The Natural Habitat : Rather Than Attempting to Beat Our Hot, Dry Ecosystem, Try Joining It
Look to the hills and you will see what grows naturally in Southern California, a landscape of tough shrubs and herbs sewn from drab. Find any flat land that has not been paved, planted or built on, and you will find what once covered most of the valleys at the foot of those hills--fleeting flowers and grasses that turn to gold at the rainy season’s end.
Only in the moist canyon bottoms, where wild roses and lilies grow in the shelter of tall sycamores and bays, can you come upon anything that resembles what we commonly grow in our gardens. When the creeks go dry, even these plants can survive, like camels in the desert, without water.
Ours is a xeric region, “requiring only a small amount of water,” but our gardens are not, as anyone who has to drag hoses around can tell you.
How we got into this situation is not difficult to understand--our heritage is wetter and greener, and our garden notions were brought West with the family clock.
When we needed water to irrigate these new gardens, we dug wells, then canals and aqueducts. Southern California built a water empire. (There were, of course, other reasons to bring water to here, but water departments estimate that roughly 40 to 50 percent of urban water usage is outdoors.) However, during the drought of 1975-1976, the empire began to fall.
With the exception of Santa Barbara, Southern California didn’t suffer directly, but furious noises from the north, which relied on rainfall to fill its local reservoirs, forced us to join in the water-saving efforts.
At the time, there were dire projections for the future. Even conservative Sunset Magazine predicted that “for those without enough water, this will be a preview of what’s expected for many Westerners in the next decade.” Those 10 years have elapsed and gardens are as green as ever. But forecasting is tricky business, and while our water empire is being expanded, it is ever under attack. Last year, burgeoning Arizona began to claim its share of “our” Colorado River water, and during the next few years it will take roughly 60 percent of what urban Southern California now uses. The state water project, which brings water from the north, is incomplete amid concerns for the Sacramento Delta, and the venerable Los Angeles Aqueduct faces ongoing challenges over some of the water that originates around Mono Lake.
While ample rainfall washed away the immediate threat, the writing was on the wall, though it was the water department in Denver, Colo.--another western city with water problems--that came up with the actual words, coining the word xeriscape about six years ago.
A xeriscape is a landscape that requires only a small amount of water. As James A. Van Haun, of the Municipal Water District of Orange County, said in his opening remarks at a recent xeriscape conference, “Xeriscape is really nothing more than appropriate plant material, irrigation techniques and maintenance practices for a semi-arid or arid climate.” And appropriate is the key word here.
At the moment there is no frantic need to save water, but a decade after the drought there is perhaps a new generation of gardeners with the maturity to question what is “appropriate” in semi-arid Southern California. It helps to have grown up in California when it was a little less populated, to have spent time in golden fields or in the warm, dry shade of oaks; those gardeners might know that beauty is not dependent on water. But often the newcomers are the ones who most appreciate our climate and its possibilities.
Pictured on these pages are water-thrifty gardens from a pocket of appropriateness in Laguna Beach and a single example from the more metropolitan West Los Angeles area. They are worth admiring and studying for their water-consciousness, and would probably garner a medal of commendation from any water department. But they are also gardens of subtle beauty; they are visually appropriate. Two of them border chaparral and blend so harmoniously that it’s not easy to tell where the garden leaves off and nature begins. Perhaps because they “feel” more like wilderness, there is a restfulness about them not often found in other gardens.
A California garden is a challenge to any gardener because it is difficult to simply copy--it must be created. You begin with an almost clean slate. Some help can be found by studying the natural California landscape and ideas can be borrowed from the gardens of the Mediterranean, but you will be working with a palette of plants not often written about because they are difficult to grow in the wetter gardening centers of the world.
Many of the plants to use are well established in California gardens. In a list of appropriate plants prepared by the planning division of Ventura County are oleanders, cotoneasters, leptospermums, raphiolepsis, gazanias, rosemary and even bougainvilleas. And there are also less-common plants such as cassias and rock roses, as well as a host of California native plants.
In the pictures shown here, you will find even more of the unusual because these are gardens, not simply drought-resistant landscapes. Everything that is possible in a plump, well-watered garden is possible here (except perhaps the growing of edible plants, which do require ample water). You can putter to your heart’s content, there is no shortage of weeds to pull, and you can even water if you want to, since drought-tolerant plants will survive drought but look better with a little irrigation. There are bulbs to plant, flowers galore, vines, shrubs and trees.
You can’t, however, mow the lawn, because these gardens do not have lawns. Lawns are, after all, a relatively recent invention in the history of gardening and not a necessity. Instead, there are paths and patios--like Italian villas--delightful and ample paths that are a joy to follow, and patios where you can get out of the ever-present sun.
Sitting in these gardens, there is no doubt that you are in California. If you fall asleep, you will not wake wondering if you are in New Jersey. These gardens celebrate California and its warm, dry climate.
The California seasons are also celebrated, and at any time there is little doubt what time of year it is. In the winter the gardens are green and growing, full of renewed life. In the spring they are spectacular, with masses of flowers. In the summer they are subdued and serene though there is still life and flowers to be found. In the fall, right now, although they are at their driest, they are beehives of activity, for you plant an appropriate garden in the autumn.
The fall, with the first rains, is the start of the natural growth cycle in a Mediterranean, summer-dry, winter-wet climate such as ours. It is an excellent time to plant anything, but it is the only time to plant drought-resistant plants, which need all winter and spring to become established if they are to fend for themselves in summer. Annuals and bulbs are the exceptions. Annuals of all sorts can be enjoyed in winter and spring with little watering. Even if it doesn’t rain, they need little irrigation because the soil doesn’t dry out so quickly (even though it seems to during Santa Ana winds) and the plants aren’t under the kind of stress summer flowers must endure. Should we have winter drought, an appropriate garden can always forgo flowers for a year.
Bulbs are even a better bet. The Cape region of South Africa, which also has a very similar Mediterranean climate, is rich in bulbs that grow almost without care in California gardens. Bulbs from the Mediterranean itself, and native California bulbs thrive on rainfall alone, or discreet watering. In fact, the undoing of these bulbs is summer watering.
While one of the gardens pictured uses California natives almost exclusively, these can be the trickiest drought-resistant plants of all to grow. If this seems illogical, consider that all of the organisms that prey upon them, including all sorts of root rots, are already present in the garden, and that many are short-lived by nature, seemingly conscious of the eventuality of fire.
The appropriate garden should certainly contain California native plants, for the adventure and romance they offer. Walking through a yard with even a few California native plants is akin to a hike in the hills, rich with the smells of the chaparral (be sure to plant some native salvias and sages) and a blaze of color in the spring. Because the very definition of a garden is someplace that is cultivated and distinct from the wild surroundings, however, all of your plants don’t have to be natives: Plants from other arid climates are often much easier to grow.
An appropriate garden doesn’t have to be entirely drought-resistant either. One of the gardens shown has an area devoted to plants that need more water, just so the gardener doesn’t feel too constrained. Located near the house, this plot is an oasis of sorts, though frankly, the dryer part of the garden is more interesting, at least to the visitor.
This idea of one area being drier than the rest leads one to realize that this might be a good way to make the transition into a xeriscape. It would make little sense to tear out a garden and start over. And an inventory of what’s already growing there would undoubtedly turn up a lot of plants now being watered that don’t really need it, or at least don’t need as much. Many of our most basic landscaping plants are Mediterranean in origin, and many more, even such dainties as camellias, can survive on little water. It is not too hard to find gardens that have been badly neglected where most of the shrubs live on, even though they may grow more slowly.
If a low-maintenance landscape is your goal, simply plant more of the tough shrubs and ground covers, replacing those that grow too vigorously or need too much water. But that is not the objective of the gardens pictured here. These are for active gardeners, and require as much upkeep as any garden, maybe more than the average one because they are full of challenging plants that may die and need replacing. They are also full of plants about which little is known and that may grow too big, or not big enough.
The replacement of plants could be seen as the principal work of appropriate gardening. It is difficult to find a xeriscape that is not full of holes, unless it is tended by a diligent gardener. There are certainly safe choices, but in general drought-tolerant plants are not easier to grow; they are more difficult because they are so sensitive to water. It is not at all surprising that the gardens featured here are tended by excellent gardeners.
You can have a pretty landscape that doesn’t need much water and is reasonably easy to maintain, although it almost has to be done by trial and error. There are lists of drought-tolerant plants, but they often mix the difficult or truly exasperating with the easy and commonplace. The Ventura County list, for instance, puts the native California flannel bush ( Fremontodendron )--which has exquisite golden flowers the size of fried eggs, but which dies at the drop of a hat--right under the indestructible but incredibly boring Hollywood juniper. It would be a grave mistake to think that these two plants are similar in any way.
Of course the solution is for Southern California to become a region of good gardeners dedicated to creating gardens as distinctive, and appropriate to California, as English gardens are to the British Islands. It is even possible to have a garden in the English manner (which is simply a garden that favors flowers over everything else) using drought-tolerant plants. Imagine great drifts of penstemons and Matilija poppies, mixed with coreopsis and monkey flowers. An interesting note is that the English are, more than any other group of gardeners, most obsessed with trying to grow California and other “dry” plants: “The Dry Garden,” by Beth Chatto, was a recent best seller, the point of the book being that some of the prettiest plants come from dry climates. Many of the plants in the book are virtually unknown in California, and very few are common in our gardens.
When I asked one of the largest wholesale growers of California natives if any retail nurseries specialize in drought-tolerant plants, he could think of only the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley, begun by a pioneer exponent of native plants a very long time ago. With so little interest in the subject, it’s not too surprising that California gardens are as green and thirsty as ever 10 years after our great drought.
At this point anything would be a beginning, and there are those that would like us to begin now, before, and hopefully heading off, any pressing need to conserve water. What makes this effort more intriguing for a gardener is the challenge of growing a garden that shouts, “This is California!”
