Gardening : GREEN THUMB : Work Over, They Can Enjoy Yard

We have given our lawn mower away. The routine of mowing, edging, watering and weeding is a thing of the past.

We accomplished this by eliminating the lawn and relandscaping the entire back yard, an area about 75 feet by 32 feet, planting it with drought-tolerant perennials watered by a drip system.

To keep down the cost, my husband and I did almost all the work ourselves. I warn anyone contemplating a similar undertaking that it requires a lot of research and planning and plenty of hard, physical labor as well as a surprisingly large financial outlay.

It took about a year from the inception of the idea to the completion of the planting. First I spent the winter reading all the gardening books at the library.

My husband translated my ideas to paper and drew a rough landscape plan, which we modified as we went along. My research had taught me that it is essential to be clear on how you intend to use the garden. In our case we wanted to exploit three shaded areas for sitting outside and we needed certain routes for walking through the garden.

Once these had been laid out, the remaining areas, consisting of the perimeter and a long, irregularly shaped central bed, would be turned into flower beds. The view from the dining room window was also an important factor in deciding where to site trees and shrubs.

In keeping with the idea of starting out with an almost clean slate, I decided to eliminate everything except a very few trees and shrubs around the edges.

To learn more about suitable plant material, I took a class at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden on Mediterranean gardening that included a tour of several gardens. For a project of this scale it was essential to determine the sunny and shady areas of the garden, to choose appropriate plants, to know how big they would grow and to plan a color scheme.

I profited by taking my Sunset Western Garden Book or other reference material with me every time I went to nurseries and buying only the plants that fit into my plan. It took persistence to locate the less common species and some had to be specially ordered. Soil preparation and drip irrigation also required research, and we needed to investigate landscaping materials carefully, finding out which kinds of sand, gravel, bricks and paving stones fit into our scheme and our budget and learning how to calculate the quantities required and arrange tor their delivery. When you are spending a lot of money, there is no such thing as a stupid question, and we asked a lot of questions.

The physical labor began in the spring with the removal of the old lawn. Because most of it consisted of Bermuda grass, which we wanted to eliminate at all costs from the garden, and we are situated on solid clay with a very thin layer of topsoil, we opted to dig it all up to a depth of six inches or so and have it dumped at a landfill.

There are other, less strenuous ways of doing it, but we wanted to do the most thorough job possible. Hauling this dirt away (three truckloads or about 20 tons) and bringing back topsoil to replace it was the only work that we paid someone else to do.

Now it was summer and we next marked out the garden design using 12-inch stakes, forming the curves with the aid of a hose and making the paths 36 inches wide to accommodate our garden cart.

Then came the installation of the PVC piping for the underground foundation of the drip system. We embedded the brick edging for the paths and beds and filled in the paths with two inches of sand topped with two inches of gravel, another backbreaking job, as we had to wheel these materials to the back yard cartload by cartload from the piles dumped on the driveway. By the end of the project we had shifted about six tons of sand, seven tons of gravel and four cubic yards of topsoil.

To prepare the ground in the flower beds we loosened the clay, added topsoil, amendments and fertilizer, dug everything together and watered the soil for the very last time with sprinklers to settle it.

Fall had arrived, the best time for planting. Over a period of two weekends I put in about 130 plants, including four trees and a herb bed. It took another two weekends to install the drip system, a tedious process. For a natural effect we placed at random in the flower beds a few large rocks collected in the back country and we laid both new and recycledpaving stones to form the sitting areas in the shade.

Having discovered by then that 3/4-inch gravel is not the ideal walking surface, we set Arizona flagstones along the center of all the paths for a firm footing. The crowning touch was a teak park bench installed under a tree and visible from our window. This transformed the garden into an inviting outdoor room.

As for the plants, the color scheme was mostly blue, purple, white and yellow. My all-time favorite turned out to be Verbena rigida, a stiff, upright spiky plant with purple flowers. From the original six plants I now have brilliant patches of it all over the garden; it spreads readily, requires no water, but is easy to pull out where you don’t want it.

Next comes Euryops pectinatus, a yellow daisy that blooms all year round. Other favorites are society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea), which requires no water, French lavender (L. dentata), which flowers all year, rosemary, both upright and trailing, true geraniums (G. sanguineum and G. incanum), tall sages (S. clevelandii and S. ‘Allen Chickering’), Mexican marigold (Tagetes lucida), which reblooms throughout the year after cutting back, Gaura lindheimeri, a prolific self-sower, and yarrows (Achillea) of various kinds and colors.

Cheiranthus ‘Bowles Mauve’ proved to be a spectacular shrub, but needs to be replaced every two years. A hundred daffodil bulbs planted at the same time make a brilliant show in March.

The plants were a costly part of the project, but I saved by buying four inch pots or pony packs whenever possible.

Altogether the project cost almost $2,000, not including the bench, of which about $700 went for building supplies, $400 for hauling and topsoil, $350 for the irrigation system and miscellaneous supplies and $450 for plant materials.

Although challenging to install, the drip system is one of the main rewards of the garden. The whole thing can be watered in a couple of hours with a few manipulations (our system is not fully automatic). Few weeds grow between the plants and we water on average only every three weeks.

Other benefits are that we spend more time relaxing in the garden, the upkeep is not arduous and we enjoy the company of more birds, bees and butterflies than before. Windy days are a particular pleasure for me, as the leaves of the yarrows, sages and lavenders rub together and send spicy scents through the air; working among the plants has the same effect.

This type of garden would not work well for families with young children, but it suits us and our arid climate very well indeed.