Less sweet are her husband’s early memories of gardening. “When I was growing up, it was just a survival thing,” says David Fresquez, 66, who remembers having to sell wild asparagus and other plants as his father struggled to put five children through Catholic school. Only when he neared retirement, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, did his thoughts wander to his own garden. “I like to just grow things,” he says. “I like nature by itself, just being out there and enjoying the fresh air. It makes me just feel real happy inside.”

Whether yours is a farm of many acres or a small concrete square, you can turn it into a haven that makes you happy. And digging up your emotional connection to the land can lead you down the perfect garden path.

CLICK IMAGE TO START SLIDESHOW NATIVE U.S. PLANTS AND FLOWERS

The Lay of the Land
Get to know your landscape by sketching it out, suggests Andres Mejides, who teaches organic gardening at Miami Dade College in South Florida. “I have students bring me a drawing of their property and show me where different structures are, like the house itself, walls, and existing trees, so that we can mix tropical fruit trees with vegetables they’re interested in, consider where the sun’s going to be [strongest], and things like that.”

Then list the elements you have available. Is the yard made mostly of brick or other patio material but has at least two borders that could become sheltering walls? If so, the inviting charm of a hacienda-style courtyard with potted plants, rustic wooden tables, and iron candelabra might be a better fit.

 With a sketch in hand and knowledge of how the sun crosses your land, you can note areas that remain in the shadows and sheltered from wind and rain, and places where plants might be exposed to extreme temperatures. Once you have the lay of the land, you can dig deeper and consider soil type and moisture retention, perhaps seeking input from a local gardening center.

Express Your Style With Taste
Now it’s time to pick the right plants for the right spot. For example, if your wide-open spaces bring back childhood memories and the aroma of your Colombian abuelita’s sancocho (soup), a vegetable garden that adds zest to your meals might draw you outdoors.

Photo: Karen Witynski Carr, Hacienda Courtyards A Hacienda Flair Andrea DeLong-Amaya, director of gardens and growing at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, has helped design theme gardens, including one with clusters of U.S. native plants as thematic accents in a courtyard next to a Spanish mission-style entryway. Rural haciendas and city town homes in Mexico, and U.S. missions, often have courtyards influenced by their Spanish and Moorish origins. Mission courtyards often included vegetation such as Mediterranean fruit, fig, and olive trees. Instead of the Mediterranean species, the Wildflower Center showcases a Mexican olive tree (anacahuita) that grows in Texas and produces edible fruit and white crepe-paper-like blossoms. Chile pequin and its hot peppers, and Texas prickly pear—which mission residents likely savored for its sweet fruit—also reside in the sheltered courtyard. Mexicans still add young prickly pear pads (nopales) to fresh salads or scrambled eggs, or boil or grill the pads for different dishes. Growing plants in a hacienda-style setting has its advantages. “The courtyard gives a good framework for a garden of any kind,” DeLong-Amaya says. Depending on their location, walls protect against brisk northerly winds and radiate heat that helps plants that are sensitive to the cold survive winters. They also influence patterns of rain and shade, and help capture flower fragrances. For instance, courtyard aromas can come from limoncillo (lemon-scented) plants such as Drummond’s false pennyroyal, which grows throughout the Midwest and West and serves as peppermint in Mexico. For those intent on including a Mexican favorite in their courtyard, bougainvilleas do well in parts of Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and they don’t aggressively take over North American soils. You also can include these and other “transplants” as potted plants, a common feature in courtyard gardens that also help with small yards or in poor soil. Just be sure to pick a container that will accommodate mature versions of each plant. This could mean temporarily adding other plants to fill in a pot, DeLong-Amaya notes.

Books and websites can help you identify the best type of plants for your climate, soil, and sun exposure. Choose what you grew up with, or try something new. Stick with a theme, or mix and match. Explore a variety of colors, textures, and tastes.

Because there was so much exchange of garden plants across borders in the past, landowners don’t need to feel guilty about picking plants that might or might not be from their patria. Besides, plants from North America are already well-adapted to the conditions here and can work well in a Latino-themed garden.

Carmen Arroyo, 51, prefers lots of herbs and vegetables. Her love of the land began six years ago while volunteering at El Coquí, a community garden in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. “It’s just a very peaceful oasis in a sometimes turbulent city,” says Arroyo, who lives near the plot where culantro and other plants used in Puerto Rican dishes grow. (Culantro, originally from Mexico and South America, is different from cilantro, which likely originated in the Mediterranean but is also part of Puerto Rican cuisine.)

Variety truly spices up life when it creates a space where Latin flavors thrive. Consider hot peppers. While some Spanish-speaking countries still boast unique peppers, plants were often traded across borders and given new names. Ají cachucha, an aromatic pepper Cubans add to black beans, thrives and can even grow into a tree in the Miami area. But Puerto Ricans and Dominicans call it ají dulce and say it’s perfect for flavoring sofrito (sautéed garlic and onions).

Cuban oregano, Mexican oregano, and Jamaican thyme are all the same thing. Yet “it’s not even an oregano,” Mejides notes, “but it tastes like oregano, it smells like it, and it makes a nice house plant for northerners. You can use it to flavor any kind of chicken dishes, or pork, or beef.”

For those of Cuban descent intent on a tropical garden, Mejides recommends butterfly ginger, the island’s national flower, which does well in South Florida and can grow in large planters farther north when taken indoors during winter. And it can do triple duty, he says. “It’s a very beautiful flower, it’s very fragrant, and the roots can actually be used like ginger.”