Blog Posts

Making the best of quarantine

11/20/2020

Now is the winter of our discontent. With a quarter million dead from Coronavirus, we wait for a vaccine. With a con man in the White House, we wait for him to vacate the premises. There’s hope of vaccinations and competent governance on the horizon, but it looks like we’ll have to hang tough for a few more months. With few social and entertainment options available during the duration, we need to look elsewhere for meaningful and productive pursuits.

Fortunately, it is the perfect season to start a native plant garden: these short, cooler days with occasional rain make a forgiving environment for native plants to sink their roots and get established. This time of social isolation could be a good season for you as well, by turning your attention from the nonsense going on in the public sphere to focus on improving your home environment. And if you’re isolating at home, gardening can be a healthy activity to get through these dark months.

I can meet with you (at a distance of six feet) to discuss the kind of space you want to create in your yard: secluded or inviting, naturalistic or formal, dramatic or soothing. I take your goals and translate them into a plant design that is appropriate for your soil and light conditions and compatible with established plants you want to keep. After we develop a plan you love, I’ll obtain and place the plants for you. I can get them planted for you too, but I love it when people do the planting themselves (I’ll show you the tricks). It not only gets you outside in the sunshine, but your feeling of connection is enhanced when you handle and nurtured the plants yourself. And watching your plants grow and develop can provide a bit of positivity in otherwise bleak times.

I’m confident that this miserable winter will eventually be made glorious summer by the sons of Pfizer and of Scranton. Wouldn’t it be great when we get beyond all this if you not only survived, but took advantage of the time to create something that will continue to provide benefits for years to come? Give me a call and let’s start to create something together.

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Basic Design Principles

11/22/2019

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When I visit a prospective client, I won’t be able to answer the question “What would you do with this yard?” until I get to know them a bit. First we’ll talk about how they use (or would like to use) the space, how they want to fit in the neighborhood, what elements they like in their existing landscape, and how the design might reflect their personality or values. This conversation usually triggers some unifying concept in my mind that I can use to inform the design. Often restrictions placed by the client (e.g., I’m allergic to bee stings) or by the site itself will help me to narrow my selection from the vast array of native plant species available.

Once I have a concept I will apply some basic concepts to create the design:

Keep the good stuff. Whatever is great about the site should be kept and emphasized. It may be that established trees can provide a framework for the native plants to be installed; if these have higher water requirements, I’ll select plants that like it a bit wetter to provide a transition to areas with more drought-tolerant natives. Maybe there’s an existing walkway or bird bath that can provide a focal point for the design. I’ll select plants that are compatible with the feature(s) and then work outward from these areas to parts of the yard that are more of a blank slate.

Work with what you’ve got. Soil type is usually the biggest restriction on species selection. The beauty of native plants is that they are adapted to local conditions, so there are always some species suitable to the soil in your yard. Clay soils are the most common restriction on what plants can be used, so I’ll select species that can tolerate slow drainage where I can. There may be certain species that we really want to include, so we’ll amend the soil around those plants (it can be as simple as a two-inch mound of topsoil) to allow them to thrive. Other factors such as shadiness, topography, or proximity to the house will also affect the plants we use.

Plan for the whole year. A common mistakes is to select showy flowering plants that will explode into color in the spring, and forget about how the garden will look in through the rest of the year. The simplest way to avoid this trap is to include evergreen species that provide year-round greenery. Many of these evergreen shrubs are chaparral species with attractive fruits that provide a splash of color in the fall, as well as enticing birds to visit. Toyon, with its dark green foliage and red berries is a great example of this kind of plant. I’ll also select shrubs that flower early in the spring (some Ceanothus species), later in the summer (lots of sunflower-like plants), or have a long blooming period (like California fuschia). A thoughtful mix of species turns a static landscape into an ever-changing display of color and life.

Think ahead. Be patient. It’s understandable to want a lot of green in the garden right away, but that immediate payoff can lead to an overcrowded mess in a few years. Worse, more aggressive species can crowd out their slower-growing (and usually more desirable) neighbors. So I consider the mature size the plant before putting them in the ground, as well as which species can be pruned and shaped. I might include short-lived species that will provide some initial bang and then fade out as other woody species fill in the space. I also consider the eventual structure of the garden (plant height, width, type) that won’t be apparent at planting time.

A native landscape will always be a dynamic and somewhat unpredictable entity. I apply these design concepts to create a garden that’s more than an assemblage of pretty plants and is closer to a holistic community that fits together visually and ecologically.

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Your Carbon-Saving Garden

10/21/2019

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Killing your lawn and planting a native landscape not only add beauty to your life and eliminates a repetitive, useless task, it helps in the fight against climate change.

On one level, this is obvious – you can see that there is more plant material (aka biomass) in the trees, shrubs, and perennial ground covers of a native garden than there is in the annual grasses that make up a lawn. As native plants grow, they take CO2 from the air and store it into leaves, stems, and roots, not in grass blades that are then (repetitively, uselessly) mowed.

Killing your lawn and planting a native landscape not only add beauty to your life and eliminates a repetitive, useless task, it helps in the fight against climate change.

On one level, this is obvious – you can see that there is more plant material (aka biomass) in the trees, shrubs, and perennial groundcovers of a native garden than there is in the annual grasses that make up a lawn. As native plants grow, they take CO2 from the air and store it into leaves, stems, and roots, not in grass blades that are then (repetitively, uselessly) mowed.

But that’s only half the picture. Zoom out from the individual plants and look at the garden as a system and the real carbon-saving benefits of native gardens become clearer.

First of all, consider the energy needed to pump water from the Colorado River to your front yard. Add in the energy to make fertilizer, run the lawn mower, and transport green waste to the landfill. Don’t forget that as the grass breaks down anaerobically, methane comes off, adding another greenhouse gas to the mix.

Admittedly, the amounts of carbon saved are small – for a typical (2000 sq. ft.) yard, the root storage is about 60 pounds per year (based on carbon sequestration in mature chaparral) with another 100 pounds of carbon saved by reducing irrigation.

This doesn’t make much of a dent in the average (US) person’s 20 ton per year carbon footprint. It’s kind of like turning the water on and off as you brush your teeth – it’s a small step that serves as a symbol and a reminder of your commitment to the larger goal.

As you enjoy your native garden, remember that you’re helping nature not only by feeding the birds and butterflies you can see, but by influencing processes you can’t see, below the ground and in the air.

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Remembering Columbus

10/13/2019

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As you may have realized by the slightly reduced rush hour traffic today, today we are celebrating Columbus Day (aka Indigenous People’s Day). In keeping with the holiday spirit, let’s contemplate what California landscapes looked like before European contact. After all, that’s how we define a native plant – something that was growing here the day before Columbus (or Francis Drake) got here.

It seems easy to know what California looked like before the Spanish got here – go to the foothills and hike far enough to where non-native weeds don’t yet have a foothold. You’ll probably find a mosaic of waist to shoulder high aromatic shrubs – coastal sage scrub – or an impenetrable evergreen thicket – chaparral.

While this shows us what plants were there back in the day, it leaves a false impression of what pre-contact landscapes were like.

Columbus, Drake and the rest did more than take make maps, trade trinkets, and take captives. They also introduced their European microbes to a system where they had no natural enemies, introducing diseases that devastated the indigenous populations.

As Kat Anderson’s Before the Wildneress explains, when John Smith or Junipero Serra arrived, they found a landscape that had been left to grow wild for over a century after the native population collapsed. They saw an empty wilderness for the taking, not an abandoned garden.

Before they were infected with the explorer's germs, Native Americans had been manipulating the landscape, burning the land to get fresh new growth to feed the game they hunted, trimming willows and sedges for basketry, irrigating desirable grasses for seeds, and promoting desired plants by selective cultivation and harvesting. Then plagues swept through the population, reducing both the need and the ability to continue altering the landscape to meet their needs.

So as you putter in your garden, deadheading those dried seed heads from the buckwheat and sage, remember that you are continuing in a millennia-old gardening tradition.

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Fall Native Color

10/8/2019

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Gardens with California native plants get a bad rap for looking great in spring, then turning brown and dry for the rest of the year. That’s not true in nature and certainly doesn’t need to be true in a well-designed native landscape. An easy way to prolong your spring flower show through the summer and into fall is to include native sunflowers in your garden.

The Sunflower Family (aka Asteraceae aka Compositae) is a huge and varied group of plants worldwide and in California. (Nerd alert: 17% of the 1410 pages of plant describing California’s plants in the Jepson Manual are Asteraceae). The species we’ll be looking at are pioneer (early successional) species in coastal sage scrub communities in SoCal and Baja.

In nature, their small seeds, often carried by the wind, land in patches of bare ground where they can germinate readily and grow rapidly. This group of species are close to fool-proof choices for a low-maintenance garden and are also great if you need plants that will fill in your landscape (relatively) quickly while other shrubs are taking their time becoming established.

Bush Sunflower (aka California daisy aka Encelia californica) and San Diego sunflower (aka San Diego viguiera aka Bahiopsis laciniata) are two native shrubs popular for their bright yellow flowers that give your garden a splash of color through the summer and into fall.

Bush Sunflower is like a bolder, brasher older sibling to San Diego Sunflower, whose more muted charms are worth the extra effort to get to know. It is a bit bigger and rangier, with showier flowers and larger leaves.

A drawback for me is the coarse texture of the leaves, with lots of bristly hairs on the underside. They dry and drop under drought conditions, but with judicious summer water, you'll keep most of them. I don’t tend to put this front and center in a garden, but I like to use masses of California Daisy as background behind smaller, subtler native plants.

San Diego viguiera tends to is a bit more compact in both its overall form and in its flowers. A real plus for me are the darker, smaller leaves with their wrinkled, arrow-like (sagitate) shape. These thick, shiny leaves are better at holding on to precious water, so this stays evergreen year-round with a bit of summer water. I like to use these as informal hedges, but single plants can also serve as the focal point for a small front yard.

The seed heads in the center of the flowers (the disc flower seeds, actually) are making their biggest contribution to our local birds right now as they provide food source during the dry months before the winter rains begin. After the birds have had their fill, you’ll want to dead head them, especially the long stalks on the California daisy.

Bush Sunflower

San Diego Sunflower

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