Beautifully Native
Southern California was sold to the world with the promise of perpetual spring. Roses bloomed in January. There was an annual parade to prove it.
That was more than a century ago. To make good on the promise, engineers piped and plundered lakes and rivers hundreds of miles east and north. And so Southern California became the “gardenesque” capital of America, the eternally balmy region where anything grew. It had Chinese gardens, English gardens, palm gardens, lotus gardens.
The idea of enlisting the local flora simply didn’t catch on. A native garden adjacent to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County was long ago ripped out in favor of roses. Exotics bespoke choice. More to the point, most of the gardeners came from wet places. Native plants routinely drowned from the innocent attentions of the newcomers. So desert willows, California lilacs and even our lovely washes of wildflowers remained background, increasingly banished to formidable brown, dry hills.
The environment movement of the 1960s, then Earth Day and all that, should have helped reintroduce them, but instead gave native plants the unfortunate stink of an open-toe sandal. In the 1980s, they were dealt a possibly worse blow when glossy garden magazines came at the public with “xeriscaping.” This neologism for dry gardening imprinted such an extreme model that landscaping with natives became associated with gardening with a cactus at your back. Bart O’Brien, a leader in the native plant movement and horticulture researcher at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, sums up the flop. “A lot of people interpreted it as succulents and acres of rock mulch.”
As a jaded public turned up its hoses, there remained the matter of a finite water supply. Five years of drought has prompted a fresh attempt to alert home gardeners to the beauty and stoicism of the plants that grow past city lines. More than 30 demonstration gardens with native plants have opened across the Southland. The tufted meadows found in them could not be further from the prickly vistas of the xeriscape days. And this time, the people behind them aren’t embittered social critics or dotty lifestyle gurus, but the very water managers whose ancestors filled the lily ponds of old.
Who deserves the credit depends on whom you ask, but most fingers point in the direction of Adan Ortega Jr., now a freelance environmental policy consultant. At the time he came up with the idea in 2002, Ortega was vice president of external affairs at the Metropolitan Water District and it was Southern California’s driest year in recorded history.
As Ortega recalls it, “MWD was challenged by the paradox that ample water supplies existed in storage and it would not have to ask the public to ration--due in part to indoor conservation. Ron Gastelum, who was CEO, asked me to come up with some believable conservation call that did not present a ‘false alarm.’ ”
To dispel the nuclear-test-site image of drought-tolerant gardening, the MWD called in the copywriters. The “BeWaterWise” campaign was born, along with ones singing the praises of “California friendly plants,” “heritage gardens” and the ease, the joy, the sheer bliss of watering and weeding less and lolling about more. There were school programs, sprinkler-head swaps, gardening tips, spring tours and bids to get big-box stores such as Home Depot to consider displaying manzanita next to the rhododendrons.
According to MWD spokesman Bob Muir, its board now sees massive gains in even the smallest changes in gardening habits. Improving irrigation, judicious watering and slowly ushering in drought-tolerant natives could, he says, capture enough water for 5 million new Californians in the next 20 years.
Ortega left the district two years ago, but in his wake the MWD has pressed on, funding a total of 31 demonstration sites. Some of the earliest, such as the 3 1/2-year-old garden at the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation in Alta Loma, are turning the corner to that thrilling point where a young garden fills out.
When California woodworker Sam Maloof and his wife, Beverly, moved their workshop to the site of an old citrus ranch, it was not quite a blank slate. There were existing trees. It was a serendipitous blend. The fruit trees so central to the California dream were incorporated in a new garden demonstrating how natives and Mediterranean plants can be incorporated in home settings. This is the place to learn how to have your avocados, pomegranates, persimmons, apples and Matilija poppies too.
As the MWD project unfolded, Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden already offered one of the best native gardens in the state. Mindful of the need to show how well the wild giants can serve in tame and often small settings, O’Brien was using hybrids bred to fit home scales. Now there are so many different shades of California fuchsia that a hummingbird could succumb to option paralysis.
The MWD also invested in educational back-up. Its grant to Rancho Santa Ana pays for advisers to be on call to advise homeowners on how to adjust watering to plants already acclimated to this dry place.
What the MWD program lacks in funds (so far only $1.5 million has been spent on gardens), it makes up for in smart investments. A recent choice to sponsor the annual Theodore Payne Foundation tour of home gardens has helped to bring a formerly fringe organization into the mainstream and attract more native gardens to the program. It is exhibitionism as activism. And, from the MWD’s point of view, it’s smart. What better place to demonstrate the potential of these plants for homes?
So when participants of the Payne tour open their gates to the public next weekend, the oaks and Western redbuds will do the talking for the agency that, a century after flooding them out of their native ranges, now sees them as the future of urban development. The message: The California dream is still beautiful. Except in the coming century, it may actually look as if it belongs in California.
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For information and tickets to the Theodore Payne Foundation Native Garden Tour, go to www.theodorepayne.org.
