Marcy is lead propagator and chief water-wand wielder at the nursery and has a special interest in native plants that provide habitat for birds and other wildlife. Formerly a wild bird rehabilitator in her native Ohio, since relocating to the Southwest 20+ years ago she has been particularly fascinated with the area’s hummingbirds and their flowering plants. After years of intensive research, she has written a comprehensive book on native hummingbird plants of the Southwest that was published in 2015 (Hummingbird Plants of the Southwest, Rio Nuevo Publishers). While in Ohio, Marcy became fairly knowledgeable about shrubs and trees that are important to birds and wrote and published a book geared toward bird rehabilitators entitled Songbird Diet Index. Now she has accumulated a similar bank of knowledge about native plants of the Southwest that provide valuable songbird habitat, and is available for consultations on creating or improving habitat for songbirds, hummingbirds, and other local wildlife. She and Jimmy have planted over 300 trees and shrubs on their property designed to attract birds, and to date they have recorded 265 different bird species, along with 17 mammals, 25 reptiles and amphibians, and 67 butterflies.
Jimmy graduated from Texas Tech University in 1987 with a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Science in Land Use and Resource Planning. His masters thesis, Planning Strategies and Guidelines for Watershed Urbanization, was a study of the Lake Worth watershed west of Fort Worth, Texas, and how to mitigate the impacts of urbanization on the watershed. Returning to El Paso, he worked at a local nursery where he promoted and encouraged the sale and use of native and resource-efficient plants and also pursued freelance landscape design. He has been implementing what he learned in his graduate studies in his landscape design work to “harvest” rainwater to reduce runoff, benefit landscape plantings, and reduce water use. In 1996 he started Zabriskie Landscape Design and Installation and in 2002 moved north of Las Cruces. Though no longer doing installation work, he still creates landscape designs, both in Las Cruces and El Paso. Some of his larger projects include consultation, installation supervision, and some redesign work for the Helen of Troy corporate headquarters, design and installation supervision of Redd Rock Center, and landscape consultation for the Whole Foods center, all in west El Paso. He designed and installed a pollinator garden for a building at White Sands Missile Range and designed several pollinator gardens at the NASA test facility in Dona Ana County, NM. The bulk of his designs have been resource-efficient residential landscapes. Three of his residential designs have won awards from the El Paso Water Utilities and two were featured in the book Native Texas Gardens by Sally and Andy Wasowski, published in 1997. One of his Las Cruces designs was a featured yard in the 2006 garden tour. His design philosophy is to create colorful, resource-efficient landscapes, using water harvesting techniques and selecting native and adaptable plants. He have 34 years experience designing resource-efficient landscapes in the area.