arizona's painted-gravel landscaping losing its appeal

Long before xeriscaping, the low-maintenance landscaping of choice for many Arizonans involved a different kind of green movement.

Thousands of homeowners from Sun City to Mesa spread generous blankets of pea gravel on their yards, glued it down and painted it green to look like lawns - at least from an airplane.

But green-rock landscaping is going the way of disco, polyester and avocado-green kitchen appliances.

"It's becoming a lost art," Valley landscaper Kevin Parker said. "I'm kind of unique. Now, nobody can find anybody who does this anymore. That's kind of good for me."

Even so, he receives only a few calls a year.

While xeriscaping - which emphasizes low water-use native plants and shade - can actually cool the landscape down, green gravel yards tend to soak in the heat and can contribute to the so-called "urban heat-island effect," which could explain some of the decline in popularity.

But there are still those who prefer the no-muss, no-fuss of glued-down gravel.

On a recent sunny day, Parker sprayed Lorraine Bradney's gravel yard with a healthy dose of clear glue, allowed it to dry and then painted everything green except her rock outlines of the Land of Lincoln and the Sooner State.

Like an oil painting, the piece is meant to be permanent.

"You don't want the rocks to get strewn about, causing the paint to chip," Parker said. "You can walk on it, but you shouldn't drive on it."

Among admiring neighbors, it is a perfect fit along Bradney's street in Sunland Village, a seniors-only community in Mesa where front yards, like the weekly bridge games, get thorough attention to detail.

"Lots of people come and look at the yard and ask if they can take pictures," said Bradney, a former physical-education teacher.

That's not surprising to Terry Mikel, a retired University of Arizona horticulturist, who remembers well his first encounter with painting a rock yard.

"I was 5 or 6 years old and was with my dad at a hardware store," he said. "The salesman said that if he used this gravel and painted it green it would look just like grass from an airplane. As a kid, it made a lot of sense, but later I wondered why anyone would want their yard to impress somebody in an airplane.

"In Sun City, it was kind of an art form," Mikel said. "They used painted rocks with different colors. There was room for creativity."

Sun City was one of the Valley's first communities to have painted yards. The phenomenon was documented in a famous 1960s vintage National Geographic photo by award-winning photojournalist James P. Blair.

But the trend is vanishing there, too.

"We're seeing less and less of it," said Paul Herrmann, executive director of the Sun City Visitors Center. "It was one of those goofy things that was fashionable back then. . . . Most people coming in are doing remodeling and going in with natural landscaping. The green, glued-down painted rock doesn't fit."

But they still can be found.

"A house across the street from my rental home was built in 1962, and it has had a green-gravel lawn since then," Herrmann said. "I used to get a kick out of seeing him hosing off the rock because of the dust."

Rusty Bowers, a former state senator and Arizona Rock Products Association executive, said he remembers green-rock lawns proliferating in the mid-to-late 1970s.

Home construction was booming, and Bowers was working for Dreamland Villa, one of the East Valley's first major retirement communities of conventional housing.

"There seemed to be hundreds of painted lawns in the Valley but pretty boring colors by today's standards," he said. "It was tough when we had to dig water lines or footers to make it look the same, and that's where the budding artist came in, making it (the rock) blend together."

Although gravel lawns are commonly associated with homes in the desert, Greg Pierceall, a Purdue University emeritus professor and landscape architect, believes the trend started in the Midwest, where residents have been known to paint their dormant grass green in winter.

As early as the late 1960s, Pierceall said, common washed river gravel could be coated with a pigment and sold in a rainbow of colors as garden accents and surfaces. He said the green-gravel trend took on new shapes and colors as Americans sought visual impact and contrast in their yards and gardens, but in retrospect it had all the sensibilities of the "aluminum Christmas tree."

He recalled a client at the time who wanted him to design a gravel landscape with a berm that resembled a big rice crispy bar - all of it held together with an epoxy material, he said.

"Oh what we do when we're young and adventurous," Pierceall said.

At the height of the trend, demand was so great that one company even began producing a special, rock-adhesive paint.

"They called it Rock Lock," said David Cash, plant manager at Ladehoff Paints in Mesa.

"People talk about it when they come in," he said. "We still have some customers ask for it.

"It was an acrylic paint," Cash said. "It wasn't like it had some exotic chemicals in it, and I don't know why more paint retailers didn't carry it."

The paint is no longer manufactured, but there are still those who like to look out the window of their home to a yard with curb appeal and little demand for maintenance.

"You can sweep the dirt off of it," said Charlotte Rosenberry, who lives in the same retirement community as Bradney. "I've lived here about 19 years, and the yard was already done like this before I moved in. I had it repainted one time."