Creating a Natural Environment for Desert Spiny Lizards in the School Garden

When we were in the planning phase of our garden ten years ago, we decided that our school garden needed to be as natural as possible for all kinds of wildlife to visit and stay in the garden.  This is why desert spiny lizards exist in our garden today. The lizards are not school pets.  We do not have to buy any special food and we do not keep them in a cage or aquarium tank. The desert spiny lizards are there because the environment allows them to survive without any predators, such as snakes, hawks, and foxes.

Our school is in the Las Vegas Valley, which is in the Mojave Desert.  The Mojave Desert is where desert spiny lizards inhabit.  One of the quadrants in our school garden is the Mountain Riparian area. It has low slopes and grassy areas.

We built hills in the mountain riparian area
because the land was all flat.

    This low hill was built by wheelbarrowing sand and dirt.

We added trees and grasses to our mountain riparian area.

Another area that the desert spiny lizards like to visit is the desert area. This area has a Joshua tree, bushes, yuccas, and sandstone boulders. Lizards like to bask in the sun on top of boulders and find food near the Joshua tree, bushes and yuccas.

Desert Spiny Lizards like to rest on the
 boulders during the hot sun. They also like
the twisted leaf yucca and the Joshua tree.

The agricultural area provides a variety of insects for the lizards to eat.  Ants, beetles, crickets, aphids, spiders, wasps, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, cockroaches, and other bugs crawl on, under, or near the apricot, plum, peach, fig, pomegranate, pistachio, and almond trees.

It's definitely a buffet of bugs for our family of desert spiny lizards.

Lizzy, Our Desert Spiny Lizard

Lizzy just appeared one day in our school garden.  We did not buy her at any store.  We do not know where she came from.  All we know is that we started a school garden ten years ago, and from time to time we saw a tiny lizard or two. Our garden does have a natural dry wash area, so perhaps there was more than one lizard in the area already.  We were never quite sure how many lizards there were in the garden before it became Jardin Del Sol (The Sun's Garden).

Nevertheless, Lizzy is getting quite big now and is more frequently seen in one of our compost bins foraging for food, basking in the sun on top of Windsor blocks in the agricultural area, or scurrying into the mountain riparian or the desert quadrant.

A few years ago when Lizzy was smaller, she would stop in front of a group of our students that would be working in the vegetable garden. A brave and curious student or two would pick her up gently.  Lizzy would crawl up their shoulders and go to the top of their heads.  Now that Lizzy is big, she does not let anyone get too close to her.  She does have a family of her own now. So, we know that she has a mate somewhere in the garden.  Every once in a while we see a few of her young scampering around in the early morning sun or late afternoon in the same favorite locations.

Lizzy, our Desert Spiny Lizard, is resting on Windsor block in the agricultural area.