Surface soils in deserts undergo different pedologic processes depending on the proximity to plant canopies. Differences in soil structure and texture in undercanopy and interspace microsites can be significant, thus affecting infiltration, plant available water, and ET. We sought to answer whether soil hydraulic properties vary from the undercanopy to interspace at the plot scale, and how this heterogeneous parameter field affects large-scale hydrologic processes of a heterogeneous landscape in the Mojave Desert. We examined the extent of variability across microsites using a linear array of seven mini-disk tension infiltrometers spaced at 25-cm increments across a distance of 150 cm. A total of four radial transects was run on each of six desert shrubs. Data were analyzed using Wooding's solution and inverse modeling at three tension steps. Results show a mean saturated conductivity (Ks) of 16.0 cm/hr which implies that saturated conditions are seldom achieved except for the most intense precipitation events. A trend of increasing unsaturated conductivity and decreasing Gardner's alpha was observed with increasing radial distance from shrubs. These findings are contrary to other researchers who show significantly higher Ks underneath plant canopies under ponded conditions. Our research implies that undercanopies are areas of lower water entry for most precipitation events and that lateral roots would thus be the primary water mover during years of typical rainfall. Using these results and the large scale canopy percent cover and spatial pattern, we upscaled the hydraulic parameters to the landscape level using the p-norm approach (Zhu et al., 2007) that represents the optimal averaging scheme (arithmetic versus harmonic versus geometric) to investigate how these two heterogeneous fields at different scales affect averaging schemes of hydraulic properties. The results illustrate the importance of proximity to shrubs, and shrub spatial pattern, when predicting large-scale soil hydraulic properties in heterogeneous desert landscapes.