder & Principal Designer, Dryland — Phoenix, AZ
$94
Monthly water bill · Chandler, AZ · August 2020 · Down from $412
We take twelve projects per year.
Not because we can't handle more. Because every project deserves a site visit, a hand-drawn study, and a designer who has walked your property at 4 p.m. in August to understand how the light falls. We are opening the 2026 calendar now. Seven slots remain.
What a consultation includes
90-minute on-site visit with a principal designer
Preliminary water audit and usage analysis
Hand-drawn concept study (delivered within 2 weeks)
Full project proposal with phased installation options
Consultation fee: $0 · Applied toward project if retained
Step 1 of 3 — Confirm your climate zone
Where is the property?
We serve Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas metro areas.