Weeds and Walls
In a presentation at the National Building Museum, Steve Martino, FASLA, demonstrates why his residential designs are winning awards and opening eyes to native plants in the desert Southwest.

Martino’s Quartz Mountain Residence received a 2006 ASLA Professional Award of Excellence for Residential Design. The jury noted that his design provided a “great lesson value on sustainability in residential design,” and “emphasizes innovations in the use of native plants and shade trees.” (Photo by Steve Martino, FASLA)

When Steve Martino, FASLA, delivered a lecture at the National Building Museum late last month—dressed in faded jeans and a tweed sports coat—he presented with a self-effacing air that belies his position in the landscape architecture profession. More inclined to call his designs “weeds and walls,” and say that a pool designed with hand-carved Italian tile and bordered by a handful of $10,000 chaise lounges is “a pretty nice pool,” Martino is nothing if not modest. In fact, Martino’s work, which has been honored several times by the ASLA Professional Awards program—including this year’s Award of Excellence for Residential Design, has fundamentally changed the way residents of the desert Southwest think about the use of native plants in the residential landscape.

During his NBM presentation, Martino noted that his first job out of school—where he was educated as an architect—was with a landscape architecture firm doing work on condominium developments throughout Phoenix. Martino said that the company was performing typical landscape installations, using palm trees and grass, when he looked across the street to a vacant lot and noticed the native vegetation growing there. Martino said he wondered openly why his company was spending so much time and money fighting nature with plants that were so obviously ill-suited for the climate, when a diverse palette of native plants was available to landscape architects. He was told, of course, that folks did not want weeds in their condo development.

However, the experience set Martino on a new career path and he began working with native plants in his practice in an attempt to “bring the desert back to the city.” Unfortunately, none of Martino’s local clients wanted it back. Instead, he began using desert plants for clients in areas as far away as Boston and Alaska. However, he was insistent and was able to convince several local clients that natives were the way to go, and these designs resulted in ASLA awards.

“Getting some ASLA awards really helped jump-start it,” Martino said. “In some cases I had to enter multiple times, but really it all started with receiving those awards.”

However, the use of native plants isn’t the only trait that marks Martino’s work. As a trained architect, he has also taken a keen interest in creating exterior buildings and fountains to control the scale of a landscape. Martino has an uncanny ability to create what seem like open spaces in small areas by actually adding architectural elements to the landscape to organize how the space is seen and used. “Gardens have to stand on their own without plants,” Martino said of this aspect of his work. “Sometimes I feel as though I’m designing ruins.”

As for the long-term effects of his work on the residential market in the desert Southwest, Martino noted that a new trend in the area is to not only remove nonnative landscapes from residences, but to run a bulldozer over a landscape to “chew up” the land and make it more natural looking. He also said that a developer recently bought a golf course and condominium development outside of Phoenix and converted them back to native landscapes because the residences would be more valuable in their natural state. Not bad for weeds and walls.

Click here to hear the full audio of Martino’s presentation at the National Building Museum.