landscape

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A berry good time of year

This time of year, the bling in our southern California landscape is often coming from seasonal decorations—the red bows, the shine from the holiday lights, the texture of evergreens, real or not, hung from doors and draped around mailboxes.  But there’s another source of (to borrow What Not to Wear‘s mantra) color, texture, pattern and shine that’s longer-lasting, and which doesn’t have to be put up or taken down at an already busy time of year:  berries.

I love berries; I love all the fruits and drupes and hips and haws that manifest themselves this time of year; it’s wonderful how much interest they add to our outdoor surroundings.  And if you plant them in your own landscape, that’s not all they’ll add; you’ll have a whole new level of color and texture in the wildlife that shows up to eat your berries.

There are many colors and varieties to consider; right now pyracantha is making its vivid display everywhere you look. IMG_1301 It’s a cast-iron plant—pay attention and you’ll see how often the really big, showy ones are on a neglected bank or are part of the edges of yards where nobody looks (or waters).  Pyracantha doesn’t care.  It just keeps on putting on its spectacular show from November till late spring or longer.  It’s also one of the shrubs Neighborhood Watch experts advise you to plant beneath windows to keep people out; it’s spiny, hence the common name “firethorn.”  The spines also mean birds love to use it for cover.

If you’d like to add one to your yard or your own neglected bank, this is a great time of year to make your selection, as the shade varies–below, a very orange variety on an untended slope near us.

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If pyracantha doesn’t send you, or you aren’t feeling the thorns, ha ha, you might like the Chinese pistache’s kind of otherworldly pink berries, plus the pistache has that amazing fall foliage:

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Thanks to Mike, our neighbor and plant expert, for the positive ID on this pistache!

Or the nandina (heavenly bamboo), one of the few fruit-bearing stalwarts that performs in shade:

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There are lots of other tough plants that will give beautiful, wildlife-attracting berries all fall and winter.  One of my favorites, the tough, totally-taken-for-granted raphiolepsis or India hawthorne, has beautiful berries; I took the picture below in a medical complex parking lot.  Notice this one’s fruiting and flowering at the same time!

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The sweetshade tree (Hymenosporum flavum)  is a no-maintenance selection that’s been overlooked in landscaping for too long and is due for a comeback.  I will wax eloquently about its fragrance in the spring, but for now, check out its fall berries!

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Another plant whose fruit is beloved by birds, and which  is almost too much fun to be real, because the berries are not one, but two colors,  is the strawberry arbutus–the arbutus unedo.  They say you can make jam from the fruit, but you can’t prove it by me.  I can, however, vouch for its toughness; the photograph is taken from a neighbor who has apparently decided to stop watering every single bit of land he owns.  A lot of his plants are now dead, but not this one.  Well, maybe that one branch, but I think it’s broken:

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Okay, I could go on . . . but I hope I’ve convinced you to notice and enjoy the berries around you—once you start looking, you’ll see they’re everywhere.  This seems to be a very berry-ful year, which is strange considering just how little rain we got last year, but perhaps the plants are putting their last-ditch survival mechanisms into play.  At any rate, enjoy the literal fruits of their labor, and consider which ones you might like to add to your own garden environment.

And let me know any favorites of yours that I’ve missed!

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How not to plan a landscape–part one

“Planning is everything; plans are nothing”–General Patton

When it comes to gardening, I can’t say I’m much of a planner.  I do have an almost constant stream of ideas, but they never cohere into a grand whole.  Adding to that is my complete lack of visual-spatial ability, rendering me nearly incapable of reading, much less producing, a map or a blueprint (to come up with your own ed psych excuses, try this quick quiz).

So that left me somewhere back behind the usual starting point when it came to visualizing our new front space.  I stared out front from every window for hours upon end (not helpful), looked through landscape books and magazines (overwhelming–but then, I can easily get paralyzed in the shampoo aisle at Target); I even traced the yard and house onto graph paper, just like the books always tell you to do (but then had no idea what to do with it–please see my thesis contained in the second sentence of the first paragraph).

In fact, at this point of the process, all I could think of was what not to do.  I did not want to go traditional drought-tolerant (Mediterranean/native) for the following reasons:

We live in a ranch house.  Not a fabulous, Cliff May Atomic Ranch rendered faintly ironic with curated thrift store finds and one fabulous vintage Eames chair or Haywood-Wakefield table:

Cliff May picture

Fabulous ranch (Credit Anna Almendraia for the Huffington Post)

No, we have a “realtor ranch,” which is what realtors seem to call any one-story home without discernible architectural style, except maybe the “there are four more of this floor plan on this block” style.  This particular ranch house, built in 1961, has been customized by the previous owners to evoke a slight cottage-y vibe, by pushing out sections of the house and adding peaked roofs.  And it’s gray.  Kind of a June gloom gray, with dark red trim.

View of house before landscaping

Less fabulous ranch, with previous landscape

This being the case, and while I know the LA Times likes to feature in its living section people who’ll remodel or repaint the house prior to re-imagining the landscaping, we were not contemplating any such heroic undertaking.  Because excuse me a minute while I clamber onto my soapbox (I’m not as limber as I once was), but how sustainable is it to gut a house or even re-cover it in paint, sending materials to the landfill and spending lots of cash in the process?  (Maybe for you money is an ever-renewing resource, but at our house, we try to conserve it).  I know, I know that the people featured in photo spreads claim green by rebuilding their living rooms using seasoned timbers miraculously salvaged from a Maine barn inhabited by the original settlers.  But until I see one of these layouts of Extreme Fabulousness feature a house miraculously built from its own salvaged materials, I’m calling B.S.

So redoing the house in anticipation of new landscaping was not an option we would contemplate.  We had to choose landscaping that honored the house the way it was.  In my (hardly humble) opinion, Mediterranean/native looks good with the bones of:  modern, Spanish, Craftsman/bungalow, fabulous ranch.  Note from this point on how often these drought-tolerant landscapes are featured as examples with exactly these types of architecture, and let me know if you see anything different.

So, cottage, or at least cottage-y.  Cottage to me evoked the need for green, which is a problem, because so many water-wise plants are gray.  Gray on gray, no.  Even as irony, it doesn’t work for me.  So, not traditional drought-tolerant, and not-gray.  But also not-Marathon grass, we knew that, and not-annuals or anything else that would require particular attention (because our energy, as we saw it, was another resource to conserve).  Where did that leave us?  Well, not-anywhere.  So, unable to live with not-action, we decided at the very least to remove the existing lawn as a starting point.  Surely faced with not-lawn and a blank slate, something would come to us.

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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.