Next Long Topic: Front Garden

Living in California, it strikes me as reasonable to garden primarily with plants from California, especially local ones. So mostly my garden contains local natives, except for plants that have other very appealing features, like edible parts that I actually want to eat. Or unless they were here before I was.

When we moved to the little house we live in now, it had a pretty jewel-green lawn. I like the soft, velvety look of that sort of lawn, but it had to go. Neither of us was willing to mow it, fertilize it, put the required water into it, pamper it. So I sliced it off and used the topsoil to build raised beds in my backyard. Then I planted it with California natives appropriate for dry shade in southern California, surrounded them with lots and lots of shredded redwood bark, and waited.

Before starting, I read a lot of landscape books. I also did a lot of reading about native plants before choosing the ones I used. I looked at other gardens in my neighborhood and everywhere else we visited. It was difficult to find examples of plants and settings similar to mine: in Los Angeles, fully shaded in the winter, mostly shaded in the summer.

I had never grown California-native plants before. If other gardens were using them (mostly, they weren't), I didn't recognize them when I saw them. And looking at images of the plants in entries in book encyclopedias and websites just doesn't give you a good sense of what the plant will look like in your garden: the shades of color, the texture, the shininess or matteness of the parts, the final size and shape. And these are among the essential things you need to know to grow a lovely garden.

I don't have a lovely garden. But it is thriving, fully of interesting bugs and creatures, and very low in water use. So I would like to list all the plants I put in, what happened with them (a few died or had to be moved), and include lots of pictures with scale. Some pics with closeups, showing the detail of leaves and stems and flowers, some more distant, so you can see the size and shape of the plant relative to other plants. And when possible, how the plants grow over time. I bought everything in 4" or 1-gallon pots. I hope this will be useful to others who are experimenting with these plants.

Above is what the front garden looked like in May, 2007. Below, June 2008.