If you look out your window and see lush green this time of year, chances are someone is spending lots of greenbacks for climate denial. It takes lots of water to keep a landscape lush and green in a summer-dry Mediterranean climate. For a big lawn surrounded by water-dependent shrubs and edged with thirsty annuals, it can cost hundreds of dollars a month to keep up the illusion that you're living in Kansas or New Jersey rather than California.
You have a choice: you can go to Belize every year, or you can stay home and spend that money trying to make your yard look like Belize, but without all the tropical plant diversity and jungle wildlife.
Yet one of the advantages of living in a summer-dry Mediterranean climate is that you don't need to spend your summers keeping up with the yardwork, endlessly mowing and pruning and weeding to keep rampant growth in check. Instead, with a drought-tolerant landscape, you can sit back and enjoy quiet afternoons in the garden as an astounding variety of bees forage in the buckwheat blossoms, or towhees kick up mulch, or hummingbirds zip around the hummingbird fuchsia.
In general, drought-tolerant California native shrubs that are planted in the rainy season may need weekly watering the first summer and monthly watering the second summer. After that, many need only occasional water during heat waves, or if the rainy season is especially dry. Some natives, such as fremontodendron and woolly blue curls, may even thrive with no water after planting. If your budget allows, you can stimulate more flowering toward the end of the dry season by watering perennials such as monkeyflower and penstemon weekly.
And though late summer is the dormant season for many drought-tolerant natives, analogous to the dead of winter in Kansas or New Jersey, a well-planned California native garden can still have color.
Some of the color is foliage, such as the blue-greens, gray-greens, and silvery tones of sages and buckwheats. You can get tinges of red on manzanita leaves, and of course their red-brown branches. Howard McMinn manzanita and some forms of coyote brush sport a lighter, springier green than other natives. Coffeeberry is a dependable foundation shrub, usually in shades of olive to dark green.
Other colors in the dry garden come mostly from subshrubs and low perennials. One of the easiest natives to grow, hummingbird fuchsia looks its best at the end of summer, its profuse red to orange flowers starting to bloom in mid to late summer and ending with the first frost. Buckwheats also shine in the late-summer dry garden, with sprays of bee-happy white or pinkish or yellow flowers fading to rusty tones. Plant Wayne Roderick seaside daisy for light lavender to rose flowers, San Bruno golden aster for a cheerful mass of yellow flowers, or yarrow for white to rose flowers.
Finally, in a summer-dry climate, your garden is an oasis, and an oasis needs a water source. The susurration of a fountain adds immeasurably to the pleasure of being in a garden and will lure you to linger. Its burbling whisper can both relax you and heighten your senses.
© 2010 Tanya Kucak