Native Roots : Dry Charm of Indigenous Plants Gaining Ground
When Maureen Gerwig stands at the windows of her Woodland Hills home, she sees Southern California as it was meant to be. Hummingbirds sip the red blooms of her creeping sage. Bunch grass rustles, as it once did in profusion on the nearby chaparral. There are purple shoots of Douglas iris, Catalina Island buckwheat and cloudy blue ceanothus--all California natives, all thriving with minimal care and, Gerwig said proudly, very little water.
Once a rare sight in domestic settings, native plants of the desert and chaparral have begun quietly appearing in San Fernando Valley gardens, thanks to two Southern California landscape trends: one philosophical, one a drought-based necessity.
According to Jo Kitts, vice president of the Santa Monica Mountains chapter of the California Native Plant Society, “There has always been a group that loved and wanted to preserve the native landscape. Now, with the need to save water, this group has moved from preservation for philosophical reasons into the marketplace.”
Sun Valley’s Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants, the nonprofit center where Gerwig buys many of her plants, exemplifies the trend.
Though the foundation has existed since 1960 as the Southland’s primary resource of native plants, sales and information, Payne manager Melanie Baer reports that membership has doubled, from 400 to 800, since 1985. Furthermore, Baer said, “we can’t supply all the requests for plants, sales have increased so substantially.”
Memberships range in price from $20 annually to $500 for a life membership; the cost of plants at the Payne Foundation runs from $4 for a one-gallon California sage to $65 for a 15-gallon 7-year-old California bay tree.
Although Baer waxes philosophical about the change (“Southern California is finally appreciating its landscape”), Charles Swigart a Sun Valley landscape contractor, attributes the growing interest in native plants to “water-issue publicity from newspapers and the DWP.”
Last month, after the second drier-than-normal winter, state Water Resources Director David N. Kennedy declared a drought in California. Despite rains shortly afterward that brought some relief to local reservoirs, the DWP warned that the Sierra snowpack, the source of most Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley water, would be much lower than average.
The Los Angeles City Council in response invoked Phase 1 of a 1977 water conservation ordinance, calling for restrictions on wasteful practices such as driveway hosing and automatic water service in restaurants.
Ultimately, at Phase 5, the law could require a 25% reduction in water use for the DWP’s service area. Wayne Kruse, a DWP senior planning engineer, says, “It’s not out of the question that Phase 2 could be activated this summer.” Phase 2 mandates a 10% reduction.
Such news sets off alarms in the landscape industry. Recently, Joe Brosius, production manager of Magic Growers, a Pasadena wholesale nursery that supplies retailers throughout Southern California, attended a meeting of the Southern California Horticultural Institute.
“The most important landscape trend agreed on was adaptation to different water use,” he said. “More professionals are putting down” drought-tolerant and native plants on their plans, “so nurseries have to provide them.”
Landscaping Decisions
Five years ago, when Gerwig, now a 42-year-old court reporter, was considering landscaping her new home, water problems were not foremost. She was simply tired of a look that pervaded Valley suburbs: “the Eastern-style garden with its neat lawn, obligatory three birches and begonias.”
Her love of the plants in the Santa Monica Mountains, where she had hiked for years, led her to hire landscape contractor Bob Cornell, who calls his specialty “the California-English perennial garden.”
To achieve this look and to keep water use low, Cornell mixed native shrubs such as California lilac with flowering herbaceous perennials from the Mediterranean and Mexico--a combination, Cornell says, that allows “a fuller palette,” or more colors, than do native plants alone. Instead of a lawn, he created a mini-riverbed in a naturally wet area of the property, adding rocks and water-loving native plants.
For Gerwig, seeing a natural habitat take shape fired her enthusiasm. “I had so many ideas,” she said. “I wanted a Valley oak because I’d heard they were endangered. I wanted the bunch grass the Spaniards had snuffed out.” When the Spaniards colonized Southern California, Gerwig said, they planted sod grasses for their grazing animals, which choked out the natural bunch grass.
Through Cornell, she learned of the Payne Foundation and began visiting regularly for plants and advice. Eventually, she replaced most of her garden’s imported plants with native, a choice, Cornell said, that not everyone would make.
“Most people aren’t that comfortable with chaparral,” he said, citing a bias toward lush gardens among California’s population, most of whom are not native born.
Even those who like native plants have not always been able to find them. “Nurseries stock plants that look good in the can,” Cornell said. “Some natives don’t fill out till they’re in the ground a year.”
Native plants also require more knowledge about placement in the garden and requirements for water and soil than the average nursery plant. Cornell said he suspects that fewer than 10% of Southern California’s landscape contractors are knowledgeable about native plants, so most don’t recommend them.
Nonetheless, demand is increasing, and more native nurseries are springing up. He named Wildwood Nursery in Claremont, Mockingbird in Riverside, Tree of Life in San Juan Capistrano, and the Payne Foundation, where individuals can get expert advice and tour extensive demonstration gardens.
Educational material on native plants and general drought-tolerant planting is also available through the DWP and the Metropolitan Water District, the agency that supplies most of the water for Burbank, the Simi Valley and the Las Virgenes area.
Cornell, whose Los Angeles firm Cornell and Wiskar Landscaping won a 1987 DWP award for a drought-tolerant Westwood garden, returns repeatedly in discussing native plants to the Southland’s finite water supply. “In the future,” he said, “water will be an even greater issue than it is today.”
MWD spokesman Bob Gomperz said the agency’s two major water sources, the Colorado River and the State Water Project, which deliver water from Northern California, both face threats at a time of soaring population growth.
In the coming years, Gomperz said, Southern California will lose 60% of its Colorado River allotment as Arizona, through a new aqueduct system, claims more of the river’s flow. Once a three-year review of Sacramento Delta water rights is completed by the state Water Resources Control Board, reductions in imported water from Northern California are also possible.
“People don’t listen unless they’re pushed,” said Frances Runyan, a 74-year-old Agua Dulce illustrator who has had a native garden for 20 years. Her vivid memories of the 1977 Southland drought include the sight of neighbors’ prostrate exotic plants. “This is not the tropics,” she said.
Indeed, Payne’s Baer, who has lived most of her 30 years in Glendale and Pasadena, describes a backlash among people her age and older who remember the less developed, less spoiled Southern California landscape of even 10 years ago.
“For us,” Baer said, “planting California natives is a way of bringing back what we knew and taking control of a landscape that’s getting away from us. These plants,” she added, “are dying to be born free.”
