Red Hills Desert Garden

The garden

Red Hills Desert Garden is a five-acre interactive demonstration garden in St. George, created by the Washington County Water Conservancy District to show what water-efficient landscaping actually looks like when it is done well. Paths wind past more than 5,000 plants chosen to thrive in an arid climate.

Why a demonstration garden

Outdoor irrigation is the largest single use of municipal water in a desert city, and lawn is the largest part of that. A garden of this kind exists to answer the practical objection to replacing it — that the alternative looks barren — by showing mature, planted examples a homeowner can copy. It is a piece of water policy built as a public amenity.

The stream and the fish

A 1,150-foot stream runs through the garden stocked with native and endangered fish from the Virgin River system. This is genuinely unusual: the Virgin River holds species such as the woundfin and the Virgin River chub that exist nowhere else, and a landscaped stream is one of very few places a visitor can actually see them.

The dinosaur tracks

The garden also holds preserved tracks roughly 200 million years old, interpreted on site, including the Eubrontes, Grallator, Kayentapus and Anomoepus track types. Tracks are named for the footprint rather than the animal — palaeontologists rarely have both together — so these names describe forms, not identified species.

Visiting

Admission is free and the garden is open daily, with paved pathways and interpretive signage throughout. It works well as a short stop rather than a half day, and it pairs naturally with the dinosaur trackways elsewhere in the county.

Related on the site: free things to do in St. George and St. George with kids.