Native Plant Gardening Brings Joys, Unexpected Challenges

When Cindy Simons decided three years ago to replace the front and backyard plants at her Castro Valley hillside home with California natives, she laid the groundwork as carefully as a landscape designer prepares a bed for planting.

She researched plants and landscape designers, she budgeted carefully and she talked to many gardeners who had gone native before her.

The result, installed in spring 2009 by Four Dimensions Landscape Co. of Oakland, is a rustic but detail-conscious landscape that slashes water and labor costs and brings Simons great joy.

Her back yard in the Columbia subdivision looks out on Mount Diablo. Its new paths and native plantings form the foreground of a cohesive viewscape that has year-round color and integrity.

But all of Simons' planning could not prevent challenges. Many of the inaugural plants, needing less water than she was used to providing, did not survive the first season.

The new front lawn of native fescue did thrive, and when Simons grew out her front hedges to match it, the Columbia homeowners' association sent her a notice saying her yard was "unruly" and needed fixing up.

"We had this boxy suburban landscape, and I thought we should tie it in with what we see," said Simons (pronounced "Simmons"), a retired librarian. 

Most Columbia homes have traditional landscaping, so Simons had to explain her choices to the HOA board and landscape committee. She thought the situation was resolved, but the following year, she received a second letter and had to speak to the HOA again.

"Increasingly, landscape design is taking a natural approach to save water and for other very valid reasons," said Ed Walsh, chief executive officer of Walsh Property Management, the community manager for Columbia and many other East Bay developments. "But HOAs are also interested in curb appeal," he said. "Trying to mesh those two ideas is sometimes difficult."

Strife can arise, said Walsh, when native plantings take time to grow.

"People hate a bare look," he said, and problems arise when HOAs or neighbors aren't told about what the native-loving homeowners are doing. Walsh said it's helpful to communicate one's plans with HOA leadership even if HOA rules don't require it, bringing along documentation such as technical drawings and lists of plantings.

Such communication is especially important when homeowners do their own landscaping, because it takes more time, Walsh said. Simons' landscape design firm included copious documentation for its $80,000 fee, so she was well prepared.

Even so, sometimes there is  no solution except compromise, as Simons found out with her front yard. She now is shaping her front hedges and mowing the bunch grass, even though the native-plant aesthetic usually calls for a more rustic look. She worked with leaders of the Columbia HOA to arrive at this solution and, for now, all parties are content.

The back garden in November is filled with purple yarrow and riotously orange zauschneria, a fuchsia-like shrub. Bees and butterflies love it all. Simons monitors the property with a naturalist's eye. She keeps a three-ring notebook on the plants and their needs through the seasons. She can therefore declare that her garden, in its first year, used less than half the water of the old one.

Water use is plummeting even further now that the plants are established. Formerly, Simons had a landscaper come in weekly; now, he just trims the hedges once a month. Simons does most of the other work herself.

"Astounding things happen here," she said. The size and color of some of the native flowers surprised her. The Douglas irises, for example, bloom in spring with big pops of purple and yellow, belying the stereotype of California natives as small and undemonstrative. Her pitcher sage, among several sages in the garden, grows six feet high. Eventually, the matilija poppies on the north edge of her property will contribute their own fried-egg-size flowers.

To keep costs down, most plants were installed in sizes no larger than five gallons. Even so, gardening exclusively with natives is expensive because demand still is low.

"Every nursery has a California native plant section, but it's small," Simons said.

If one can find, say, a gallon-size matilija poppy at a high-end Bay Area nursery, it might retail for $15, not much for a perennial that grows eight feet high and four feet wide until one considers that it grows wild along Bay Area freeways. (Digging up such freeway landscaping, however, is illegal, according to Caltrans, constituting vandalism and a safety threat.)

Simons still is tweaking the garden's irrigation needs. Only time will adjust the clayey soil, which held so much water the first year that it threatened many plants. As part of the project, Four Dimensions added not only drip irrigation and paths of decomposed granite, but huge quantities of arborists' mulch, a byproduct of tree trimming.

This mulch will decompose over years, amending the soil. Simons advises do-it-yourselfers to make sure to install plants in community. The south part of her back yard, for example, gets runoff and received riverine plants in consequence.

For those who want to follow Simons down the native path, she recommends plenty of resources. She found her landscape firm through Bring Back the Natives, a nonprofit group dedicated to Bay Area native gardens.

The group's annual garden tour, which rotates among Bay Area communities, draws thousands of visitors. Simons' home was on the 2010 tour but will sit out next year's, planned for early May. 

In addition, Simons recommends two books. One is California Native Plants for the Garden by Carol Bornstein, David Fross and Bart O'Brien (Cachuma Press, 2006). The other is Designing California Native Gardens by Glenn Keator and Alrie Middlebrook (University of California Press, 2007).

"I have a friend who told me, 'I just don't like the desert look,' " Simons said. "But there are some extraordinarily beautiful plants in the native community. It has been so exciting just watching them grow."