Martha Retallick

Martha Retallick is an award-winning documentary photographer and writer. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from the University of Michigan and has done additional coursework in graphic design and building and construction technologies at Pima Community College.

Martha’s eclectic life experiences include bicycling through all 50 of the United States, plus a bit of Mexico and Canada, and publishing two books about her adventures. While pedaling more than 15,000 miles, Martha met such on-the-road challenges as traversing the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains and the Southwestern deserts. She also experienced many off-the-bike adventures, including a visit to former President Jimmy Carter’s residence, a brief stint as a Kansas wheat farmer, and a night in an Arkansas jail; she was looking for a place to stay in a small town, and the police chief offered floor space in the visitors’ room.

In addition, Martha has helped to produce two different magazines, volunteered to rebuild houses damaged during Hurricane Katrina, and created an urban water harvesting oasis.
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Martha’s publishing credits include articles in The Washington Post, Edible Baja Arizona, and Michigan Today.
In addition to her workaday activities, Martha is:

• Mastering the art of mead making. A combination of water, honey, and yeast, mead is the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage.
• Monitoring Tucson weather with RainLog.org, CoCoRaHS, and the National Weather Service’s SkyWarn program.
• Making sculptures and collages with found objects.

Your home has become a two-decade experiment in transforming urban space into a thriving desert oasis. When you first purchased the property in 2004, what was your vision—and how has the reality surprised or changed you over the years?

When I first bought this property, it had no landscaping. 

The yard – if you can even call it that – consisted of a sun-baked expanse of crushed rock in the front yard and out-of-control Bermuda grass in the backyard. In this part of the world, Bermuda grass is considered to be an invasive species. You don’t want it in your yard.

Shortly after my offer was accepted, I was showing my house-to-be to a friend. She saw my barren front yard and said, “That’s your palette!”

To put it mildly, Martha was inspired. 

In essence, my vision for this place would to be to create a landscape that would integrate nature with the built environment. Two decades later, I’m still working on that vision.

I’d say that my biggest success story has been the desert native trees in the front yard. I’m happy to say that three out of the four trees I planted have survived – and they’re thriving.

That trio of desert native trees consists of two ironwoods and a mesquite – and here’s the best part: I don’t irrigate them. They can live off of rainwater, and that’s what they’ve been doing for two decades.

However, my success with trees has not extended to another desert native: Cactus. 

They’ve proven to more disease-prone and insect-infested than I thought. So, I’ve had to remove a lot of what I had planted. 

Of the remaining cactus, the bunny ears cactus is still growing and expanding its territory. I think I’ll let it do just that.

Many people think of the desert as a harsh environment where lushness is impossible without heavy irrigation. How has water harvesting – both passive and active – reshaped your understanding of what’s possible in arid landscapes?

Here’s the thing about heavy irrigation: It leads to sky-high water bills. And those can really lighten your wallet.

And, lucky for me, I went into home ownership on a shoestring. That made the irrigation decision easy. I simply couldn’t afford to install an irrigation system – or run water through it.

So, what was this Pennsylvanian-turned-Arizonan to do? I made the most Pennsylvania decision ever: I decided to plant trees. 

My mesquite and ironwood trees – and the shrubbery beneath them – are drought-tolerant species that can live off rainwater. They also benefit from passive water harvesting earthworks – basins, berms, and swales – that help keep the rain here on my property.

I’d like to add that there’s no lawn here – they take too much water to establish and maintain – and that’s why you don’t see many lawns in Tucson.
I do have a small fruit forest in the backyard. The irrigation comes via active water harvesting. 

On wash day, my laundry-to-landscape greywater system keeps the wastewater out of the sewer. Instead, that wastewater gets recycled and it irrigates my two pomegranates and a Meyer lemon tree. 

I also have a dwarf fig tree that lives in a planter. It gets the good stuff – watering cans full of rainwater from my 1,500-gallon cistern.

Your passive water-harvesting design uses basins, berms, and swales. Could you walk us through the early learning curve? What were the biggest lessons, mistakes, or “aha” moments as you sculpted your land to work with water rather than fight against scarcity?

By the end of 2006, my DIY landscaped yard was looking pretty good. But there was one big problem.

During Tucson’s summer monsoon season, sudden storms can dump several inches in a matter of hours. And I’d watch from inside my house while the front and back yards turned into flood zones.

Would the water come into the house? A neighbor told me that a previous owner dealt with this very issue.

I figured that the flooding problem related to the grade of the back-yard – it sloped toward the house.

My solution: A rock-lined diversion swale that pulled water out of the back-yard and brought it into the already flooded front yard. I and a landscaping crew that I hired did the joint project of digging and installation. And, oh, did that swale look great.

By using Catalina Granite rocks that I found in various locations near my home, I couldn’t have been more local in my choice of materials. Those bright white rocks had flecks of mica that sparkled in the sunshine.

Unfortunately, my lovely swale didn’t work. 

In order to bring excess water out of my back-yard, the swale had to make a 90-degree turn at the northeast corner of my house. During heavy storms, water would accumulate in that corner and I was afraid that it would undermine my foundation. Even worse, very little water made it past the sharp turn and continued flowing downhill into my front yard.

It was time to ask for help. And, lucky me, I found that there was plenty of low-cost, locally-based help. 

In 2007, I started volunteering with a local nonprofit that ran service learning projects around Tucson. Through those projects, I learned the basics of water harvesting.

These include an important mental skill, and that is to think like water. Remember that, regardless of the terrain, it always flows downhill. 

Do you like where it’s going? Or do you need to send it elsewhere? My yard flooding problem told me that the rainwater needed to be guided away from the house.

In addition to thinking like water, decide what you want your water to do. 

For my rainwater, the choice was clear: I didn’t want it in the house, not when I had a yard full of young plants that needed water to help them grow. 

The solution? Berms and basins that would encourage the rainwater to stay close to the plants. The addition of organic (wood chip) mulch would slow the evaporation of that water.

As for my diversion swales, they’ve been fixed and now they work properly. Best practices? Here goes:

1. Long, complex swales – like the one that started in my backyard and had to make a 90-degree turn while routing water to my front yard – don’t work very well. 
2. Instead, give your swale a simple assignment – like directing water from this high point to a low point that’s nearby – and you will ensure its success.

You’ve eliminated the need for traditional irrigation, which is remarkable in a region where 40 percent of household water is used outdoors. What would you say to skeptics who believe water harvesting is too complex, too costly, or too ineffective for the average homeowner?

Quite often, people equate water harvesting with cisterns. And those things can cost serious money. (Don’t ask me how I know!)

But take it from someone who went 16 years before I was able to afford a cistern: You can do water harvesting on the cheap. Here’s how:

Focus your efforts on building passive water harvesting earthworks – basins, berms, and swales. These will enable your rainwater to slow down, spread out, and gradually sink into the ground. And bonus points if you build those earthworks before planting anything. In water harvesting parlance, this is called planting the rain first.

In essence, you’re creating a huge water retention area below your earthworks. Much cheaper than a cistern, and all you need is a shovel.

Your 1,500-gallon cistern and laundry-to-landscape greywater system are powerful examples of active water harvesting. How did you decide which technologies to invest in, and what advice do you have for people wanting to add similar systems to their own homes?

For the first 13 years of living on this property, my slender budget said “passive water harvesting only.” So, that’s what I did. 

Then came 2017. At last, I was able to afford to get active with my water harvesting via a laundry-to-landscape greywater harvesting system. This system irrigates three fruit threes – a Meyer lemon and two pomegranates.

In 2020, it was cistern installation time. The cistern stores 1,500 gallons of rainwater, which is harvested from 500 square feet of roof. During a one-inch storm, about 250 gallons goes into the cistern. Six inches of rain will fill it.

Although 1,500 gallons seems like a lot, it really isn’t. That’s why I dedicate the cistern water to my backyard garden. There simply isn’t enough for the landscape.

City Nature includes more than 60 of your color photographs, showcasing plant life, wildlife, and even your recycled-chandelier kinetic sculpture. How does photography help you tell the story of your landscape—and what do these images reveal that words alone cannot?

I like to say that water harvesting encompasses three activities:

1. Redirecting rainwater away from where it isn’t wanted to where it is
2. Storing rainwater for later use, for example, during a drought 
3. Recycling “used” water

Sounds good, but if you’ve never seen these concepts illustrated, you’ll have no idea how they actually work. 

That’s why I show photos of my passive water harvesting earthworks during rainstorms. Activity #1 in action. 

My cistern? Also in the book as it’s engaging in Activity #2, storing  rainwater for later use.

Recycling “used” water, Activity #3? What better way to show that than soapy laundry water emerging from one of my fruit tree irrigation emitters.

Over 20 years, your property has become a habitat not just for plants, but also for birds and other urban wildlife. What ecological changes have you observed as your landscape matured, and what has been most meaningful about sharing your space with these species?

This once-barren lot is now one of the biggest bird hangouts in my neighborhood. 

Every spring, my front yard mesquite tree turns into an avian singles club. While few birds have successfully nested in the mesquite – they prefer the two ironwoods – they certainly enjoy using the mesquite for calling out, meeting, greeting, and, shall we say, other activities.

My bird hangout has also proven to be quite motivational. Since 2020, I have been honing my wildlife photography skills with the neighborhood birds. I’d like to thank them for providing so many opportunities.

In addition to their bird-attracting abilities, my trees provide much-needed shade, which helps to cool this property and our city.

Many of your water-harvesting solutions are do-it-yourself projects. What has hands-on building taught you about sustainable living, and how has it influenced your relationship with your home and environment?

Both my active and passive water harvesting projects have been group projects. 

Although I did much of the planting myself, I had help with berm, basin, and swale creation. I also had help with the active water harvesting features, specifically, the cistern and laundry-to-landscape greywater harvesting system.

My creators and installers ranged from a local nonprofit that focuses on water and sustainability issues, that organization’s service learning volunteers, and commercial contractors.

But, now that the installations are complete, it’s up to me to maintain what’s here. It’s a human-created environment, and, as such, it doesn’t maintain itself. Maintenance can include a DIY shrubbery trimming session or calling an arborist for professional tree care.

With Southwestern water scarcity becoming increasingly urgent, City Nature arrives at a critical moment. How do you hope your book will influence conversations about personal responsibility, urban planning, and the future of water use in desert cities?

I don’t want City Nature to be a doom and gloom book. Instead, I want the photos and the storytelling to inspire people, to show them what is possible through water harvesting.

1Your resource guide includes books, websites, organizations, and businesses for readers interested in water conservation and desert gardening. If someone is starting from scratch—overwhelmed but inspired – what is the first practical step you would recommend they take after reading your book?

First thing to do is decide why you want to get into water harvesting. And be aware that your reasons may well change over time. Mine sure have!

For example, while I was still a renter, I was interested in water harvesting because I thought it would be a cool thing to do.

And then I moved into a flood-prone house. 

Suddenly, that first activity of water harvesting became very important. I had to figure out how to redirect rainwater away from where I didn’t want it (inside my house) to where I do (out in the yard).

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Website: https://westernskycommunications.com/
Instagram: @marthanaturephotography
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martharetallick/​

Purchase the book here: https://proaudiovoices.com/