Mojave Bloom

Creating a tortoise-friendly yard starts with the right plants. This guide features plants our team recommends to help provide food, shelter, and habitat for desert tortoises here in Southern Nevada. Attached, you'll find a thoughtfully curated list that focuses primarily on regionally native plants, along with a small selection of well-adapted non-native plants that can also play a beneficial role in tortoise habitat.

Our Mojave Desert soils can be challenging. Depending on where you live, you might be working with heavy clay, caliche, compacted construction fill, sandy soils, or some combination of all of them. Soil conditions can vary significantly from one part of the Las Vegas Valley to another, which means there isn't one perfect soil recipe for every yard or every native plant. That realization is where this project began. For months, we kept asking ourselves a simple question...

This spring, Norm Schilling was honored with the Award of Excellence by the National Garden Clubs, recognizing his decades of dedication to horticulture, environmental stewardship, and educating Southern Nevadans about the beauty and importance of gardening in the desert.