The hellstrip

This seems to be the new name for the section of "lawn" between the sidewalk and the street. Difficult to water, compacted by walkers, surrounded by hot concrete impermeable to rain, they're difficult spots to garden. In LA, they're also apparently legally required to be planted with short-mown grass.

Here is mine in June, 2008 (above) and May, 2007 (below.)


Using our little car as a guide, I measured where the door of a car that was parked on the street with its front bumper right up to our driveway opening would open onto the hellstrip. Then I dug the dirt out and filled it with decomposed granite to form a path. Then again on the other side of the street tree. Turns out most cars are so much bigger than my car that their doors open right into hte tree, so this was almost pointless. Still, it does seem that people mostly walk on the "paths" I made for them rather than on the tender plants. (Or LA is just so car-happy that all the cars that park there contain only their driver, so no passengers have to get out onto my hellstrip anyway.) I hope this is a good balance between a safe and neighborly offering of convenience for passengers, drought tolerant design, and plantings that please me.

And here, in detail appealing only to other people trying to garden with natives in LA (all 2 of them) , are the lists of plants shown.

Top pic: the grasses are deer grass (muhlenbergia rigens) and little baby fescue grasses (festuca glauca siskiyou blue), santolina (not native), lots of recently transplanted little chalk dudleyas (dudleya pulverulenta). The small flowers on the left are some yarrow grown from seed. In the center, the dark green mat is a manzanita, arctostaphylos edmundii parviflora. The yarrow are really best with more water than falls naturally here. With supplemental water, they're lovely, though.


The pink flowers are clarkia, grown new from seed each spring and self-sowed. Easy, aggressive, self-seeding, tolerant of medium to minute amounts of water after germination.