THE COASTAL GARDENER:Stop ‘working’ and start enjoying

Reasons vary to have a California-friendly garden. Each gardener who enters the California Friendly Garden Contest might do so for a different reason.

A truly sustainable landscape thrives on rainwater and keeps plant clippings and green waste on site. It requires a minimum amount of outside products and resources to sustain it.

The conventional, suburban landscape, much like those up and down your street, equates to “work” because it is inherently not maintainable, whereas a sustainable, California-friendly landscape is just the opposite. Stability, or I’ll call it maintainability, can be built into the design of the garden, but it requires some out of-the-box thinking.

One doesn’t have to be a good gardener to have a good garden. In fact, most of what the landscape industry and homeowners call maintenance is unnecessary, a byproduct of poor design.

Consider most lawns: a green area that is fertilized and watered incessantly to make it grow. When it does, we pay people to come cut it off, fertilize it so it will grow again, and come back and cut it again in a week — ad infinitum. Lots of “work.”

Consider plant size. All plants grow every day of their lives — there are no exceptions in the plant kingdom. Plants don’t grow to a certain size and, like your children, one year just stop growing. Planting shrubs that are genetically programmed to become 10 feet but are planted in a 4-foot space creates “work” — an ultimately unmaintainable dilemma.

Why do we bring our green clippings to the curb every week to be taken away then buy bags of soil amendment to bring back into the garden? Why do we spray herbicides on weeds when a layer of mulch would be more effective and more beautiful? Why do we work so hard? Why do we climb the hill when we could just as easily have walked to the side of it?

On Sunday I visited a strikingly beautiful garden in Corona del Mar that actually contributed resources, rather than consumed them. Most gardens are graded to drain excess water away to the property lines on each side and from there to the street. At this California-friendly garden, though, water actually drained into the garden and collected in three small, unobtrusive sumps in the ground. Sometimes called “soakaways,” these gravel-filled sumps percolate water back into the ground, naturally cleaning it of pollutants and ultimately replenishing the underground aquifer. Water was actually added to the environment rather than removed. Brilliant.

Against the house, rain gutters drained more water into a barrel where it was stored for later use. Why not?

So why not get started? Begin a compost bin somewhere in your yard. Get rid of the chemicals and pesticides in your garage. Plant things that will naturally grow to the size and form you want. Mulch your soil. Kill your lawnmower.

If this approach to gardening rings true for you, then you should take the first steps now. A good way to start is to enter the California Friendly Garden Contest. Even if you’re just in the early stages of getting over the popular, fertilize-maintain-work addiction, it’s still worth entering. Take three pictures, answer five easy questions (at www.rogersgardens.com/gardencontest) and you’re in the competition. There will be four winners, and you might win $3,000 for your efforts.

ASK RON

My plumeria has not leafed out yet, and when I checked it more closely I noticed that the ends of the branches have all been killed by the frost. What should I do?

Lew

Unfortunately, many plumeria throughout California were damaged by January’s severe frost. If the tips are dead and shriveling, it is critical that you cut all of these dead portions off the plant as soon as possible. Cut the tops back to a couple of inches into moist, healthy tissue. If you don’t cut them back, the damaged stems will continue to rot and die.

ASK RON your toughest gardening questions, and the expert nursery staff at Roger’s Gardens will come up with an answer. Please include your name, phone number and city, and limit queries to 30 words or fewer. E-mail stumpthegardener@ rogersgardens.com, or write to Plant Talk at Roger’s Gardens, 2301 San Joaquin Hills Road, Corona del Mar, CA 92625.