Alaina Walton (DJ Dove) is a gardener in Marfa, TX. She pursues creativity through photography, writing, film and landscape design to express her appreciation for the natural world. Originally from Florida, after receiving her bachelor’s degree at UF she has lived and worked in France, Argentina, Louisiana, Arizona, Oregon and Far West Texas.
Cue “Springtime Again” by Sun Ra.
It is spring and I am a gardener. This is the exciting time of year where I get to resume work outside and leave my hibernation. So much about gardening has felt like a calling, the connection to nature and the lessons it teaches. The first money I ever earned was from weeding my grandmother’s garden. I would be alone outside for hours watching the little worlds under hedges and bushes as I cleared sprouts from the mulch. I'd find snails, lizards, and even cats, greet them and watch them in awe and wonder. It made work feel like play, and I still try to find that feeling in earning a living through gardening today. That was my father’s mother’s garden, and my father is a DJ. Music has always been a bond between us, as well as other family and friends.
I became very involved with growing food in college. I studied sustainability because of my reverence for nature and learned how important sustainable agriculture is for the planet, human health, and everything in between. Finding myself after graduation, I traveled through Europe, South America, and around the states volunteering and witnessing how cultures and communities create sustainable systems. That's when I landed in Marfa. Being in such a remote town surrounded by high desert microbiomes, so different from the ones I grew up with in Florida, it was an exciting challenge learning to farm in this climate. I was honored to learn to grow food in the garden space behind Cochineal for their restaurant, and as an independent contractor I received a lot of requests for help with native landscaping. I participated in the Texas Master Naturalist Tierra Grande Chapter in 2023 which introduced me to more of the community and events that celebrate this amazing landscape.
Growing food requires a higher demand than native landscaping. If you don't have irrigation or shade, you have to water two or three times a day. With natives, you can water deeply once a month depending on size and weather. A tedious task that everyone should take part in is weeding invasive plants that travel through the wind. Tumbleweeds, wild mustard, and the loathsome Bermuda grass are a few I constantly remove from residential and commercial gardens.
What makes gardening in Marfa so special to me is the diversity of desert life. I've learned to be careful while weeding sharp and spiky plants, using tongs for prickly pear, chollas, mesquite, cacti and agaves. But I still get poked by goat head seed pods. I’ve learned what a difference water makes. Seeing what a single flower can attract – native bees and a variety of butterflies, moths, bats, hummingbirds, and wasp pollinators. I have only ever been stung in West Texas – by bees, wasps, scorpions, and even a tarantula hawk that climbed up my pants while harvesting carrots. The soil is rich in clay, sand, volcanic rocks and somewhat devoid of organic nutrients like nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus (which a little compost can fix right up). Some seasons, things do really well, while other times, they struggle. It can be a harsh environment, which, in my opinion, makes its beauty all the more tangible. My understanding of how much work plant growth takes drives my desire for connection and working together.
When I started thinking about making a gardening show for Marfa Public Radio in spring of 2025, I asked around to see if anyone would be interested in sharing their stories between songs I saved on a playlist entitled “In My Garden” that I listen to while working outside. I received an abundantly supportive response. While you can’t show the beauty that comes from a gardener's labor and love on the radio, you can feel it in their passionate voices and the birds singing in the background.
For this spring’s show, I first went to the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute for their plant sale and was warmly welcomed on a very cold March morning. I love going to CDRI for their botanical gardens and hikes, and I’ve bought so many beautiful desert plants at their annual sales. I went inside for coffee and a pastry and met Lisa Gordon, education coordinator. She described their annual cactus sale, some grown by them from seed, as “a gift to all the people that come and see them throughout the year.” She explained that the Queen Victoria agaves are very popular and hard to find, so those are bought up the fastest. “ The plants in the garden are starting to bloom,” she told me. “Almost everything down inside the canyon is in bloom. The Madrone trees and Tracy’s Hawthorns and Buckeye, and it's really beautiful down there.”
Then I went outside to look around and found Warren, a cactus and succulent sale volunteer who was in the Master Naturalist program with me and is still deeply involved. Warren and I mused over the success of the sale and the fluctuating weather and how the plants tolerate the cold. ”Oh yeah,” he said. “There's all these plants that can handle down to freezing and then some of them can go all the way down to zero. A lot of 'em, they don't care.”
After the plant sale, I went to Bob Schwab's garden in Marfa, which he has been cultivating for 20 years. He specializes in vegetable gardening which he learned from his grandfathers. “My paternal grandfather was a German immigrant,” Bob said. “I remember as a young child he would ask me to read seed packs. I didn't really understand the dynamic there, I think that he spoke broken English but didn't read well. And so he had me read the seed packages to him and it was probably really more him just getting me interested.”
Bob and his wife, the painter Leslie Wilkes (who you may recognize from years of her show Grooveline on Marfa Public Radio) practice organic methods, have 12 x 4 foot beds, and plant their veggies below grade for water conservation. This season they planted February 2 and got an early start with the mild weather. “We have clean air, high altitude, really, really high UV levels,” Bob said. “And so daytime sun can be very, very intense. That also has its impact on plants.” Bob and Leslie use row covers to start seeds in the ground. The dry air makes organic gardening easier because there are fewer humidity borne pests and diseases.
An exciting development in Bob’s garden is a greenhouse that will give a higher germination rate under more controlled conditions. This will lead to a more efficient garden with less seed waste and fewer spacing issues. Bob explained how this project was an opportunity to recycle adobe bricks and old windows with help from members of the community. As a gardener, Bob observes patterns, and he noted the desertification that happens with climate change, causing hotter summers and less rainfall. He loves growing food and feeding people, which is very important for this small remote town.
Chelsea Quinlan invited me to her whimsical backyard — her largest garden project to date. She grew her love of indoor plants out to her yard and plans on growing vegetables and native grasses. She is planning a cowboy pool to keep cool and play with the neighbors’ peacocks on her swing, as well as a place for meditation, yoga and to work on her paintings. The community has kept her inspired, and the seed library at Marfa Public Library has been a valuable resource. She repurposes a lot of materials and furniture from the dump. It's a creative space that she wants to reflect that inspiration and self sufficiency. ”I think what I love the most about gardens,” Chelsea said, “Is they're like these communal third spaces and I just can't get enough of those. That's where the community can come together and talk. It's not work, it's not school, it's not a stressy place. You can lay down and read a book, and it's beautiful to know that your food can come from there.”
Logan Smith specializes in cut gardens that harvest flowers year round for arrangements and bouquets. Traditionally, annuals are used in cut gardens, but Logan likes to include perennials and drought tolerant plants. He harvests some seeds from flowers, and already planted his collected desert marigold seeds. He even made wreaths last holiday season. “That was something that I've always wanted to do. Because it's like the process of making these portals, in my mind. They're portals because they're circles and you weave them together, and at the end of it, it's something completely different,” Logan said. He wants to cultivate a way for the community to get in the spirit for the holidays and is taking initiative to create that. He and a friend are planning a pumpkin patch for the community in the fall. It will have a wide variety of pumpkins, some for carving and some for cooking but mostly beautiful decorative indigenous varieties from a native seed company. He wants to enrich the soil with indigenous farming practices of burying fish heads and food scraps for more dense nutrients. Something he loves about gardening is that “there’s always a season to plan for.”
Calletana Vargas is excited about native plants that are growing and propagating after years of removing invasive plants and all the rain we had last growing season. She commented on how bringing natives back also brings back a healthy ecosystem of birds and pollinators. You can feel the change in restored patches that enliven the land. She compared removing invasive grasses and weeds to decolonizing. “It's the same process of tedious, exhausting work… it's the same work it's going to take to acknowledge what is going on in society.”
How you create a healthy ecosystem is the same as creating a healthy mind, body and soul. This work can help you feel in control in the face of anxiety and make the ground soft and teeming with life. I love nature metaphors because we are a part of nature and need to work with nature. The music I choose sings about these metaphors and lessons, as well as the importance of protecting nature.
I want to thank the gardeners for sharing their perspectives and experiences with me, so I could share with all of you. If you’d like to hear all of the gardeners in this piece, and a few others I spoke with, you can listen to Spring Mixx here, on Mixcloud. I'm so excited for more to come this fall, and I’m looking forward to checking in on everyone's growth plans. Happy Spring!