Daisy Robles discovered her passion for landscape design while studying at College of the Desert, so landing a position as an assistant superintendent of grounds at Sunnylands Center & Gardens is a dream job.

“I realized there’s a whole industry where you can use plants to design. I have a creative side and I like to look at art, so that’s what intrigued me about landscape design,” she said.

At Sunnylands, the concept of plants as art is taken seriously.  More than 53,000 desert plants on the 15-acre site in Rancho Mirage are arranged to evoke the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that once adorned the walls of Walter and Leonore Annenberg’s famous winter home. It was the Annenbergs who, before they died, arranged for the development of the Center & Gardens as a public access point to the historic estate.

“My main duty is plant health,” Robles said. “If I see a tree turning yellow all of a sudden, I need to figure out why and how to fix it—maybe with fertilizer, or different irrigation, or maybe there is an insect causing damage.”   

Laced with 1.5 miles of walking trails, the gardens are composed of various features, including a wildflower field, a labyrinth, a grassy circle, and rows of barrel cactus, agave, and aloes.

Robles’ favorite part? “It’s like kids. You don’t want to pick a favorite,” she said, before settling on the four specimen beds where species of cactus are on display. “I like the variety and the clusters. That’s one of the areas I can play around with because the design isn’t set in stone.”

Sunnylands designates its garden as an art garden, not a botanical garden, so plants are not labeled with their names. This season, Sunnylands launched a new website, www.sunnylandsgardens.org, to help people identify the plants they see. Public access is free, but visitors are encouraged to check www.sunnylands.org for operating hours and closures due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Visitors ask a lot of questions about the plants, and Robles said she’s more than happy to talk about them. “It’s not just a nice place to work,” she said. “It’s something that fuels my passion.”