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.

Gardening In the Line of Fire

Manzanita's spring blossoms, of the Genus Arctostaphylos

December 4, 2017: California seems to be on fire.  Everywhere. It started last week when Santa Ana winds stirred up a wildfire in Ventura, California, just to the north of Los Angeles County. I was on my way up to Santa Monica to take care of some business at the courthouse there.  Everyone was talking about the fires. It was a warm, dry day, more like summertime than Christmastime. The sky was hazy and girls passed by with masks over their faces, so as not to breathe in too much ash and particulates. The golden sun took on a new color. It was just the beginning of what would become the week ahead.

My car radio was alive with chatter about how this was not the fire season: It is too late in the year and fires are supposed to be over.  "Newbies" to Los Angeles had to call into the radio station to put in their "two cents," annoying me with how they know all about living in LA.  "This is what it's like living in LA: you never know when there might be a fire and we are always living with this danger..." much like folks back East live with tornadoes or hurricanes or ice storms. I suppose that's what they meant. I wanted to call in and say, "No. This NOT normal for Los Angeles."

For one thing, we are in our 6th year of drought. Nothing is normal now. The trees are stressed. Aluminum has been sprayed on us day in and day out for weather modification... Ah, but that is a subject for another post.

As the car radio droned on, I started thinking about the backyard gardeners in Southern California. We all spend much time and money planning our landscapes: shopping for the right plants, learning where to place them, and how to care for them.  Then, should a fire appear out of nowhere and strike our neighborhood, causing evacuations, we have to leave our gardens behind. When we leave our houses, we leave our gardens, too.  And we don't know what we will come back to.

What a terrible feeling that is!  Even if the insurance companies reimburse you for your house, how do you replace the garden?  All that love and careful nurturing of your plants: they are like friends that cannot be replaced. The only choice is to start over. You assess the damages, decide what to keep and what cannot be saved, and you move on.  And that takes time and money.

So, now we come to why I am writing this blog post. There are things you CAN do to mitigate the destructive effects of wildfires on your garden and make the new garden stronger.  With a little bit of  research, you can make your new garden even more fire resistant!  I suggest you start with taking a look at which plants you choose to put in.

In Southern California there are native plants that are fire resistant and plants that are fire tolerant. There are a good many varieties of plants to choose from. You do not have to go with strickly a "cactus and succulent" garden if you don't want to.  I want to introduce you to some of the native plants I know of that would work well in your new garden.  Like the lovely Manzanita~ If you had a garden full of Manzanita, they would survive fires. Yes, they still burn, but they do not die. Instead, they grow back from a basal stump and eventually return to their enchanting pre-fire forms, producing sweet pink blossoms in spring that pollinators so enjoy.

After a fire, your garden will be void of much brush; it may look like a whole new palette to paint on. So rather than fill it with more plants that would be destroyed if wildfires should come again, consider using native plants that stand up to fire, plants that will be with you for a lifetime. It will make coming home after an evacuation that much less stressful. Your favorite plants might be charred and blackened. They might be smaller versions of their former selves. But they will continue to grow. And the wildlife that called them home will return, too. They will put out seeds that native birds rely on. The ecosystem will continue to thrive, and your garden will be reborn!

Remember, plant fire resiliant and fire tolerant native plants.  Look them up. Research your options.  I will post some great native choices in upcoming blog posts for you.  Because, I am a Southern California gardener, too.  I have lived in the chaparral & soft-scrub areas of the Santa Monica Mountains for most of my adult life. And I have seen what wildfires can do. I am no "newbie" to this place. And I am here to tell you, you can be strong. You can create a better and stronger garden that will last you a lifetime~ 

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