The middle path

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Now is the winter of our Santa Ana event

I know the weather people like to call our episodes of high wind a “Santa Ana event,” but that always sounds to me as though it should be a giant sale:   “Come on down for our Santa Ana Event!  Stock up now on our huge inventory of uprooted trees, broken tree limbs, flattened shrubbery!  Don’t miss our special purchase of fallen palm fronds—downed power lines at selected locations.”

Calling it a “Santa Ana event” makes it sound like a lot more fun than it actually is.

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A familiar sight in our neighborhood in Santa Ana season.

If you’re a gardener, a Santa Ana event can be vexing, because there’s not much you can do outdoors besides duck, cover and hold.  You can’t even clean up the piles of debris shaken down from the trees, because more is Continue reading →

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The L-bomb

“Lawn” is not a four-letter word.

Okay, maybe technically it is a four-letter word.  But it’s a four-letter word you don’t want to mention in conversation with eco-purists and sustainability warriors.  Mention “lawn” to the True Believer and you’ll get the same horrified reaction as if you’d dropped an f-bomb at a tea.

The thing is, while broad, estate-style sweeps of lawn are going the way of the dinosaur, there are good reasons why you might not want to eliminate your lawn entirely:  Kids and pets appreciate a spot to roll and play;  there’s the cooling effect; maybe you hail from an area which is lush and green, and home is not home to you without your small patch of grass.  Maybe it’s now a smaller patch of grass, but darn it, you still want it.

When we were first trying to figure out what should anchor our big, front-yard beds of perennial shrubs, we considered, and vetoed, many ideas—more shrubs, decomposed granite, gravel, ground covers like dymondia and myporoum.  Each one of these, though, while water-wise, had drawbacks.  I wanted to be able to walk across it barefoot (you can take the girl out of the country . . . ); we wanted a flat area so neighbors and visitors didn’t have to wade through knee-high shrubs; I’d seen a lot of lawn substitutes in my walks that just didn’t quite work.  So I was pretty sure that little circular area surrounded by shrubs was going to be occupied by grass.

Spending the amount of time we did in the company of sustainably-minded people, we were pretty cowed about even asking how we might go about this.  We knew we wouldn’t be using Marathon sod; even a small patch of the supposedly more drought-tolerant Marathon II is extremely demanding when it comes to water.  But just try to move on from there, to see what else might work.  We consulted with the usually-friendly Theodore Payne folks, and got the suspicious reply “Why d’ya want a lawn?”  (No one who asks you this is really interested in your response, by the way.  They just want to tell you why you’re wrong.)

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Buffalo grass

The TP people finally allowed as how we might use buffalo grass “If you have to have a lawn.”  Other professionals concurred that buffalo grass was the new turf substitute.   We really clung to that gleam of hope for a short while, but then our local Armstrong nursery made the mistake of actually bringing in a demo flat of it.  Yikes.  It’s a prairie grass, and after seeing it up close and personal, I decided that’s where it belongs.  (I should mention in the interests of fairness that it apparently behaves more like lawn in northern California.)

So after a lot of resource- and soul-searching, we took the step (which was advised against at almost every turn) of buying two $8 flats of St. Augustine plugs at Home Depot.  St. Augustine has a bad reputation, some of which is deserved:  It spreads by stolons (runners), which can get away from you.  It goes dormant in the winter, which offends some homeowners’ personal design aesthetic.

But it seemed our best option, so Ian spent an afternoon on his knees—Ian planting St. Augustine

two months later our little circle was completely filled.

St. Augustinei green and lush

Two years later, the lawn (Yes!  I said it!  Lawn lawn lawn!) does send out runners, which we alternately weedwhack or pull to keep within its borders.  It does go dormant, though it turns kind of a drab green, rather than the winter-white of Bermuda grass.  Which doesn’t bother me—coming from a four-season climate as I do, I expect grass to go dormant in winter.  And, the best part—it requires about 75% less water than the previous Marathon lawn.

So don’t be cowed by eco-purists.  You can be sustainable and have a lawn.  You can make it quite a bit smaller; you can replace parts of it with other things; you can use a different type of grass or even a ground cover.  Sustainability doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach; we can find some middle ground, and—who knows?—it might even be green.

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You can’t train a plant

The title concept bears repeating, so I’ll repeat it:  You can’t train a plant.  You can, if consistent and firm, train a dog; you can train your children (provided you start early), you can sort of, kind of, train a spouse.  But you can’t train a plant.  Plants lack the higher-order cognitive functions—not surprising given that they don’t have brains.  So you can’t plant them in areas which are radically different than the environments of their ancestral origins and expect them to plot out a survival strategy.  They will look at you in shock and surprise, and then in despair, and then they will cease to look at you at all and gaze directly into the ground–and then fall over.  Very dramatic.  A sad commentary on your efforts, and guilt-producing to boot.

And expensive, needless to say.  So if you have had trouble getting plants to “do” for you, consider whether in the past you have chosen a plant solely for its looks (and just a thought:  how well has that worked for you in your romantic life?) and then decided it would work, by golly, wherever you wanted to put it.  Just like picking a partner by looks and blind hope, that approach works, with luck, maybe 5% of the time.

Here’s a thought:  start by assessing your actual, physical, real-world needs (this really is starting to sound like relationship advice–the parallels are striking!  I may write a book!) and then search for your plant based on that. Do you have a corner that is in shade all day?  A hot, sunny balcony?  A tree whose roots have lifted up above the soil, spreading in every direction?  How often—truthfully, now—will you be checking the progress of your plantings to adjust water and care as needed?  How much money are you willing to spend on water monthly?  Ask these questions, don’t judge your responses, take a little time to think, and then it’s time to sally forth to the singles bars, um, nurseries, to pick out your right plant for the right place.

You can, of course, read widely and educate yourself about plants; you can take your next neighborhood stroll with an eye to noticing what plants are working in the kind of spots you’re planning for; and last, which might be first, you can seek expert advice.  Start by finding a nursery close to you.  Though the big-box stores are ubiquitous and value-priced, the staff is often not especially knowledgeable, so seek out local counsel, which can be far more accurate and useful.

You may have to find the manager—some nurseries seem to cycle through employees, so you want someone who’s worked there long enough to amass some knowledge of subject matter and region—but it’s absolutely worth your while.  Describe in specific detail the space you’re shopping for (low water, morning sun, deep afternoon shade, living room windowsill, e.g.), and then pay careful attention.  And then buy something from them.  If we expect these places to stay in business against the cutthroat competition and enormous buying power of the Home Depots et al, we have to be willing to do our part.

Whatever you plant, though, here are your mantras:  You have to water consistently till the plant is established.  Always.  And you can’t train a plant.

Marthas and statice

This hedge of pelargonium and statice is a good example of right plant, right place–
which for them is full sun and little water.

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Piecework

Often when we think about going sustainable, we picture tearing out everything we have and starting all over again.  The prospect can be so exhausting that the project simply never begins, and so we just keep watering our lawns and cursing the water district.

We imagine that changing our landscape will be like organizing our closets, another large chore that no one leaps to do because it seems so monumental, so overwhelming, such a Hercules-cleaning-out-the-Augean-stables undertaking.  For this myth, I blame the shelter magazines and their photo spreads featuring makeover magic—the spaces utterly, and sometimes unrecognizably, transformed in the final reveal.

The truth is that you don’t have to take a closet or an outdoor space down to the studs; doing so is enormously time-consuming and expensive.  You can instead take it one corner, one bed, one patch of ground at a time.  You can chip away at the lawn without the chaos and rumpled look of a work in progress.

One way is to consider putting in big things (plants, pots, hardscape) where once there were thousands of little things (blades of grass).   Taking out a few feet of lawn and replacing it with a bed of larger, waterwise plants can be strikingly beautiful and will reap benefits almost immediately (do keep in mind that plants have to establish first).  If you have money and the inclination for hardscape, it’s another way to take up large amounts of space that won’t require water.  Covering an area with bark, mulch, or gravel is another option.

One of our neighbors is taking the little-bit-a-time approach by cutting big curved beds into what used to be lawn, and planting the new spaces with New Zealand flax (phormium), grasses, and succulents.  You can see by the photo that the owners really have a good eye for what works; as a person who doesn’t necessarily have that same gift, I look, and remember, and try to incorporate the principles into my own little-at-a-time planning.

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Beds of flax and grasses occupy space that was formerly lawn,
and soften the front of the house

These artistic neighbors, Matt and Denise, very generously let me take pictures and told me how they’ve gradually gone more sustainable over time.  Matt says the reduced lawn requires almost 50% less water, and the beds of flax and grasses (obtained for free from a friend—my favorite kind of plant shopping!) get no supplemental water at all.  Water-wise, money-wise, and still beautiful–that’s the best kind of sustainable.

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New Zealand Flax, fountain grasses, myoporum (ground cover) and strategically placed rocks require little to no supplemental water (especially the rocks).

The benefits of walking your neighborhood really can’t be overstated.  You get ideas of what to do (and the occasional insight on what not to do); you see for yourself what really works in your immediate location, and you realize you can change to a more sustainable gardening style a little bit at a time.  And best of all, you meet the nicest people.

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Considerations of going native

Ceanothus branch

Ceanothus “Concha”

I have nothing against California natives; in fact, some of my best friends are natives.  Some, like the sturdy, glossy, and un-temperamental Yankee Point can be easily adapted to the home landscape, and perform beautifully in a range of soils and conditions.  And it’s green year-round, so what’s not to love?  Planting California natives will attract a whole new population of wildlife and butterflies to your yard, and over time, they can lower your water bill.  Over time.  See below.

But keep in mind that natives will, on average, have a 30-40% failure rate, which is a polite way of saying that 4 of every 10 you plant may die; slowly or inexorably, or seemingly overnight.  Natives tend to carry a higher cost owing to their slower growth rate and difficulty of cultivation (see:  failure rate).  So figure an average of $8 per 1-gallon plant, and figure replacing 3-4 at each go, and you begin to see just how expensive a proposition tearing out your lawn and putting in natives might be.

If you’re an impatient gardener and want to go native, you’ll either have to take up meditation or look out some other window after you’ve planted, because Theodore Payne Nursery’s mantra are the truest words ever spoken on the subject:  The first year they sleep, the second, they creep, the third, they leap.  The first year, TP neglects to mention (but which we learned through bitter failure and advice from Las Pilitas Nursery), you must water like you would any other plant.  The second year, less so; the third, probably less, and so on till you reach equilibrium or all your plants die.

So my advice (not that you asked) is to educate yourself a little and again, take a walk through your neighborhood.  Using natives is very mainstream now; what’s surviving?  What natives have made it to the big nurseries?  This is how we glommed onto the Yankee Point, which forms the foundation plantings of our front yard.

Yankee Point ceanothus in spring

Yankee Point ceanothus in spring

Ask yourself how much dormancy you are willing to tolerate; you may be able to tuck plants with a long dormant season in and around other plantings, similar to the way you might treat bulbs.  Just remember a great many natives do have a long dormant season, usually summer; there’s a reason the Theodore Payne Foundation Garden Tour is in April.

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Having new eyes

“The real voyage of discovery lies not in new landscapes, but having new eyes with which to see.”–Marcel Proust

If you’ve read my two “About” paragraphs, you know I’ve been through a lot of gardening phases and crazes.  The current phase began nine years ago, when we moved to a house with a big (for southern California) lot.  The front and back yards consisted mostly of lawn and concrete paths, built on what seemed to be a bottomless layer of shale–no actual soil is evident no matter how deep we dig.  It was the worst possible combination of factors for water conservation, and after the second summer of the lawn expensively gasping out its last in the middle of June, we decided we had to do something.

We spent more money than we are accustomed to, hiring a landscape architect to draw up a plan for the back yard; said plan involved a meadow and big swaths of drought-tolerant plants forming the bulk of the landscape.  We implemented the plan, incorporating a lot of California natives.  We had been busily steeping ourselves in waterwise landscape information; we absorbed the Doctrine of No-Lawn, which was refreshed annually at the April Theodore Payne Garden Tour; we made pilgrimages to native nurseries within driving distances, we attended lectures, we met True Believers.  In the end, the backyard works, mostly.  Parts of it are messy (I prefer “rustic”), and like any gardening effort, it’s always being subjected to tweaks due to unexpected growth, death, and the occasional burst of insight.  It takes less water to look presentable than the previous arrangement.

Ian reflects picturesquely in the backyard meadow.

Ian reflects picturesquely in the backyard meadow.

But when it came time to redo our front yard (mostly lawn), I knew we were going to take a different approach.  I didn’t want to spend money on outside advice this time, and I didn’t want to go native, because keeping natives front-yard-worthy year-round takes darn near as much water as a lawn.  An all-native yard in the summer can be a sad, sad, sight, and kind of jarring to the viewer when sandwiched between houses with expanses of green extending right up to the sidewalk.

We dithered for a while, looking through landscape books, talking to nursery staff, trying to decide what drought-tolerant plants could work in our front yard, and really not hitting on a plan.  Then one day I was out for my morning walk, and it hit me–the answer was literally all around us.

We live in a “starter-home” neighborhood–that is, the residents are about 1/3 original owners and 2/3 first-time owners.  Since the houses were built in 1961, it doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that the original homeowners are getting up there in age, and may not be able to care for the yard as they once could.  Some of the first-time owners are strapped for cash, working long hours, and/or raising families.  All in all, it adds up to some less-tended home landscapes.  This turned out to be a gold mine for me.  I started noticing what thrived–what continued to grow in spite of haphazard or no watering, amateur or no pruning, and just general benign neglect.

With my new mental framework, I roamed the neighborhood, taking mental notes, asking people about their plantings, getting to know my neighborhood landscape and my neighbors.   I started noticing that the plants that survived were the very same ones I was seeing planted in gas station strips, in Target parking lots, in planter beds by the now-defunct Blockbuster.  We overlook them because they’re generally sheared into submissive lumps, or full of roadside debris.  But even so, they flower, they add green, they host bees and other beneficials–and when I took the time to consider them individually, each one was a knockout, full of color and texture and interest.  And once established, they were water-wise; just as important, they conserved other resources, like energy and money.

So I decided my approach to the front yard would favor the tried-and-true:  standard landscaping favorites that are so common our eyes don’t even register them anymore.  Shrubs and trees and perennials (annuals and I broke up a looong time ago) that, while I might not buy them at a big-box store, would nevertheless be available at the big-box stores.  No exotics, no special trips to the native nurseries, no hand-holding.  What these old faithfuls would do for me is be reliable, once planted.  What I would do for them is try to group them in unexpected ways, allow them to flower rather than hedge them into stiff clipped attention, and to view them with new eyes–for their true, long-taken for granted beauty.

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Manifesto for the middle

If you’re a gardener, unless you’ve been locked in a closet for the past decade (and if so, how have you been gardening in there?–you should write a blog!), you’re familiar with the concept of “sustainable”–the careful stewardship of resources in order to avoid depletion.  It’s easy to embrace the concept–either because you care about the earth, or because you care about your water bill.  But what’s not so easy is how to get from your established, current water-intensive  situation to something a little more planet- and wallet-friendly.

It’s not for lack of inspiration.  Between shelter and lifestyle magazines, Pintrest, HGTV, and any number of other media sources, you receive a tidal wave of pictures, features, and Great Ideas for your new, all-sustainable landscape, which may or may not include a vegetable garden and chicken coop.  The trouble is, a lot of those Great Ideas are not so great.  They may conserve water, but more often than not, they also overlook the necessity of conserving other important resources:  time, energy, and money.

Sunset magazine, just to pick on an obvious source, is a particular offender in this regard.  You’re pulled in by a lovely picture of golden feathery grasses waving in front of a hedge of olive trees placed artistically around a starkly minimalistic house; you read the equally minimalistic text (thanks, Sunset, for decades of “how-to” advice–not!) and find that the owners are both architects who stumbled upon this fixer-upper when looking for a vacation home.  They “fixed it” by gutting and rebuilding it, and then hired another couple, these both landscape architects, who pulled everything out, bulldozed, and then re-established a drought-tolerant landscape that suited the house’s new profile.  The owners, shown on their new yoga deck or sipping wine, are supremely content.  “This is our dream,” they tell us.

While we’re happy for them, I, for one, can not relate.  I don’t have the time, energy, or money to throw everything, be it home or lawn, out and start over.  I love to garden, but I can’t spend eight hours a day doing it.  And I think a lot of people are in the same boat.  So this blog is dedicated to the proposition that sustainable gardening doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing endeavor; that it’s possible to conserve a wide range of precious resources by adopting the middle way–a more moderate path through the sustainable landscape.  So come along with me–read, share your ideas and experience–I think we can start a movement!  We may not be featured in Sunset, but we can perhaps redefine what “sustainable” means–and looks like.