Everyone likes to have flowering shrubs in the landscape, but if you are trying to use only drought-tolerant plants, the selection is rather limited. Of course, we all like Apache Plume with its bright white, 5-petaled flowers and silken pink plumes, but there are less known others that I'd like to recommend.
First would be Cliff Rose, formerly called Cowania but now technically listed as Purshia stansburiana. Don't get Purshia tridentata by mistake. It is a smaller shrub with small, pale flowers with hardly any scent. The true Cliff Rose has 5-petaled ¾ - 1-inch soft yellow flowers in late May with a scent that perfumes the air all around. Tiny evergreen leaves are covered by little round yellow buds and then miniature single-rose-like flowers almost from the ground up for two to three weeks, followed by five feathery tails, up to two inches long, from each flower, much like Mountain Mahogany.
The plant is found growing wild in limited areas of western Colorado and New Mexico, but reaches its best development in Arizona and Utah, where it is better known and specimens may reach 20 feet with a trunk diameter of six inches. Cliff Rose is choice browse for deer and stock, so is usually much smaller and not with a natural shape in the wild. I have a plant that is twenty years old that is probably six feet tall. Unfortunately, I placed it where other trees crowd it, but it can have a nice rounded shape. Silvery older stems tend to bend under the weight of summer growth, which are erect reddish brown stems covered with the tiny leathery green leaves. Soil improvement is not necessary and after getting established it does not require supplemental water.
Not native to New Mexico, but another excellent drought-tolerant shrub is Fernbush, Chamaebatiaria millefolium. Mature specimens can be seen in the plantings around the West Capitol Complex and city planted medians here in Santa Fe. It grows to about six feet tall in a rounded shape with erect stems that produce 4 - 6-inch tall panicles of mildly fragrant small white flowers in late summer which gradually turn a bright rust color as they age. The small leaves look like those of Partridge Feather but are a soft olive green. The leaves turn yellow and fall in November, but are among the first to reappear in spring. I have heard that in milder areas it is nearly evergreen. The plant is entirely hardy, but supplemental water will keep the leaves from yellowing and dropping in dry periods.
Cliff Fendlerbush, Fendlera rupicola, is found on rocky hillsides and in canyons such as the Rio Grande Canyon between here and Taos. The flowers are white, four-petaled and faintly scented in early May. Stems grow erect then bend as they develop branches to give the plant a fountain shape. Leaves are quite small, green and deciduous.
Supplemental water will speed the development of many stems and flowers.We never know what levels of precipitation the future will bring, so I hope you will plant small specimens of these shrubs that will establish more easily than large ones and enjoy watching and training their growth.