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Shade [1]

• Admin user
• August 20, 2025
• 2 Comments

This is hardly the last thing I will have to say about shade. Here in Tucson we are having our second consecutive ‘nonsoon’ – the monsoon that doesn’t show up. We’ve had two record-breaking months of highs in the hundreds, day after day, often in the 110s. Not that we’re special: Europe is worse right now. Jordan – usually much cooler than Tucson – has been just as bad. Even in a ‘normal’ year (which at this point may just be a point of nostalgia), direct summer sun will kill a lot of beings – including a lot of plants that are said, advertised, to tolerate direct sunlight. To repeat my neighbor’s warning: not Tucson sun. When I moved here from northern New Mexico I hauled about fifty potted plants along in the back of my pickup. None of them are with us anymore.

My kitchen porch and ‘patio’ — February 2022. I’d just moved in, and most of the plants visible here came with me from NM.

A few things lasted through the summer of 2022, babied under the shade of my kitchen porch. I draped the west side of the porch in black shade cloth, which looked some goth décor move. No wonder I don’t have any images. It was definitely a trashy vibe. I had a lot of empty pots by the end of that year.

Shadecloth. Not that appealing.

I saw a very appealing Apartment Therapy article showing a sunny balcony in Brooklyn with reed matting tucked around pots for extra shade. So I started the summer of 2023 by propping reed matting from another project around groups of pots. Every time we got a big wind they blew down, damaging plants and pots and leaving them exposed to the sun.

July 2023. You can see the reed matting in the upper left corner. Nearly ALL my pots were crammed onto the 6 x 10′ porch.  Here the matting has been ‘untucked’ and propped after a wind-related disaster.

I went out and bought some more matting, hung it where the black shade cloth had been, and weighted it with bricks and baling wire. I jerry-rigged various panels to block the sun in the early part of the summer, when it would beam in for a vicious couple of hours during the afternoon. A slightly more evolved trashy vibe. But most of my plants made it through the summer.

In March 2024 (above) I had my carpenter extend the roofbeams so I could hang the matting more securely (and enlarge the shaded area), and I put hooks to accommodate narrower panels to solve the seasonal arc of killer sun. But my porch was really full. And anyway it was time to take care of the undulating brickscape which was much of my back ‘garden’ for the first two years. It was time to get serious.

July 2025

I extended the paved area of the porch and covered it with a pergola. The main ‘ceiling’ is 1/2” bamboo fencing that I can roll back in the winter to admit sunlight. I intended to create an outdoor room that could be completely enclosed in shade, but the nicely finished bamboo blinds I tried didn’t allow enough air circulation and, honestly – it didn’t suit my funky little old house. I liked the reed matting! I fitted it with 1” cotton twill tape pulls so I can adjust the height of the blinds, and cut the blinds to fit, so no more jerry-rigging.

July 2025

I love the stripey shade, and I didn’t anticipate how far the shade would extend into the rest of the garden. In the morning it extends west, late in the afternoon there is extra shade on the northeast.

Some of my agaves (plus a cholla, a spider plant, others stuff…)

I am collecting cholla and agave species, and they mostly love some extra shade, too. The shelf is made of leftover bricks from the old ‘patio’ and a piece of thick, varnished lumber salvaged from another project.

(photo by my neighbor, Kendall)

And people like shade, too.

It’s not finished yet (of course, if it ever will be). I want to resurface the concrete porch to match the new pavers. Then I plan to extend the pergola all the way to the neighbor’s fence and, in modular fashion, all the way around the lot, framing around the trees. Then I can also control my viewsheds a little bit – not have to look at the neighbors’ sheds, et al. My shade palace!