South Winona

This Winona Court front yard started as a dead, thirsty lawn and became one of our most sculptural high-desert xeriscapes. The design is built around quarried sandstone boulders — set deep and staged like natural outcroppings — with succulents and sedum tucked into the rock crevices for pops of color. Cold-hardy agave, yucca, blue fescue, and native flowering shrubs fill the beds, while a blooming ornamental tree anchors the yard and softens the entry.

Underneath the beauty is real engineering: a graded, free-draining rock groundcover that sheds Colorado's storms, steel-and-timber edging that holds crisp lines, and a plant palette chosen to thrive at altitude with almost no supplemental water. The lawn — and its mower, its sprinklers, its weekly upkeep — is gone. What's left looks intentional in every season and asks almost nothing to keep it that way.