April is the Month for Garden Tours

The Manzanita bush off to the right is my favorite native plant in this grouping.

April is the month for garden tours. All across North America spring has sprung, and the excitement over new blooms is evident by the number of garden tours and walks that can be found.  Here on the West Coast there certainly have been a plentiful group of gardens to visit.   Some tours charge an entrance fee and the fees vary widely, but others are FREE. I attended one such FREE garden tour on April 28th in Southern California, the 2018 Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase.

This year the focus of the 2018 Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase was on sustainability.  The garden tour in Mar Vista was a self-guided tour and included gardens that were made up of native plants and other drought tolerant plants.  Visitors were given a map of homes that are practicing water-wise techniques. On this user-friendly tour day, homeowners or their landscapers were available to answer questions at each garden.

Raised beds are a water wise way to grow vegetables after a lawn removal.

Besides native plant gardens, there were also vegetable gardens and succulent gardens to visit. Again, with the focus being on sustainability, some of the things folks wanted to know were: How can we reduce our water consumption, and in the case of a vegetable garden, how can we still create viable food gardens during a drought year? With the DWP offering incentives for water-guzzling lawn removals, homeowners must decide what they want to plant.  (This popular DWP program is being renewed in July.)  Raised beds in front yards are one answer to the lawn removal debate. 

Most gardens on the Native Plant Garden Tour seemed to make use of succulents for their drought-tolerance.  But succulents are NOT California natives.  Most come from places like Africa, Australia or China.  As a native plant enthusiast, I wish the tour organizers would have done more to inform visitors of the difference.  Yes, succulents will save water and so are applauded by the DWP.  But going a step further by planting things that BELONG here, that are native/local to Southern California, not the desert, would have been applauded by me.

Succulents are not native plants but are drought tolerant and create a distinctive look.

Most people would ask: What’s the difference between natives and succulents? If both are drought tolerant, who cares?  For an answer to that, I would urge people to pick up a book like Douglas Tallamy’s “Bringing Nature Home.”  In it he describes the intricate connection between the microbes in the soil, the insects, and the birds who eat the insects.  They are all part of an ecosystem, a food network that existed long before Los Angeles was developed and covered over in green lawns and gray asphalt.  Succulents, while adding a distinctive look, do not contribute to the healthy network of native wildlife like native plants do. 

Yet and still, the 2018 Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase offered a wonderful opportunity for folks to get out and enjoy the April sunshine, meet like-minded folks, and learn water-wise tips.  I only wish April came around more often.