walking the land with a client, I walk it alone, then sit in the best place I can find to ponder on plant associations to be recreated and how they can be combined with what already exists. Important information to elicit is which plants the client wants to keep.
I seek to avoid the tearing out of well-loved plants. Ripping out roses and fruit trees, a fragrant daphne, or a time-honored wisteria is not the way I like to begin. The kind of gardening described in this book simply sets in slow motion the process of tipping the balance in a native direction. Returning the natives, seeing how they work, making thoughtful choices, the gardener can move slowly to a vision of commitment arising, not from a sense of loss or deprivation, but rather from a sense of enrichment.
Roses and fruit trees can be protected from deer by encircling them with coyote bush or Oregon grape, Mahonia aquifolium, In coastal gardens, coyote bush can visually tie a garden together; its rich green foliage makes a good background for roses, particularly the climbing roses that don't require spraying and coddling. The back-yard orchardist may find that the only nut trees that do well on the coast are the native hazels. When the raspberries are done, the berry lover can head for the native huckleberries.
Fruit trees can be underplanted with native bunchgrasses, whose slow and steady intake of water and deep fibrous root systems make them good cover crops for orchards and vineyards. The native grape, Vitis californica, tangy and sweet after the first frost, is well worth growing. Food growers, including permaculturists, who focus on perennial crops, and organic truck farmers might profitably begin serious conversation with native plant people.
The back-yard gardener, with no deadlines to meet, no committees to please, has the opportunity to change slowly. No massive replantings or clear-cuts need be scheduled in the back yard. We remove one or two Monterey pines a year around my house, replanting oak trees, buckeyes, and red elderberries as we go. If any creatures have adapted to existing garden plants, we aim to provide them with alternatives before eliminating their habitat.
Appropriate Expectations
In working out the sequence of events for the homeowner, I hope to establish that less than total certainty is the essence of this kind of gardening. Surprise, both good and bad, provides opportunities to learn more about a particular site. Accumulating information about what works where, sometimes developing site-specific techniques, and using that information to rework the project as it proceeds are part of the evolving native garden.
In order that expectations and reality mesh, I make it clear that some native plants have a longer adjustment period after planting than nonnative plants commonly used in the trade. They may not begin to thrive till the fall after planting, or till two or even three years down the line. I want to avoid the situation where the homeowner, used to the “quick off the mark” growth rate of standard landscaping plants, gives up just as the plants are about to come into their own.
Where slow-growing plants are used, I include quick-growing annuals and perennial wildflowers and native bunchgrasses to give the homeowner immediate satisfaction and pleasure. The early garden is often quite different from the mature garden, which expresses the realized forms of trees and shrubs. I often plant willows, elderberries, or alders with slowergrowing oaks. These riparian plants are quick to take off and provide good screening fast. It usually takes about five years for the oak to overtake them.
I am alerted to potential problems when a client indicates particular flower color dislikes or preferences. The client who dislikes pink, all pinks, from lavender-tinged to nearly red, from opaque to translucent, or all yellow flowers, may be applying “interior design” principles that indicate a critical difference in our perspectives. I recall an experience I had on one of my first bird walks. Pausing in an opening near a creek, we were asked to count the number of bird calls we heard. Trying to decipher which one was under discussion, I asked, “Do you mean the musical one?”
“Musical is in the ear of the beholder,” said one participant.
That little comment revealed to me that in the bird world as in the plant world, personal tastes differ. I have often been confused by a customer's request for “something pretty” in the way of wildflowers, since “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Many times I have fielded requests for a wildflower mix that includes nothing yellow, or nothing pink, or nothing red.
I have never been asked for a mix that excludes blue flowers. People almost universally like blue flowers. To most bees and day-flying butterflies, however, blue is not attractive. Which perhaps accounts for its relative rarity in the world of flowers, and, therefore, its appeal for novelty-seeking humans.
The other relatively rare flower color, red, attracts birds rather than insects. Because most insect pollinators do not see pure red as a color, such flowers are to a certain extent an unoccupied ecological niche, available to the birds that do “see red.” “Bird red” is a particularly valuable color for long-range attraction. It stands out starkly from all colors in the background and is clearly visible even early in the morning and late in the afternoon—times when many birds prefer to fly.
Bird nectar seekers not being as common as bird berry eaters, there are correspondingly fewer red flowers and more red berries, including, here in California, toyon, hairy honeysuckle, red elderberry, wild rose, and chokecherry.
Discussing this kind of plant/bird interaction may produce either startled attention or stifled yawns. I try to establish whether or not the client wants to see plants in this full way, and whether considerations of providing food for a wide variety of creatures can influence preferences.
I also assess the degree of seasonality, including dormancy or semidormancy, the client can tolerate. Some native plants may demonstrate change through the seasons more dramatically than the kinds of nonnatives chosen for freeway, shopping mall, and bank parking lot. The gardener's pruning hand helps keep dormant plants tidy, but attention through the year is required. To the best of my ability, I attempt to make all this clear to the clients.
A tricky juggle is being performed here. I weigh the preconceptions of my clients concerning a desirable landscape, the vision that has formed in my investigations, and an assessment of the difference between the two. A moment may later arrive, which I try to imagine now. It comes after we have done the planting, watering, and final mulching. It is a time before the inevitable problems of watering, weeding, and the unexpected. Sitting in my car in a crowded neighborhood that I believe was once solid oak woodland, I salute the small oaks we have planted, the bunchgrasses, brodiaeas, calochortus, and toyon. I regard the huge old valley oak down the block that validated my assumptions about this piece of land. It is a moment of cloudy triumph, acknowledging the unknown ahead, while resting for the moment in the hope of having done something for that which is thought valuable.
In anticipation of that moment, I go through the private, final phase of the initial consultation, before discussing my ideas with the client. I ask,“Help me know what it is that the land wants.” Whom am I asking? I'm not sure, and I know there will be no one answer, but rather a series of them. Still, I ask
Part-opening illustration: Blue oak. Drawing by Ane Carla Rovetta.
CHAPTER THREE
These things it must be, to be Californian. One gets a hint of it in the flower-decked glades in our mountain forests, in our canyons, many-colored with spring flowers, on our seashore slopes, carpets with purple and gold; but when it comes to making a garden, we all, like sheep, have gone within the lines, the old, old lines of other lands, and in so doing have gone astray. Alfred Robinson, 1913
