Outbreaks of Lawnlessness : People like wild, natural look and low maintenance of drought-resistant plants and flowers

Like weeds after the first fall rain, lawnless front yards are popping up all over town.

Those who like this new lawnlessness, but have waited until fall to do any planting (it’s the best time), or those who are still mulling it over, should be interested in some of the lessons learned by those who have already taken the plunge.

Enough drought-resistant front yards have been planted in the last two years to issue a progress report, although it will take several more years before we see a final report card.

One thing is for sure, the lawnless few like their new front yards.

Said one, a family therapist: “I really love coming home to this. The minute I drive up, I feel like I’ve left the city and its problems behind. It’s so wild and natural looking.” Garden designer Barbara Engel got three more jobs on the street where she installed a drought-resistant front yard. “I guess they liked it,” she said, and the owners have heard nothing but compliments.

Tom and Kathy Miller plowed up their huge, 4,500-square-foot front lawn in Hancock Park and became the first and, so far, only family on the block to be lawnless.

“People stop all the time to look at the flowers and ask us about it,” he said. The big question people have been asking the Millers and others about these new drought-resistant front yards is: Are they low-maintenance as well as drought-resistant, or are they a lot of work?

Professional gardener C. W. Bass maintains a drought-resistant front yard designed by Jessica Lamden of Long-Run Gardens in Pacific Palisades, and she answers with a qualified “yes.” Although she spends two hours a week working in it, she considers the garden low-maintenance compared to other lawn-filled gardens she works on.

Most of the maintenance is what she calls “removal.” She spends a lot of time thinning plants, pruning and deadheading (garden-speak for spent flower removal). “I cart off lots of snow-in-summer and other fast-growing plants,” said Bass, “and spend a lot of time deadheading society garlic and other frequent bloomers.”

She also spends time replenishing mulches and roughing up the soil surface because in drought-resistant designs, bare soil does show between the plants.

Her biggest problem is a curious one: “I just can’t get people to turn off the water,” she said. These drought-resistant plants would grow more slowly and live longer with less irrigation, but watering seems a hard habit to break.

“What I need are less sprinklers and more hose bibs, so I can water individual plants by hand, and hose off the dust from the foliage,” she said.

The Millers maintain their own front garden (a gardener does the little strip of lawn left in the parkway and the lawn in back), and they don’t think it is high maintenance, though they say it is definitely not no-maintenance. Another qualified yes.

They figure they spend about a half-day each month working in it, doing pruning, deadheading and a little weeding. “Some areas seem to take care of themselves, others require more care,” said Tom Miller.

The Millers don’t let their gardener use a leaf blower on the lawn and they have no need for one in their new front yard, a bonus of lawnless behavior.

Garden designer Engel, of Sunshine Greenery in West Los Angeles, also maintains the drought-resistant garden she installed in Pacific Palisades, and agrees that these gardens are low maintenance.

She spends about one hour every other week on the front garden and, again, most of the work is “removal” of one kind or another. For comparison, she spends 1 1/2 hours in the smaller back yard, but it has a lawn and rose bed.

She too spends a lot of that time deadheading society garlic and lavender, or cutting to the ground evening primrose when it finishes blooming, but this keeps the garden neat and tidy. There is also some weeding in that hour, even though the entire garden is covered with a thick and handsome mulch of shredded bark.

Engel also occasionally hoses down the plants in the garden she maintains. Otherwise the leaves would never get wet, because the entire garden is on a drip system.

And how is the drip system working? “Flawlessly,” she said. “We haven’t had a single problem with it,” answering another question people have been asking.

Engel designed a simple irrigation system: the entire front garden on two valves, one for the top half of the slope, the other for the bottom. Large plants (mostly trees) have 2-gallon-a-minute emitters (where the water comes out), small plants get the 1-gallon emitters and the ground covers need only one-half-gallon emitters. The entire system is on a clock and comes on for an hour, twice a week. In summer she adds a third day each week to the schedule.

Do the drought-resistant plantings and the drip system really save water? Engel doesn’t know because the new garden (it’s only a year old) replaced a half-dead Bermuda grass lawn that wasn’t being watered very often. But she does know exactly how much water this garden is using--424 gallons every week, except in summer when it jumps to 636 gallons, because the garden is only a year old. It will use less as it matures.

Miller’s 2-year-old garden is also on drip, but he has found that the system, installed by a contractor, is more complicated than need be. He’s had his share of problems, including broken emitters. He still thinks drip is far superior to sprinklers and doesn’t plan to switch, though he is modifying it. His system is also on a clock and comes on once a week.

He doesn’t know if it is actually saving water because this new front yard also replaced a half-dead lawn. He does know that they met their water conservation goal, even with the brand-new garden.

Plant success stories are numerous in these gardens, and a few are surprising. The fuzzy, gray lamb’s ears and the small, blue-flowered ground morning glory aren’t supposed to be all that drought tolerant, but they are in the Miller garden. Two kinds of teucrium (germander) are surprising hits in the garden designed by Engel. One of them is a new kind named Teucrium marjoricum ‘Cossonii.’ It grows only inches tall and makes a neat and tidy ground cover that flowers most of spring and summer.

Designer Jessica Lamden has a new appreciation for “plants that grow slow,” because so many things filled their spot so quickly and now need pruning. All of these garden planters commented on how fast the gardens grew and how quickly they filled in.

It is not uncommon for some plants to die during the first year of a new garden, but there were surprisingly few losses in these gardens. One fatality surprised all three planters-- Limonium perezii , the oh-so-common purple statice or sea lavender. Plants died out in all three gardens. No one knows why.

Miller suspects that ants undermined the roots. The ant population has increased in the garden since the lawn sprinklers were removed and are one of the down-sides of drip irrigation, which leaves so much dry ground for ants to tunnel in. He’s working on ways to control them.

Native plants also suffered casualties. Lamden lost two manzanitas (the cultivar ‘Howard McMinn’), which were replanted and are now doing fine. Engel lost Ceanothus ‘Julia Phelps.’ However, another California lilac named ‘Concha’ is doing fine in the same place. Ceanothus ‘Concha’ is one of Miller’s most successful plants.

Miller lost a lot of the thyme he planted as ground cover, but between the stepping stones in the garden designed by Lamden, it has prospered. It would seem to be a case of the right plant in the right place.

Plant losses may mean a little work, but they do not devastate these gardens because they are planted with such variety. There are 48 kinds of plants in the front yard designed by Lamden, not counting the many bulbs. Miller started with 50 kinds and has been adding ever since. And there are 27 different plants in the garden by Engel.

That partially accounts for the look of these new gardens. Lamden calls hers a “little arboretum” and the owners of the garden designed by Engel say there are “always flowers, everywhere. We love it.”

The Millers agree: “It’s so much prettier, and so much more fun,” and there’s certainly no lawn against that.