Garden Crew Is on Unfamiliar Turf

When a municipality puts in a garden, it encounters all the problems a homeowner does. And then some.

So it’s probably a good thing that Jim Jones, parks supervisor for the city of Huntington Beach, and Jerry Lochmann, city landscape architect, didn’t foresee all the obstacles they’d face creating Garden One Project. If they had, this striking addition to Huntington Central Park might never have been undertaken.

Garden One, just north of the central library, is a pleasant island of contrasting color in a sea of green. The variety of foliage used in the project--such as the soft gray of dusty miller, deep burgundy of red fountain grass and cool silvery blue of blue oat grass--provides a welcome relief from the monotone of turf. Flowering bushes, such as rockrose and lantana, bring in additional colors.

Getting some variety into the park’s color scheme was the prime motivation behind the project, according to Jones. “When parks are your whole life, all that green gets a little monotonous,” he says. But it wasn’t the project’s only goal.

Determining whether landscaping based on shrubs, ornamental grasses and bushy ground covers required fewer hours to maintain than turf was another. Saving man-hours is becoming critical in the city’s parks, trees and landscape division, according to superintendent Daryl Smith.

There are 16 maintenance positions--three full-time and 13 summer-only slots--currently unfilled due to an expected budget shortfall next year, he says. This leaves only four crew members to maintain the entire 196 developed acres and 100 undeveloped acres of the park, says Smith.

Initial results indicate that less turf does mean reduced man-hours.

“It would take a maintenance person approximately an hour a week to mow a comparable area,” says Jones. “This plot takes about 15 to 30 minutes a week.”

Maintenance consists of infrequent watering and minor weeding--a weed-barrier matting has eliminated unwanted intruders except for the few that emerge immediately around the holes cut out for plants.

Evaluating new plant materials with low-watering requirements for future use elsewhere in the park and throughout the city was another purpose of the project.

“I don’t think we’re experiencing a major water crisis yet,” says Jones, “but we need to be ready for it.”

Water savings in Garden One are dramatic. The plot uses only 5% of the water needed for a comparable area of turf, estimates Jones.

“Depending on usage, soil and wind, turf is watered up to six times a week,” he says. “This project, on the other hand, wasn’t watered at all between January and April, only once in June, and will probably be watered a maximum of once every three weeks now through fall.”

So Garden One is more than a pretty plot; it’s also been a valuable laboratory.

But getting the project to this point was a test of patience and perseverance.

Finding the funds to begin the project--an obstacle most homeowners can relate to--was the first hurdle. The division squeezed $3,000 out of its plants acquisition budget the first year and another $3,000 the following year and a half.

“For a project about the size of a football field, that’s a pretty small budget,” says Lochmann. “I think we did a lot with it.”

Selecting plant materials suited for the site was the next challenge. In addition to taking into account soil type and hours of sunlight and shade--as any residential gardener would--Lochmann had a few other factors to worry about.

Once low-lying marshlands, most of Huntington Central Park has a high water table. Drought-tolerant plants, on the other hand, which are what the division wanted, are frequently intolerant of wet roots, particularly during summer.

Plants that fulfilled the contradictory requirements of requiring little water and tolerating wet roots also had to be unattractive to insects or capable of springing back from periodic infestations without chemical intervention.

“Most chemicals are incompatible with birds and wildlife,” explains Lochmann, “so we try not to use them in the park.”

That meant, though, that Lochmann had to stand by and watch snails chomp their way through his gazania and a host of other ground covers until he found species they weren’t as fond of.

Plants also had to be boron-proof. The park supported oil well facilities before eucalyptus trees, and boron deposits in the soil are a souvenir of that era.

“Boron doesn’t bother all plants,” says Lochmann, “but it will kill a lot of them.” Discovering which ones would tolerate boron was largely a process of trial and error, he says. “There’s a little about it in plant literature, but not much.”

The plants that “took” in the city’s garden are the plants that really want to be where they are, Lochmann says. “What’s left--rockrose, silverberry, dusty miller, flax--these are tough plants, real survivors. They’ll be the backbone of any future projects.”

Teaching a maintenance crew accustomed to high-maintenance turf what not to do was the next hurdle. Homeowners making a transition from turf to shrubs and ground cover might encounter the same problem.

“We put in the initial plants in late summer--not the best time, but that’s when we were able to do it--and many of them died back shortly afterward,” says Lochmann. “That’s natural for many of these plants, but the crew wasn’t familiar with a lot of them. So they’d either pull them out or would give them more water--which was exactly what they didn’t need.”

Everyone learned as the project progressed, however, he says, and now the crew is as enthused about the garden as he is.

“They come back excited when something new is in bloom or when a perennial comes back to life,” says Lochmann.

Installing the garden themselves may contribute to the crew’s interest, according to crew leader Ron Foreman.

“The city usually contracts landscaping firms to plant the medians and new parks,” he says, “so the crews don’t get many chances to put in anything from scratch. And never anything this big.

“Another neat thing (about the project) is normally a three-man crew works together all the time. So except for the beginning and end of the day, you don’t see anyone from the other crews except for sick leave or vacation rotations. Twelve crew members all working together on one project was pretty interesting.”

Crews have a vested interest in the project now, says Foreman, and come up with suggestions for improving the garden. Adding a walkway, made from broken pieces of concrete from city street repair jobs, was one of them.

The local avian population also seems interested in the garden. Though Lochmann planted wild strawberries, natal plum, and seed-producing grasses specifically to attract birds, he’s been a little surprised at the number that have shown up, particularly now that the vegetation is well established.

Loren Hays, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, member of local bird association Sea & Sage, longtime resident of Huntington Beach, and nearly weekly visitor to Central Park, confirms Lochmann’s claims.

“I have seen a lot of birds in the garden,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s because they’ve planted things specifically to attract birds or if the birds like the protection of the fence around the garden. Or both.”

But the more bushy ground cover there is, the better the park, in Hays’ opinion. Unless you’re a brown-headed cowbird, he says, turf doesn’t benefit birds.

“Cowbirds--which are not native to this area--feed on grass, eat the eggs of songbirds, usurp their nests and reduce their numbers,” he says. “So the less turf, the better.”

Because the garden has proved such a successful bird haven, the department is reluctant to take down the chain-link fence around the project originally meant to be temporary, according to supervisor Jones.

“What I’d really like to do now,” he says, “is double the size of the project and put in some benches and more permanent fencing. Make it a real retreat. For birds and people.”

Jones would also like to start another project on the western portion of Huntington Central Park, which is on higher ground and sandier, sharper-draining soil. It would be perfect for ceanothus and the other Californian natives that prefer drier ground than Garden One’s.

Hays would like that, too. “More California natives would really help out the bird population,” he says.

Realistically, however, says everyone in the park, tree, and landscape division, from Smith to Foreman, it’s going to be very difficult to expand the project within the current budget. They aren’t giving up, though.

“We’re pretty innovative about using our limited resources around here,” says Jones, “and we really would like to keep this project going. Somehow we’ll try to find a way.”

Garden One Project park in the Huntington Central Library parking lot at 7111 Talbert Ave., between Golden West and Gothard streets. Follow the walkway east of the library into the park. At the base of the slope behind the library is a garden encircled by a chain-link fence. Though the project is not yet open to the public, you can see most of it by walking the circumference.