
Plants for the Arizona Desert
Want to create a stunning and sustainable desert landscape?
Browse by category or find the right plant with our advanced search.
Plant Combinations
The desert offers a surprisingly diverse selection of low-water-use landscape plants. Blending this distinctive palette of colors, forms, and textures allows you to create plant combinations to suit any landscape situation. Browse our gallery to find creative options that ensure year-round color, seasonal interest, and a wealth of other possibilities.

There are endless options when selecting plant combinations for your yard that range in size, color and texture.
Acknowledgements
The Landscape Plants section of the AMWUA.org website is the online edition of the AMWUA publication Landscape Plants for the Arizona Desert. These resources were developed by the AMWUA Conservation & Efficiency Advisory Group, comprising representatives of AMWUA member municipalities with professional expertise in water conservation, horticulture, botany, and the plant sciences, and AMWUA staff, with the much-appreciated assistance of local green industry professionals and university faculty and staffs.
The time, expertise, advice, input, and support that these many professionals contributed to the development of AMWUA’s materials is what has made them so successful and so widely embraced. Thanks doesn’t seem sufficient, but thank you.
For providing recommendations and experience that guided the Advisory Group in narrowing the list of plants from the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix AMA Low Water Use/Drought Tolerant Plant List to the 200 featured in the booklet, we would like to acknowledge the following individuals:
Rita Jo Anthony, Wild Seed, Inc
Jonathan Arnold, City of Scottsdale Parks, Recreation, and Facilities
John Augustine, Desert Tree Farm
Louisa Ballard, Arizona State University Arboretum
Cathy Cromell, Phoenix Home and Garden Magazine
Libby Davison, University of Arizona Department of Plant Sciences
Ron Dinchak, Mesa Community College Life Science Department
Wendy Hardy, City of Scottsdale
Jay Harper, Harpers Nurseries and Flower Shops, Inc.
George Hull, Mountain States Wholesale Nursery
Mary Irish, Horticultural Writer/Consultant
Rob Johns, A&P Plant Nurseries
Kirti Mathura, Desert Botanical Garden
Judy Mielke, Logan Simpson Design
Terry Mikel, University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
Ed Mulrean, Ph.D., Arid Zone Trees
Steve Priebe, City of Phoenix Streets Department
Janet Rademacher, Mountain States Wholesale Nursery
Marjie Risk, Arizona Department of Water Resources
Ursula Schuch, Ph.D., University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
Dwayne View, Treeland Nurseries, Inc.
Niko Vlachos, V&P Nurseries, Inc.
Jim Wheat, Jim Wheat's Landscape Center
For reviewing the final draft of the booklet and offering their professional criticism, comments, and suggestions, we would like to recognize:
Chester Leathers, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University Microbiology Department
Rita Jo Anthony, Wild Seed, Inc.
Matt Johnson, University of Arizona Desert Legume Program
Janet Rademacher, Mountain States Wholesale Nursery
Steve Priebe, City of Phoenix Streets Department
Cathy Cromell, Phoenix Home and Garden Magazine
A special thanks to our intrepid and talented photographer, Dave Seibert. Over a period of two years, Dave gained unexpected expertise in desert-adapted plants as he persistently hunted down and shot many thousands of images of our 224 plants (along with some that looked an awful lot like them but weren’t quite).
We would also like to recognize the following individuals for their patient efforts in reviewing photos for accurate plant identification and providing assistance in locating plants:
Steve Priebe, now teaching at MCC
Kirti Mathura, University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
Judy Mielke, Landscape Architect
Angelica Elliott, Kristen Kindl, and Jaime Toledano, Desert Botanical Garden
Scott Frische and John Sills, Phoenix Zoo
Jeff Payne and Becky Noth, Boyce Thompson Arboretum
Lauren Belcher, Sonoran Desert Museum
Tohono Chul Botanical Gardens
A shout out to Halperin Creative, our web development team. It’s been great to work with web folks who are also fellow water advocates and plant people.
The first sentence of our publication was inspired by text from Growing Desert Plants from Windowsill to Garden by Theodore B. Hodoba, with permission from the author and the publisher, Red Crane Books.