Living Desert State Park
— a desert that lets you walk through its own field guide.
Not only on a wall.
Living Desert State Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A working zoo and botanical garden laid out across a desert hilltop, dedicated to the Chihuahuan Desert and nothing else. A mile and a quarter of paved path winds past mountain lions, javelina, a walk-through aviary, a greenhouse of more than a thousand succulents. The animals are mostly native, mostly non-releasable rescues. The garden is the desert itself, lightly arranged. On a clear afternoon you can see the Guadalupes from the ridge above the bison pen. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park sits on the Ocotillo Hills, a low ridge just northwest of Carlsbad in Eddy County, New Mexico, at about 3,400 feet of elevation. The park opened in 1971 and is managed by New Mexico State Parks. It covers around 1,500 acres of undisturbed Chihuahuan Desert, of which a 1.3-mile paved interpretive trail loops through the developed zoo and garden section. The collection is restricted to species native to the Chihuahuan Desert region, which spans southeastern New Mexico, west Texas, and much of north-central Mexico.
The Chihuahuan is North America's largest desert by area, and the part of it that rolls north out of Mexico into Eddy County is high desert, not low. Summer days reach the upper 90s but the nights cool sharply. The park's vegetation tells that story plainly: creosote, ocotillo, lechuguilla, sotol, prickly pear, and a long inventory of cacti and succulents in the Succulents of the World greenhouse. The aviary holds roadrunners, burrowing owls, and golden eagles, all native or regional. On clear days the Guadalupe Mountains are visible to the southwest from the higher overlooks.
The park is open year-round, with last entry generally an hour and a half before closing. The interpretive loop is paved, mostly level, and takes roughly an hour and a half at an unhurried pace. Animals are most active in the cooler early morning and late afternoon; midsummer afternoons are hot enough that most of the residents retreat to shade. Carlsbad Caverns National Park lies about 25 miles south on US-62/180, and many travellers pair the two sites in one day, with the cave in the morning and the Living Desert in the late afternoon.
