Natives Grow Like Weeds in Dry Weather

Several months ago, Salvatore and Janet Merendino looked at their ivy-covered hillside and decided they’d had enough.

It took too much water to keep the ivy green, and with mandatory cutbacks looming, the prospect of looking at a hillside covered with brown, gnarly vines was less than appealing.

So the Merendinos ripped out the ivy and planted what some people might consider weeds: California native plants.

As the drought begins to take its toll on lawns and gardens in Southern California, more homeowners and landscapers are turning to California natives which require much less water and are more suited to the arid local climate.

And that means more people are showing up at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley, one of the few sources of information and supply of California native plants in the Southern California area.

“We are incredibly busy,” said Janice Busco, co-manager of the nonprofit foundation that provides education on California native plants and runs a nursery where they propagate the plants from cuttings and sell them to the public. Recent rains haven’t slowed down the crowds.

“This is usually a very slow time for us,” she said, because the ideal planting season for most California natives, such as the manzanita bush and the California poppy, is fall and early winter. Spring is planting time for most traditional perennials and annuals. “But people started coming in to see what they could do to save water.”

In addition, Busco said there has been a change in the clientele. The usual visitors to the foundation nursery, located in La Tuna Canyon, are either professional landscapers or gardening enthusiasts eager to expand their knowledge of an obscure subject. Now, the foundation is seeing the average homeowner who’s panicking over the dilemma of either facing brown lawns or astronomical water bills.

“There has been a great change in the people who come in here. Everyone’s interest is now drought tolerance,” she said.

And most don’t know the first thing about California native plants except that they do not require much water. “We normally do a lot more educating than selling,” Busco said.

The idea behind promoting native vegetation is that the California desert habitat is more appropriate to these hardy varieties than are the lush gardens most suburban homeowners plant. Busco points out that the idea many people have of drought-tolerant plants is limited to succulents and cacti. But there is great diversity among California natives, which range from trees and large flowering bushes to wildflowers and ground covers that can carpet large areas.

“So you’re not just limited to desert plants and chaparral,” she said.

Going with native vegetation is an idea that made sense to the Merendinos.

“We’re on a hillside in Pasadena, and water’s quite a problem in terms of runoff,” Janet Merendino said. “And it would be silly to have grass and English flowers when we’ve got coyotes, deer, rabbits and gophers.”

Preserving and promoting native California vegetation, especially wildflowers, was a great love of the foundation’s founder, Theodore Payne. He first encountered the colorful and fragrant plants at an exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens in his native England.

He was so enchanted with the wildflowers that he came to California in 1893, expecting to see the poppies, daisies and buttercups in home gardens. But most people considered wildflowers to be weeds, more appropriate for rural fields than their front yards.

“He came over here to find that nobody appreciated what the heck they had in the hills,” said Melanie Baer-Keeley, who along with Busco co-manages the foundation nursery.

So he started his own nursery, first located in downtown Los Angeles, and after moving to two other locations finally settled in Los Feliz in 1922. He cultivated more than 430 native species before his death in 1963. The foundation was formed in 1960 to carry on his work.

And with this drought in its fifth year, the idea of using vegetation native to this environment may be coming into its own.

“Southern California is a very arid place. And before Europeans were here, there were very few trees,” said Patricia Ratcliffe, a landscape designer who specializes in California native plants. “It’s very easy to be seduced by the movie-land set that we’ve created in our garden environment, to think that we live in a tropical zone. And we don’t.”

Ratcliffe said her business has been launched by the drought. Before, she had only an occasional job, but now business is steady.

Although growing these native plants requires some knowledge of the appropriate soil and the amount of sun and watering needed, once they are established they require little special care.

In fact, the danger with most California native vegetation is over-watering. Many of these plants need water only every two weeks during much of the year, and monthly during the summer months, except when the weather is extremely hot, Baer-Keeley said.

With these advantages, the staff at the Theodore Payne Foundation cannot figure out why anyone would plant anything else.

“We love to encourage people to tear out their lawns,” Busco said.