Ready to rethink your lawn? Fall is the best time to start, and your options are intoxicatingly plentiful, according to the authors of the new Cachuma Press book Reimagining the California Lawn: Water-conserving Plants, Practices, and Designs.
Carol Bornstein, David Fross, and Bart O'Brien detail the compelling reasons for replacing lawns and offer a variety of garden styles featuring low-growing plants. For each garden style, the authors show examples of landscapes and discuss maintenance considerations for some of the plant choices. They talk about the historical background of lawns and the alternatives and mention public gardens where you can see more variations of a given style.
A short list of plants for each garden style is augmented by detailed plant profiles that fill over half of the book. The book is well-designed and -written, easy to use, and authoritative, and at 154 pages, compact enough not to overwhelm readers.
Whether you want to do the work yourself or hire it out, you'll want to consult this useful manual at every step, from reducing or removing existing turf to deciding between, say, blue grama and red fescue. You'll be guided to analyze the uses and functions of existing lawn areas, and look closely at whether problem areas could be managed more intelligently by choosing different plants.
The plants highlighted in this book are better adapted to California's mediterranean climate, so they require fewer resources and less work than traditional lawns. Many of these plants also attract birds and pollinators, creating a livelier and more interesting place to live. Gorgeous photos of plants in the landscape by John Evarts and others offer inspiration and a hint of the endless possibilities if you lose the lawn.
If you're getting started with California natives, you can narrow down your plant list by looking for the green plant names. If you're not sure you want all natives, this book offers a nice selection of drought-tolerant plants from other parts of the world as well.
The simplest garden style is the greensward: a sweep of grasses or sedges that requires less water, infrequent or no mowing, and no fertilizers or pesticides. If you use natives, you can also increase the habitat value of your landscape. Greenswards can often accommodate foot traffic and serve as a play surface.
The joy of meadows, according to Fross, is that they are ever-changing. This is not a garden style for micromanagers. Adding annual and perennial wildflowers and bulbs to greenswards creates meadows. Though meadows are informal and naturalistic, they require a lot of attention to weeds in the first couple years.
Other garden styles include
© 2011 Tanya Kucak