Gardening with a Wild Heart. Judith Larner Lowry
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nipomensis on the Nipomo Mesa in SanLuis Obispo County to hazels on the north coast. He experiments with acorns, both growing trees from them and eating them. Perhaps he joins the California Oak Foundation and attends the symposia that focus on the ecology and preservation of native oaks. Oaks of California is a frequently consulted reference work.
The oaks enrich his life. They are a presence, leaned against, noticed, attended to, climbed, viewed from many angles. Nourishment is exchanged. ssThe family photo album may include snapshots of germinating acorns, young saplings, and thriving adults.
Or a southern California gardener might attempt to restore a “walnut woodland.” Southern California black walnut, Juglans californica var. californica, is classified as “very threatened” by the Nature Conservancy Heritage Program. These tall and graceful deciduous trees are fast-growing from seed, and a grove of them is a lovely place to be. They are often found near old California Indian village sites. The nuts, though small, are tasty and nutritious.
Design Principles
Let us explore some of the “principles” or notions behind this vision of the naturally designed garden.
USE NATURAL MODELS
Plant associations and combinations from nearby pristine areas are recreated in the back yard. The gardener seeks to gain as great an understanding as possible of the land both within and beyond the fence, an understanding that is continually applied to the planning and planting of the garden.
How does this notion apply to the urban gardener with a small fenced yard in the middle of a densely populated city? She searches out relatively pristine sections, perhaps a nearby nature preserve, the unused parts of a cemetery, or an old estate to use as models and as textbooks. In many cases, the native presence has been thoroughly erased from the fertile and buildable valley lands; in that case, she looks beyond the city streets to the encircling hills, Mount Shasta, the Santa Cruz Mountains, San Jacinto Mountain, or Mount Diablo.
REMOVE OR CONTROL NON-NATIVE PLANTS
This endeavor (thoroughly addressed in chapter 8) accounts for at least 50 percent of most garden projects we undertake. The particular weeds removed depend on the plant communities involved, and the methods employed depend on the weeds. Persistence is almost always required.
DESIGN WITH A LIMITED NUMBER OF SPECIES
Once we climbed to an alpine meadow. Masses of lupine and paintbrush lay before us, but little else. After a slight initial botanical disappointment (it had been a killing climb), I began to notice the multiplicity of effects possible with just these two species. There were random and equal scatterings of both species, there were pools of lupines set off by a few scarlet paintbrushes, there were glowing masses of deep scarlet paintbrush dotted with sky blue lupines. Paintbrush was set off by a gray-white granite boulder. Lupine fields drew you on toward the lake. Mixed in different proportions, growing in different situations, these two species produced a satisfying variety of results.
I began to realize that effective design statements can be made by a limited plant palette. Groves, forests, prairies, chaparral, all imply repetition of appropriate species, where arrangement and disposition create interest, where the particular situation of each plant gives that specimen its unique aspect, balanced with the sense of harmony that results from repetition.
Limiting the number of species can deepen appreciation of the plants already in place, their seasonal changes, their aspects from different viewpoints, their fragrances and textures. Robert Michael Pyle, butterfly expert and nature writer, talks in his book Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land about his decision to move to the Willapa Hills in Washington State, a place where the number of butterfly species is mysteriously few. Colleagues and friends, puzzled by his choice, wondered why a butterfly lover would choose a place not known for its variety of butterfly species. Pyle replied that he is thus forced to know one species deeply, rather than being distracted by variety. The time and focus it takes to understand the flutterings and movements, the larval necessities, or the inexplicable arrivals and departures of any single species absorb a significant chunk of a lifetime. Depth of understanding is the goal and the reward of the back-yard restoration gardener.
Choosing a keynote plant, to be repeated throughout the garden, can give a garden “bones,” a structure that the eye can follow throughout. Ceanothus nipomensis, in San Luis Obispo County; black sage, Salvia mellifera, along the south coast; bigberry manzanita, Arctostaphylos glauca, in the Sierra foothills; toyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia, in Santa Clara County; and western rhododendron, Rhododendron macrophyllum, in a woodland garden in Mendocino, are evergreen plants that can hold the garden together through seasonal changes.
ARRANGE PLANTS WITH A LIGHT HAND
Natural models of spatial distribution and vegetation architecture can give us a sense of how we want to arrange plants in our garden. For example, the plant association known as “Douglas fir-mixed evergreen old growth forest” is two-tiered, the tall Douglas firs overtopping the lower-growing tan oaks and bays. The gardener working with that plant community can recreate and work with that spatial arrangement.
In some stands of coastal scrub, the coyote bushes are spaced far enough apart so that each expresses its own mounding shape. In other stands, plants are exuberantly crowded. In my coastal garden, I have used both schemes, providing an opportunity to draw tentative conclusions about the consequences of plant placement. To avoid some weed problems, “plant cramming,” leaving no openings for weedy species to fill, can be effective. Spaced according to their ultimate mature widths, plants can display the full beauty of their form, but more time will be spent weeding until they reach adult size.
The “mosaic” is a way of describing patches that visually knit together. Chaparral and scrub communities on faraway hillsides, with their close weavings of shrubs, can inspire the designer in the use of these species.
For an Ojai garden, take the sacred plant of the Chumash, white sage,Salvia apiana, as your keynote and form a grouping of its associates, ascertained from a local flora or from John Sawyer and Todd Keeler-Wolf's A Manual of California Vegetation, to make a cluster of plants that can be repeated, with variations, throughout the garden. This cluster might include California buckwheat, chamise, chaparral yucca, chaparral whitethorn, deer weed, and, of course, white sage, whose flowers are a powerful lure for bees and whose pungent leaves make a prized incense.
California fescue is a large grass that expresses its nature on many an oak-studded hillside, coastal bluff, or partly shaded road cut. On one striking bank, each plant is spaced so that a perfect staggered design is formed, and the eye takes pleasure in the arrangement in the wild, where it contrasts with less-ordered plant arrangements. The eye seeks repetition, while variation maintains interest. Give the eye a strong message through repetition, as nature does.
Interesting garden designs come from the play between symmetry and asymmetry. Take, for example, a neat threesome of wax myrtles at one end of the fence, one wax myrtle at the other end of the fence, and one wax myrtle somewhere off-center in between. Large garden spaces give opportunity for mass plantings—fifty California fescues rather than eight. The eye strongly registers the growth pattern of this grass, the fountainlike leaf blades, the upright flowering stalks, the silvery skirt of old leaves at the base. Plants that are subtle in shape and color can be given impact by numbers.
The ways plant communities intergrade, the ancient oaks giving way to the silvery shrub lupines, giving way to the tufted bunchgrasses, can be reproduced in the garden in such a fashion as to enhance different kinds of movement through the garden. Openings planted with low-growing forbs, grasses, and wildflowers are places for garden furniture and activities that require free movement. Close plantings of shrubs along pathways that require the garden walker to squeeze through or brush past create a moment of actual physical contact with the plants, feeling and smelling the soft leaf of the hazel or the stiff twigs of coffeeberry. It is pleasurable to be forced to brush past fragrant plants like ceanothus in bloom. Such moments enhance the dimension of immersion in local sensuality.