Advice on Plant Selection

What recommendation do you have for choosing California native plants for a garden?

To assist you in selecting plants at the Sale this weekend, we asked co-chairs and members of the CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee to respond to this question with one paragraph. Here is what they said:

“My garden consists almost entirely of plants that grow within about 10 miles of my home. I love wandering through nearby open spaces just to see what grows here. The good news is that there is such diversity that there are many beautiful plants to choose from. Even though my garden is on a north facing hill, I am confident many of the plants growing there now would not survive on their own. The solution is monthly irrigation, each time with an inch of water. Many of our best looking plants grow on the relatively cool, wet north side of our hills, but these areas are cooler and wetter only in the winter. I bet these plants would grow well in hotter exposures by continuing irrigation during the winter and spring, even during rainy periods.”
-Lee Gordon, Member CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee

“Each of us has our own individual style for our gardens. My goal in choosing California Native plants is to have it mimic what the surroundings of my neighborhood would have looked like before suburbanization took. Therefore-I am going for the wild garden look. Originally, our household chose plants that we thought would be nice specimens, but now, we are focused on what is locally native and are going for the Coastal Sage Scrub/Chaparral look. With some very small, scaled-down paths through our front yard for passers-by to meaner on, we are now choosing the basics to fill in and border our ‘trail’. Buckwheats, sages, manzanitas and bladderpods grace our garden. We fill in with California native wildflowers (that reseed every year with enough seeds to collect and share with others) to attract pollinators and we rejoice in seeing more birds, native insects and even 2 snakes (never before seen in the last 2 decades) that now call our wild, natural landscape home. Our home, their home.”
-Judie Lincer, Co-Chair CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee

“When choosing native plants for your garden, there are some factors you should be aware of. First, what is the exposure – sun, partial shade, shade? What type of look are you going for? – naturally exuberant or highly structured, for instance. Remember to use a lot of evergreen groundcovers and shrubs to create year round backbone to your garden. Then finally you can use a couple of on-line resources to help you pick plants. Las Pilitas nursery has an excellent design tool called http://www.mynativeplants.com, in which you input your zip code, intended watering schedule, exposure, soil drainage, and the type of mulch you intend to use, and it will come up with a list of appropriate native plants for your site. You can then go back and tweak different parameters to see how it affects the recommended plant list. Calscape – Restore Nature One Garden at a Time is also a very powerful tool for design and plant selection as well. Look at the ultimate size of the plants you use to figure out spacing and therefore how many plants you should get. Finally, add colorful perennials like Seaside daisy, Hummingbird fuschia, Penstemon ‘Margarita BOP’, and Monkey flower to the edges for upfront, easily maintained color spots.”
-Greg Rubin, Member CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee

“After 6 years of trial-and-error native gardening, my recommendation for selecting plants is to aim for as locally endemic as you can. Unless you are experimenting with a botanic garden of California native plants from the various regions of the state or county (which is legit), you’ll have best success with plants that grow naturally in your immediate area. By immediate, I’m talking maybe a 40 to 50 square-mile radius. Know what plant community you live in. Is it Coastal Sage, Coastal Strand, Oak Woodland, Chaparral?… Both Calscape and Calflora offer terrific tools for discovering what grows around you. You can make lists on both these sites for reference. Keep in mind that some local plants, if they are completely situated in your direct area, may grow much larger than the specifications listed. White Sage and San Diego Goldenbush grow enormously tall in my Clairemont area garden. Pollinators adapted to these local plants, too, will find your plants much more readily. You can either keep a strict local list or add something from outside your area that you like and see if if thrives. But filling the backbone of your garden with very local plants will make it a success, I have found.”
-Joseph Sochor, Co-Chair CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee

“Since childhood, I have loved hiking in our beautiful Coastal Sage Scrub. As an adult, I’d always look up what I’d seen in my 1st (and 2nd and 3rd!) edition of James Lightner’s San Diego County Native Plants. Now when I hike, I observe with a different eye, seeing which local native species might thrive in my coastal garden. When I began native gardening, I consulted California Native Plants for the Garden, a wonderful book by Carol Bornstein, David Fross, and Bart O’Brien, to see photos and descriptions of varieties of native species that do well in garden situations. I also went on the garden tours hosted by CNPS-SD to get design ideas. My initial plantings featured many Channel Island natives, as my garden has a similar climate. Since then, I now research more locally native plants on Calflora & Calscape (also https://www.laspilitas.com and http://theodorepayne.org/nativeplantdatabase) for information on soil type, water requirements, and climate zone. I have found that a native garden is an ever-evolving organism, where some things thrive and some things don’t—and not to be afraid to pull up those that don’t! I originally planted mostly to attract butterflies and birds but have been delighted to find that I now have many resident lizards and visiting insects. A real life-changer has been the iNaturalist app, which I use daily to help me identify all the native bees, wasps, hover flies, and bee flies that have found their way to my native garden. Every day is filled with the joy of discovery!”
-Bonnie Nickel, Member CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee

“Successfully selecting the best native plants for your garden is dependent upon many factors. One should first ask themselves, what style of garden do you want. Carefully selected plants with an emphasis on aesthetics, or less interest in aesthetics and more interest in habitat, restoration, wilderness. Then ask, how would you like the plants to function.. Are you seeking shade, privacy, wind break, birds, pollinators, fragrance, medicinal/edibles, lots and lots of color etc.? Once you have an overarching view of how you want your garden to feel & function you can get a better idea of the layout. Do you want hardscape such as boulders, do you want a sitting area, bird feeding/bathing station, stream bed, bridge, etc? All of those take up space, so calculate how big you want those areas to be and then think of what space is left over for planting. When selecting plants at this phase think sizes, shapes, colors. Then observe the sun/shade, moisture level, soil make up/drainage, steepness of slope/flat ground etc. for each area of the garden. Then finally, you can determine which native plants would be best suitable for each space. Remember, you can have the most beautiful plant in the world, but if it doesn’t survive it isn’t going to be so beautiful. Sometimes certain plants just don’t grow well in certain conditions, even if they’re native. Plants that are most likely to survive are usually those more wild and local to your area. Maintenance of the garden is important to consider. Many wild natives seed readily, grow very quickly, and are woody. All of these increase maintenance. Hybrids, selections, and cultivated native plants are useful in providing a neater and cleaner garden, but often come with more water requirements & less stability. A mix of both is useful. Ultimately, research the full size of a plant and plan ahead. Put that larger plant in as a foundation, then surround it with smaller perennials you’re not afraid to remove. And do not be afraid to remove them. Every plant provides a need at a given time, and there is nothing wrong with removing a native to help a native. An oak tree shading out other natives is not a bad oak. So use fast growing plants to fill in space quickly until a more prized/established plant can dominate the space. Avoid over planting however, as this causes frustration and soreness of back/wallet. Lastly, don’t be afraid to redo your work. Like anything else, gardening is a practice that takes time to learn. Also, humans are prone to make bountiful mistakes. Set aside fear of being wrong or messing up and remember that you’re doing a good thing, even if you have to remove something to replace it with something else.”

-Vincent Bellino, Co-Chair CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee