sustainable

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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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Succulents–because to forgive is divine

Succulents are having a moment.  A fairly extended moment, which means garden designers writers are really reaching for ways to use them.  October’s pumpkin-as-succulent-container craze was a perfect example of this; I personally am gobsmacked that anyone has the discretionary time, especially at this time of the year, to fiddle with floral pins and sphagnum moss.  Though they do look pretty cool, and if anyone wants to make me one, I’m up for it.succulent-pumpkin-instructions-collage1But it is certainly great proof of how succulents will adapt to all kinds of creative situations; they’re a great artist’s tool.   Too, succulents will adjust to just about any container, which means if you’re the kind of person who can’t say no to a thrift-store find of a rusty Dutch oven or delicate teacup, you’re in luck.

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Now you can justify your habit because you can stuff succulent trimmings into your treasures; they’ll take root and flow down the sides, and people will admire your panache.  If you want more crafty ideas for using succulents, set yourself up a Pintrest board and prepare to be amazed.

In addition to these qualities, of course, succulents are also becoming more widely used both in landscapes and containers because of their relatively modest needs (good drainage; occasional water).  They’re really like the perfect dinner party guest—they quickly make themselves at home, they get along with just about everyone, and they’re not high maintenance.  But here’s the real reason I like succulents, and invite many to live with me:  They’re forgiving.  Really, really forgiving.  I like that in a relationship.

You see, just because I write a gardening blog doesn’t mean I can always spend a lot of time gardening.  In fact, in the whole month of October I am not sure I saw my own backyard more than twice, due to work demands and the usual shot-from-cannons pace of 21st-century life.   So succulents, which overlook my lapses of memory and failures to carry out my own good intentions, are the perfect garden partner for me.

If you haven’t had a lot of experience with succulents, let me show you what I mean.  Here’s one of my patio pots planted with aeonium “Schwarzkopf.”  Because it’s in full sun, on a stone wall and inconveniently far from a spigot, this pot often suffers from a double whammy of heat and neglect.  So when I did wander out a couple of weeks ago to see if the backyard was still there, the aeonium looked like this:  IMG_5933I was not alarmed; I just whisked by it on my way to something else.  And normally I would go right on ignoring it, because I know it can wait, and other things in the garden needed my attention, but it occurred to me that I could use this to dramatically demonstrate the Lazarus-like qualities of succulents.  So I took the picture above, and then went and got the dog’s water bucket.  I dumped the water over the pot, and came back the next day.

IMG_6425As Emeril says, “Bam!”

I don’t mean to suggest that succulents can be ignored with no consequences.  Drought and heat will alter their appearance.  But here’s the thing—I can live with that.  Sometimes the stressed look is actually cooler than the healthy look.  As soon as they’re watered again, either by rainfall (what does that look like again?  I’ve forgotten) or via the occasional dog bowl, all is forgiven.  The past is forgotten, and you’re moving forward.  And you can do this over and over again, and the succulent will never hold a grudge.  If only all relationships were so elastic.

So if your life includes long stretches of chaos, intense activity, or any other distractions which divert you from your gardening, consider succulents.  Adaptable, self-sufficient, easy to ignore, and always forgiving—they’re the perfect partner in a gardening relationship.

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Fall (yes, really!) in southern California

People say we don’t have fall in southern California.  I beg to disagree.  Oh, people will disparage what they see as our lack of seasons; in fact, I recently observed a raging Facebook debate on this very subject; the natives were insisting that we do have fall here, while the transplants from other areas disparaged our Octobers as “just more tepid than summer.”  And then they went on to wax eloquent about New England.

Now, having grown up in the Blue Ridge mountains, with its famous fall foliage displays, I do understand the yearning for home and the fall colors.   And I also understand the profound sense of displacement when your surroundings don’t match your inner calendar.  That happens a lot out here, and mostly we’re used to the complaining about it.

But fall does happen here, and I thought I’d devote the next couple of posts to an appreciation of what Helen Hunt Jackson (herself a transplant to California) called “October’s bright blue weather.”  And that is indeed the first sign of fall:  the right-on-schedule, deep blue sky.

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This parking lot liquidambar shows off our October sky.

Then the temperatures drop.  Yes!  It’s a cool-ish 70 degrees on my patio right now!  And—get ready—it can get even colder.

Other seasonal markers are there once you know what to look for.  Below, a native erigonum (buckwheat) in the late afternoon light.  The Chumash made pancakes from it—I just like to look at it.

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While we don’t have the flamboyant, in-your-face displays of fall foliage that other regions have, a number of trees here (which, okay, are all transplants) put on a lovely and reliable seasonal display.  The following are worth looking for, and perhaps deserving of a spot in your home landscape:

Crape myrtle--yellow

The Crape myrtle (above) is one of my favorite trees; I can devote a whole post to their graceful structure and four-season interest, but for now, I’ll just focus on their fall foliage–which can be beautiful.  If you’re planting this tree for fall color, it’s a good idea to pick it out in the fall so you can see what you’ll be getting.Tall liquidambar

Liquidambars (above, called sweetgum in other parts of the country) can turn a startling red in the fall, and in the winter, the bare tree will be covered, if you’re lucky, with the flocks of goldfinches that come after the seeds in the sticky balls.  (These balls eventually make their way to the ground below, so do choose your location carefully—I notice they’re often perimeter trees, so that passers-by, rather than the homeowners, have to deal with the treacherous balls underfoot.  Nice.)

Red chinese pistache

Chinese pistache, above, is a lesser-known superstar; it blends in with any landscape in the summer, but in fall, look out.  It turns the most amazing shades of red-gold, and will light up its location.

Birch tree shower of goldBirches, those landscape staples so beloved and so often stuck in the middle of lawns, turn a spectacular gold color this time of year.

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Pyracantha (firethorn, above) and chrysanthemums (below) add a lot of seasonal color; pyracantha berries redden in fall and continue to brighten up the landscape all winter long. And instead of composting your Costco or Home Depot mums when they’re done blooming, stick them in the ground, cut them back in January, and prepare to be amazed next October.

Crysanthemums

Above, an example of both crysanthemum’s fall color and my poor planning–these guys are reaching for some sun owing to the great success of the shrubs planted nearby.  Some of the mums have decided to take a nap.

So, yes, we do have fall, and it has arrived.  Like the song says about love, it’s all around you.  Let it show.  And enjoy!

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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.

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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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The heart-ful side of landscape design: use your words

“Trust thyself–every heart vibrates to that iron string.”–Emerson

I was walking the dog this morning by the community gardens, happily situated in a corner of our city’s equestrian park, thus ensuring an unending supply of fertilizer—now that was some thoughtful planning!—and I started noticing how much variety there was in the beds.  If you’d asked me, I’d have said I would have expected to see vegetables planted in the beds, because I’ve always held this unsupported-by-research notion that people rent beds in community gardens to supplement their food supply.

And vegetables there were a-plenty; as you would imagine at this time of year, tomatoes had escaped their cages and were snaking out the sides, dripping fruit; all kinds of squash and pumpkins were peeking out from under their giant leaves.  But there were also beds of nothing but sunflowers (this may or may not have been intentional; if you’ve ever grown sunflowers, you know they are one garden gift that keeps on giving); there were beds of solid blooming rosebushes; there was a bed with a bumper crop of (go figure) amaranth.

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Amaranth

Some beds were quite artistic, with arches woven of branches and vines; there were white picket fences; there was a space enclosed by what appeared to be laminated pieces of a former desk.  No two beds were alike in either intent, function, or appearance.

And this brings me to my point (finally!  you think), which is that a garden is living art, and art is intensely personal in nature.  To adapt the old saying about art, you may not know garden design, but you know what you like.  And that should be where you start, regardless of any other advice you get about gardening sustainably.

If I could remember where I got this advice, I’d credit it–it may have been A Pattern Garden, by Valerie Easton, which to date is the only landscape design book I can absorb.  But the advice was to write down a few words that describe the way you want your space to look and feel.  So I wrote down:  “Green, shady, secret, dappled, inviting.”  And I held that thought in my head as I set about choosing plants and designing our layout.

A tremendous amount has been written (and filmed) about our houses as our archetypal selves; it’s been observed that we connect almost viscerally to houses that spark in us some memory of our early selves. I think the same is true for the space that surrounds the buildings we live in.  We connect, not just visually, but through the heart, and so it’s important to keep the heart’s desires in mind when planning.  You might not have a clear vision of your landscape design at the outset, but it’s worth a few minutes of quiet time to think about what your words would be, and write them down.

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Ceanothus and crape myrtle in late afternoon

In case you’re wondering, I did indeed end up with a green, shady, dappled front yard space, with secret nooks and niches–and I think it’s very inviting.

And it was only when our friend Roberta remarked, “This reminds me of the mountains” that I realized I’d recreated the feel of  the landscape of my youth in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Now, there’s not a single plant in our yard that could actually be found in Asheville, but it was possible, by keeping my word list in mind, to find California-friendly plants that would create the same feel.

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Early evening front yard

So give it a try–put a few words down on paper; see what your heart wants to feel in your garden.  Because “sustainable,” remember, works in many ways–the space you create should be one that will sustain you.

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Consider the bottlebrush

Bottlebrush blossom

An important insight early in my re-education in “plants we take for granted” came from Beverley Nichols, an English writer whose works have recently been revived by Timber Press.  Nichols was a man of his age (early 20th century), complaining about his manservant lying a-bed too late of a morning, employing gardeners to tend his conservatory, and so on.  He is frightfully opinionated–and completely addictive.  You won’t read him for garden advice–at least unless you have an English estate–but I do recommend you read him for his take on people, cats, and plants, and his use of the King’s English.

Now that I’m done with that plug for his estate, let me move on to the moment of revelation.  Our neighborhood has a number of old bottlebrushes (callistemon) stuck here and there in the landscape.  Untended, unwatered, they’re mostly gnarled and scrubby, and if I noticed them at all, I mostly noticed how untidy they were.  And then one day my husband was reading Nichols’ Garden Open Tomorrow, and read out loud (as he is wont to do even though he can clearly see I’M READING, TOO) the author’s description of seeing a bottlebrush for the first time in Kew Gardens’ Australian greenhouse:  “It is a flamboyant, extravagant, and altogether unlikely creation; the arrogant scarlet flowers are like fantasies of spun glass tied to the branches by a modern decorator.”

On my next walk I stopped to consider the bottlebrush that hung over the sidewalk, asking for nothing—not water, not fertilizer; maybe only some attention—and decided, by God, that was an accurate description.  It was truly spectacular.  And we already had a previously-unappreciated one on our bank, surrounded by ivy.  So we cleared the ivy, and planted three more.  The bees and hummingbirds could not be happier, and when the sun shines on the blossoms, they do indeed look like spun glass.  And look at it (above) after a rain!  It looks like a Chihuly piece!

So in your plant selection, do consider the bottlebrush.  They attract hummingbirds and bees, come in a number of cultivars to fit a variety of situations, from patio tree to hedge to foundation plantings; Callistemon viminalis, the weeping bottlebrush, can stand in for people nostalgic for the weeping willows of their youth, and the smaller-sized Callistemon “Little John“ is a wonderful compact, blue-green shrub that, in Bob Perry’s words, is “highly tolerant of heat, aridity, and cold termperatures below 20 degrees.”  Can’t get much more versatile than that.

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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.