Tucked into the corner of Palo Alto located between Los Altos and Los Altos Hills is a 1-acre garden that gets better every year. It's one of those places you just don't want to leave. Maybe it's the sound of falling water from the two small waterfalls that punctuate the stream and pond. Maybe it's the variety of garden rooms in a mostly open design that give a feeling of spaciousness and draw your eye to interesting features at every turn. Or maybe it's that the plants are mostly native, so they contribute a strong sense of place.
The garden was created about ten years ago with a mix of Mediterranean and California native plants, and each year more natives have been added.
Melanie Cross has been learning about native plants for 30 years, and she had three goals in mind when she chose mostly native plants for her garden.
First, she wanted to provide habitat for insects and birds, and native plants excel at this task. Coyote brush is an especially good host for insects, supporting nearly 500 insect and arthropod species, according to research by the namesake of Tilden Botanic Garden. Insects, in turn, feed the birds.
Second, Melanie was interested in low water use and low maintenance. Many natives flourish without additional water once they are established. Furthermore, “most natives require very little maintenance unless they're overwatered,” she said.
Third, she liked specific plants a lot. Mugwort, for example, is one of her favorites. Another favorite is the grove of native alders planted three years ago, along with an arbor, to shade the west side of the house. The cool refuge under the streamside alders “smells so nice from the leaves transpiring,” she said.
Finally, native plants caught her attention on hikes, and when she bought her first home thirty years ago, the former owners, who had planted some natives, encouraged Melanie to visit Yerba Buena Nursery in Woodside. At the time, when Los Altos Hills resident Gerda Isenberg was still around, the nursery she founded was one of the few places to buy native plants.
Low maintenance is an elusive goal of many landscape designs. One of the keys to achieving a low-maintenance garden is “knowing where to plant and how big the plant can get so you won't have to prune it,” she said. When Melanie hired landscape designer Jolee Horne of Mountain View to draw up the planting design, they took special care to space shrubs the correct distance apart for the expected mature size, rather than planting them to make the landscape look instantly finished.
For new plantings, they used fast-growing nonnatives such as gaura, Santa Barbara daisy, and cistus as fillers. Native plants such as toyon, which is clothed in red hollylike fruit this time of year, often stay small for their first 2 or 3 years, while they are growing the extensive root systems that will allow them to become drought tolerant. As the native shrubs grew, the fillers were gradually removed. In addition, some native grasses filled spaces between plants.
Each time plants are removed, “it's an opportunity to try something else,” Melanie said. The lavenders that originally covered part of the sloping front garden were gradually replaced with Bee's Bliss sage. Both the Bee's Bliss sage and the four or five varieties of native buckwheats that flow gracefully down the hill are longer-lived and look better this time of year than the lavenders, she said.
Another aspect of low maintenance is allowing some plants to reseed and plant themselves around the garden, including coyote brush, toyon, oaks, golden currant, bush mallows, milkweeds, and yarrow.
An important factor in keeping the garden low maintenance is having someone in charge who knows the plants and knows what to do when. In this garden, Melanie is that person. She closely supervises a three-person crew that comes in for a couple hours a week.
As the garden evolves, some parts of the garden take more time to maintain. A meadow with a labyrinth made from fieldstones, with Island Pink yarrow and other plants between the stones, has turned out to be a higher-maintenance part of the garden. Some remaining nonnative plants, particularly hybrid tea roses, need lots of work.
Well-behaved nonnatives such as crape myrtle, fruit trees, catmint, oakleaf hydrangea, nonnative flowering sages, and doublefile viburnum have also earned a place in the garden.
Like many gardens in Los Altos Hills, Melanie's garden has hard adobe soil that bakes in the summer sun. Because the garden covers such a large area, the soil was not amended as a whole. New plants get some compost, though, and a couple years ago, forty cubic yard ns of mulch was spread around the garden.
Also as in many parts of Los Altos Hills, the sloping topography improves the drainage, making it possible for natives to flourish. In mid-December, a Wayne Roderick seaside daisy's lavender flowers were in full bloom, and a canyon sunflower brightened a dry shady spot.
Most wildlife is welcome here. Deer are not a problem in the neighborhood. After losing a hundred plants to gophers ten years ago, Melanie hired a service that keeps gophers out by placing poison underground. No other pesticides, herbicides, or sprays are used in this dog-friendly garden.
The most dramatic part of the garden is the naturalistic water feature. Water flows from a deep upper pond, down a small waterfall, into a stream that flows under a wooden bridge, down another small waterfall, and into another deep pool. Streamside plants such as spicebush, alders, rushes, and California wild rose surround the water feature. In warmer months, a stunning golden currant overhangs the pond.
Built by Steve Grimes of Grimes Natural Landscape in Los Altos Hills, the water feature is, surprisingly, low maintenance. The secret is a biofilter. No regular chemicals are needed to keep the pond clear and the fish and turtles healthy. The upper pool contains lava rocks inoculated with bacteria, which eat the nitrates that would otherwise cloud the water. Every five years, built-up sludge is cleaned out by opening a valve, and the sludge is returned to the garden as fertilizer.
Hummingbirds favor one of the stone shelves in the upper pond. On cold mornings, Melanie has observed as many as seven hummingbirds waiting their turn to take a bath in the gently flowing water.
© 2008 Tanya Kucak