Those of you who have been following along here at Left Coast Cowboys have heard me warning about our historic drought. I’ve even condemned the ubiquitous Ice Bucket Challenge. Despite its noble goals, it still perpetuates the completely irresponsible assumption that we have plenty of potable water to throw around. I could go on for days on the pitifully inadequate response of our state government to this ecological catastrophe. Instead I’ll do something I know I’ll be ashamed of later: quote James Michener. As dreadful a novelist as he might be, he still wrote something that has stayed with me. In Hawaii, a missionary is wondering why the Native Hawaiians are sickening and dying in such great numbers mere decades after first contact with Europeans. His wife says, of course European diseases and alcohol are partly to blame, but she thinks the key thing plaguing the Hawaiians is “our inability to find them beautiful”. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say, while the roulette wheel of ecology and Climate Change are a big factor, our inability to find Native California beautiful is also a core problem.
Think that’s a stretch? Take a walk through my neighborhood in San Jose. The Rose Garden District is acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful areas of the city. Older homes sit on tidy streets under the shade of large mature trees. A key component of the “Rose Garden look”: lawns. Big, thirsty lawns of Kentucky Bluegrass punctuated with flowers — often of the tropical Hawaiian variety. Not to pick on my ‘hood. This phenomenon is pretty widespread throughout the West. People leave New England, Ohio, and rainy climes, move to Phoenix, LA or Las Vegas and immediately put in a lawn and all those plants that looked so great back home. Why is this almost always the case? I think it’s for two reasons: a) people have no idea what plants are native to California, and b) they don’t know the first thing about California’s ecology. Because if you really learned about the latter, you would demand the former.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the same clueless variation on a complaint about Western weather — “Gee, what a shame all the rain came at once instead of being spread out through the year.” Hmmm. Clearly you were snoozing in 7th grade geography. Because it’s pretty consistent in any semi-arid place from Australia to Eastern Africa to America’s West that typical weather patterns consist of long dry periods punctuated by short intense wet seasons. And it’s also a pretty cyclical event that sometimes those rains don’t come during that small window of opportunity, leaving you with practically no rain for the year. Get three years of that in a row and, well, we end up where we are now. In a drought of the proportions that once brought down the Anasazi, Chaco Canyon and probably the Mayan civilizations.

Sticky Monkey Flower is one of my favorite natives. There are endless and subtle variations in the patterns.
Yet, people are clinging to their lawns and their water wasting ways. Which is the long way about telling you that I’m not. Clinging to my lawn that is.
I’ve just completed the first stage of Project Lawn Be Gone, which will segue-way into planting a beautiful drought tolerant lawn of California native plants. And forget this dreadful “Brown is the New Green” campaign that California thinks will make everyone save water. I’m not going to have any brown. Because, if you plant a native garden right, you can have year round color for the price of NO water. If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you know how hard we’ve worked to preserve and restore our native habitat on our spread in Sonoma. We have large areas of plantings that we haven’t watered in three years. They’re beautiful. But then I’ve always preferred California plants to anything imported. All those East Coast plants seem to me blowsy and overly perfumed. California plants have smaller flowers, but they reward with intense colors and peppery scents. Describing the landscape of another semi-arid area, Isak Dineson wrote:
“There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.”
Exactly! I’ll be going for “strong and refined essence”. Can I also add that another benefit of a California garden is that it feeds native Californian birds and insects. See all drought-tolerant gardens aren’t created equal. Think before you grab those Mediterranean plants. Sure, they’re water wise, but can the local fauna find any sustenance on them? Probably not. And believe me, you want those California birds, bees and butterflies. They are as beautiful as California native plants.
But I’ll be spending much more time evangelizing about native plants in later posts. First, let’s get to the hard part in this equation: taking out a lawn. I’m using the sheet mulching method. It’s scary at first, but it’s by far the easiest, most ecological way to proceed. Step one is covering your entire yard with flattened cardboard boxes, slightly overlapping. Be sure to use thin boxes and remember to remove all tape since it won’t compost.

The cardboard forms a weed barrier and speeds the breakdown of the grass. Here is my Sonoma Ranch Manager Louis trying to convince my neighbor, Gary, that there will eventually be a beautiful garden here. Gary is polite, interested but skeptical.

Finally, cover the dirt with mulch. We opted for the shredded redwood bark called “Gorilla Hair”. It’s the lightest to move which was much appreciated by this point in the project.

Finished! Now we’ll let it sit for four to six weeks, by which time the grass below should be turned to compost or at least significantly broken down so that planting into it is easy.
We’ll wet it down with the sprinkler nozzle on the hose just to keep everything from drying out. But the Gorilla Hair kind of mats down and holds everything in place really well. I purchased soil and mulch from Evergreen Supply who I highly recommend. They’ll calculate how much you’ll need of each based on the square footage of your lawn. They also steered me to a cheaper soil than what I was going to purchase. When I mentioned that I was putting in a California native garden, they reminded me that California plants thrive in less than rich soil so I could go for the cheap stuff! As for the small piles of leftover mulch and soil, I posted on Nextdoor.com that I was giving it away free. Gone in an afternoon.
As I warned, this is the scary part. Six weeks of staring at mulch is going to put a bit of a strain on my relationship with my neighbors, although they’ve been very polite about the whole thing. When we get to the planting stage, we’ll just cut holes through the mulch, soil, cardboard sandwich and pop our plants in. What remains of the cardboard should continue to act as a weed barrier.
If you are interested in how this all progresses, watch this space. I’ll be generating pretty detailed, full color landscape plans that I’ll be posting as we refine our design.
As I keep telling my neighbors: Trust me. You’re going to learn to love California Natives. I’m hoping that, unlike Michener’s missionaries, you will develop the ability to find them beautiful. It will be a different kind of beauty than perhaps you are used to. But it will be beautiful.
Keep in mind that California is very diverse. What grows in San Jose becomes toast in Bakersfield. I support your efforts and join with you in your distaste for the “Brown is the New Green” BS.
FYI…the outlook for 2015 isn’t looking so good. Managers of all local (Kern County) water districts (ag and urban) are very, very scared/nervous. This is a tremendous time we are living through.
Curious as to how long before Oscar and Lucy know what you have done :)And whether their little feet will touch it before the new fauna array is established. Looking forward to the whole process.
No drought here, but have planted Black-eyed Susans,coneflowers, and coreopsis where annuals used to live. Not all the flower bed space, but a lot of it. Indigenous to Kentucky.
The birds have just about picked the coneflowers clean.
I had some hummingbirds visit without putting out feeders for them. Not sure what drew them, but always a nice surprise.
Thanks, Maybelline. We are very aware of what grows where. There are dozens of varieties of Manzanitas, but some are better at the coast than inland. San Jose does have many of the same natives as Sonoma, although they may grow a little better in San Jose as there is a little more moisture in San Jose and the temperatures are less extreme. Well, there used to be a bit more moisture in San Jose. As you said, the drought is everywhere and it is frightening. But the state has done a horrible job of educating the public. It was frightening what some of the passers-by were asking us as they stopped to view the project. One guy asked us if we had the drought in Sonoma. Uh yeah! PRetty much the whole state and much of the West is in severe drought!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/california-drought-gifs_n_5843534.html
The link above isn’t as current as I would like; but it gives one a very good impression of the severity of this drought.
I have been discussing the “Brown is the New Green” slogan with the Save Our Water team. They asked for a better suggestion from me. I’m stumped. Do you have a better suggestion?
I hate that slogan. Because it feeds into all the stereotypes people have of California flora being “less than”, less beautiful, less manicured, etc. etc.
I’d rather see something positive like:
“Go Native”
“Feed the Bees”
“Bag the lawn, embrace the color”
California Color is the New Green
Because one of the wonderful things about California natives is that they offer year round color. Can’t think of any other state where that happens.
Until people start moving away from the stereotype of the green lawn — which is the antithesis of California plants — we’ll never break this cycle of over watered landscape.
Perfect! I knew I could count on you for great words to replace the current slogan. I have passed along your creative suggestions. Thanks.