Most of the hotels and golf courses here use what they call ''reclaimed" water, which has been used and treated. Even with conservation, the future in Las Vegas (''The Meadows" in Spanish, because of the springs near the city) is ''back to rock," says John Carter, head horticulturalist at the Flamingo. ''We call it xeriscape," the landscape style that uses only rocks or desert plants (from the Greek xeros, meaning dry). The city gets just 4.3 inches of rain per year (compared with more than 41 inches in Boston), and 90 percent of the water in town is supplied by the Lake Mead reservoir. So while there are no building or swimming pool restrictions here, not even any smoking restrictions in the casinos and hotels, there is a lawn restriction. In 2003, the Southern Nevada Water Authority declared that Nevadans could grow grass in the backyard but not the front. Las Vegas is now in what the authority calls a ''drought-alert" stage of water availability.
You wouldn't know it by looking at the hotel gardens. Where the Flamingo has palms, Bellagio (3600 Las Vegas Blvd. South) has chrysanthemums. Some 6,000-8,000 mums, hydrangeas, azaleas, and other plants come into the lobby and conservatory of Bellagio every two weeks. The conservatory changes its display of plants and flowers five times a year, for the seasons and for Chinese New Year.
When we visited, the 150-member horticulture staff was in the midst of ''change-out," moving out all the summer flowers and floral displays with cranes and electronically changing floors, and moving in the autumn flowers, masses of pumpkins from California, and ''a couple of thousand gourds," according to chief horticulturist Audra Danzak.
Danzak showed us pieces of the dead, 200,000-pound, banyan tree the hotel had purchased from the town of West Palm Beach, where it was beginning to block public access.
''We're going to . . . put it in the main lobby," she said with a smile, ''and we'll put specimen orchids in the branches."
Contact Julie Hatfield, a freelance writer in Boston, at juliestockwell@peoplepc.com.
