The Dry Garden: Hummers and snapdragons
Channel Islands native Galvezia speciosa amounts to a year-round hummingbird feeder on a negligible water budget. Cal Poly Pomona landscape architect Bob Perry recommends the hybrid 'Firecracker' (above) as being compact and therefore suitable to many gardens. Photo: Bob Perry / Land Design Publishing
If you are considering a hummingbird feeder, try buying a plant instead of a bottle.
For what seems like a year-round fountain of nectar, make that plant a bush snapdragon. Galvezia speciosa, as this Channel Island native is more properly known, flowers four out of four seasons and 365 days a year. Its bright red tubular blossoms clearly evolved with hummingbirds as pollinators, and the birds will stake out your garden the instant the plant goes in the ground.
They are very hard to kill; Galvezia’s only weakness is susceptibility to freezing. Other than that, they can be used throughout most of Southern California. The …
The Dry Garden: Eco-snooping, part three
You might set out on the Theodore Payne Foundation tour this weekend for righteous reasons — to save water, or to help birds and butterflies. But the sheer beauty of Wynne Wilson’s Altadena home will have you wondering, why doesn’t everyone garden with natives? Her partnering of indigenous coral bells and lilac with the Mediterranean staples of citrus and lavender is so stupidly beautiful that you want to cry.
Click here for part three in the Los Angeles Times of The Dry Garden’s preview of this weekend’s Theodore Payne Foundation tour.…
The Dry Garden: Native mallows
Few plants better connote the sheer luxuriance of the California dream as hibiscus. It comes from a clan of plants known as mallows native to the tropics, where, University of Texas botanist Paul A. Fryxell says, this family finds its “greatest richness.”
Fryxell is an authority on mallows, a family that he says has more than 100 genera with cousins around the world, capable of tolerating situations as diverse as the high climes of the Andes, hot and dry Palm Desert and the mediterranean climate of coastal California.
Talk to Fryxell and it soon becomes clear why hibiscuses in Southern California needn’t be a guilty pleasure, even though they’re tropical. Thanks to their robust root systems, many can go with only occasional deep watering during dry season. Once established, they are happiest when treated like trees.
For Californians, he also points to our native mallows. Those who haven’t expanded from …
“A city that can take care of itself”
Desert mallow in Los Angeles. Photo: Annie Wells / Chance of Rain. Click on the image to be taken to a listing of dry garden resources for Southern California.
“Every Angeleno knows we’re living on water siphoned from other parts of the state. And it feels wrong somehow to drench your lawn in the middle of Southern California winter — even on one of the two allowed watering days…”
Going native
2008: Garden in transition to strongly native with no built-in irrigation and only occasional hose watering. Plants in image: live oaks, irises, lavender, coyote bush, native honeysuckle, ceanothus, poppies and one very hardy tea rose. Paving part of a zero runoff water-capturing design adapted in Los Angeles to City of Santa Monica standards.
Emily Green, publisher of this website and writer of the “Dry Garden” column for the Los Angeles Times, will be speaking on December 8th at the California Native Plant Society on “A Decade of killing plants and learning from the survivors.” Snapshots, left, are examples from the period, from 1998 to 2008, during which Green began chronicling for the Times the transition from conventional to native gardening.
For information, click here.…
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