Deergrass

The deergrass grows quickly and is nice, thick and healthy. It has handsome seedstalks for a lot of the year. A really nice, large mounding grass. After I saw how these did the first year, I got some more. And last year the first year's bunches were big enough to divide, so I risked a division and moved the littler parts down to the other end of the hellstrip, where they;re now thriving. I love this grass and can't recommend it enough. It's also nice because it's green year-round.

The Las Pilitas nursery website has a nice description of this grass, but a few things were different in my garden from their description: it does grow quickly, but took more like 4 years to get to "mature size", assuming that these large mounds I have now are finally mature. (But they're not next to a seasonal creek, so probably get less water than they would in their natural habitat. No, actually, I have no idea how much water they get, because they but up against the neighbor's lawn, and he waters a lot.) And the seed plumes are more like 5 feet tall, not 2 feet, in my garden.

For reference: shown here are 3 plants that came in 1-gallon pots from Theodore Payne nursery, planted in my garden at the beginning of February 2009. The hellstrip planting area width is 4 feet. The pictures were taken in August, 2008. This area receives full sun in the summer and partial sun in the winter. After the first 2 years, the grasses have received NO supplemental water from me, although they probably receive a little from the neighbor when he waters his lawn, which starts where these end. Last fall (fall 2007), I divided 2 of these plants and put the (much smaller) divisions on the other end of the hellstrip. The divisions are doing well, are the same height, and are now about 1 foot in diameter.

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.