The Sand Plot Thickens and Plants Take Root

Anyone who lives close to the beach probably is gardening on top of ancient sand dunes. These stable dunes may look like coastal hills, but dig into one and you’ll find the soil is still sandy.

Susan Rudnicki gardens inland on the second of three long dunes in Manhattan Beach, just above the old Pacific Electric line that now serves as a greenbelt and jogging corridor though the middle of the city. And her sumptuous garden shows what can be done with a sandy soil that has been improved.

When Rudnicki, 43, began gardening there about two years ago, a test laboratory identified her soil as a “loamy sand,” not the more common sandy loam.

Sandy soils usually have the magical good drainage that so many plants appreciate--although sometimes the drainage is so good that water zips right though them, as does any fertilizer, leaving little organic matter.

The test results indicated Rudnicki should add lots of organic matter plus nitrogen and potassium. She brought in truckloads of compost, composted horse manure and other amendments, mixing 4 cubic yards of imported compost into the narrow street-side bed alone. But once she got her compost piles and worm bins going, she easily managed to keep the entire garden thickly mulched. (Worms help by dragging the compost mulch down into the garden soil.) All the work on the soil has paid off handsomely, allowing Rudnicki to grow a large variety of plants, many of them unusual, such as chocolate cosmos and some rare salvias.

The Rudnicki garden is squeezed onto a typically small beach-town lot, and it is irregular in shape, about 1,800 square feet in all. The largest piece faces directly into the salt-laden sea breeze, and “it can be quite a fierce wind, real cold in winter with enough salt to damage plants that are not protected by the house and walls,” Rudnicki said. Most of the garden, therefore, is packed into the small area behind the house.

Most of the area is shady, but Rudnicki says it was worse when they moved in.

“It was so dark and the soil so full of roots that the first thing I did was take out trees and shrubs,” Rudnicki said. “But I also saved as many old shrubs as I could so the garden wouldn’t look too new.”

*

On a recent garden tour, many visitors commented on some handsome 30-year-old camellias that she had pruned into trees, wondering what they were. Rudnicki values them for their lustrous green foliage rather than just their spring flowers.

Foliage is important everywhere in this garden. Although there are plenty of flowers, such as the many asters blooming when I was there in early fall, the garden will be fascinating in any season because of the varied tapestry of foliage.

Rudnicki says the emphasis on foliage is a direct result of reading “The Green Tapestry” by Beth Chatto (Simon & Schuster, 1989). “I read a lot of English gardening books in the early 1980s, but most had to do with flowers and flower color. People talked about how valuable foliage was to a garden, but I didn’t get it until I read Beth Chatto’s book,” she said. “It was like a light came on, and I haven’t gardened the same since.”

Everywhere you look, foliage provides the interest, the varying colors and textures contrasting or complimenting each other, with the flowers seeming almost secondary, a bonus. As others have pointed out before, while flowers come and go, foliage is forever, especially in Southern California where so many plants are evergreen.

Rudnicki finds variety in foliage color, texture and form by scouring nurseries from Berkeley Horticultural Nursery in Northern California to Desert-to-Jungle in Montebello; traveling to plant sales such as the Strybing Arboretum sale in San Francisco and the Huntington Library’s sale in San Marino; and ordering by mail from rare-plant specialists such as Canyon Creek Nursery in Oroville, Calif., and Heronswood in Kingston, Wash.

She has managed to find unusual plants with distinctive leaves that may be olive-colored, apple green, dark green, blue-gray or straight gray. The leaves may be fuzzy or polished, crinkled or flat, deeply lobed or knife-sharp. She was willing to try anything--except yellow foliage. “I thought plants with yellow foliage looked like they were suffering from a nutrient deficiency,” she said, “but now I really like plants with yellowish leaves, like the creeping golden oregano, or the fuchsia named ‘Aurea.’ They really brighten a garden, especially a shady one.”

*

She uses plants to create little scenes of various kinds of foliage and flowers. As an example, one shaded area where orange clivia grows was transformed by the addition of a scrambling pelargonium, ‘Chocolate Mint,’ which has big, velvety, apple-green leaves with brown blotches at the center. It spreads among coral bells with metallic-colored leaves, Chinese ground orchids with strong pleated leaves and a burnet Sanguisorba obtusa with delicate gray-blue leaves.

In another little scene growing out in full sun, a colorful New Zealand flax named ‘Maori Maiden’ helps support the grayish Dicliptera suberecta, while the very gray and dainty Geranium harveyii winds though it. These are mixed with the rare bronzy Haloragis ‘Wellington Bronze’ and the ajuga named ‘Rainbow.’ To round out the composition, Rudnicki planted a carex that is the color of dead grass with a geum named ‘Coppertone.’

Rudnicki began gardening while she was in college, tending some indoor plants, and moved on to growing things in the ground as soon as she had some land around her first rental house. About 11 years ago, she joined the Southern California Horticultural Society and was introduced to many of the plants she now grows at the society’s monthly Plant Forums. It also is where she met home gardener Cathy Ratner (we visited her Palos Verdes garden on April 1, 1999).

“Cathy is my mentor,” Rudnicki said. “I think its real important for younger gardeners to know more-experienced gardeners. You learn so much from them, and about half the plants in my garden came from Cathy’s.”

While that may be an exaggeration, there is little doubt about Ratner’s influence. “With gardening, it seems like everyone has to go though such a long learning curve,” Rudnicki said. “It really helps to know someone’s who’s already been there.”

Although she devotes a lot of time to gardening, it is not Rudnicki’s profession; she is a dental hygienist.

Rudnicki and her husband, George, have an older son, Colin, 11, but it is her 2 1/2-year old son, Rhett, who is Rudnicki’s garden companion. The towheaded Rhett knows how to look for snails and that broccoli stems belong in the worm box. He has his own garden clogs, which don’t quite fit yet, and wields a trowel like a pro. This winter, he and his mom are planning to put in a vegetable garden.

Rhett even has pet names for a few plants, such as a spectacular Salvia involucrata. Ask him to show you “Gorgeous” and he’ll take you right there.

* Catalogs are available from Canyon Creek Nursery, 3527 Dry Creek Road, Oroville, CA 95965, for $2, and Heronswood, 7530 N.E. 288th St., Kingston, WA 98346, for $5.

* Southern California Horticultural Society, (818) 567-1496.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Garden at a Glance

Gardener: Susan Rudnicki.

Location: Eight blocks from ocean in Manhattan Beach.

Sunset Climate Zone: 24

Land: Irregular beach-town lot about 1800 square feet.

Soil: Loamy sand.

Watering: Varies. Installing drip.

Fertilizing: Sandy soil is low in nitrogen, so it is continually mulched with homemade compost.

Labor: Homeowner does it all, except tree pruning.

Favorite Plants: Iris japonica--a crested iris for shade with graceful arching leaves and crisp white flowers.

Aster ‘Lady in Black’--bushy, autumn-blooming aster with plethora of tiny white daisies.

Helleborus corsicus--dramatic palmate leaves with green flowers in winter.