Gardening for a Dry California Future

By Leslie Patten

In this eBook, Patten, a veteran low water designer, describes step-by-step strategies to transform high water design situations. Produce gardens, proper zoning, irrigation, native low water lawns, tips for xeriscape design styles, advice on planting California natives and Mediterraneans, as well as how to take advantage of microclimates. These are just some of the topics covered. Special sections on native California Oaks, instructions on how to grow a native meadow, and a month-by-month native bloom cycle list included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leslie Patten
• Release date: Apr 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310176333

Leslie Patten

Leslie Patten is a well-known landscape designer in the Bay Area of California. Her work has been featured in Mill Valley’s Outdoor Art Club Garden Tours, in the Marin Independent Journal, Marin Art & Garden Center tours, the Garden Conservancy, and Marin County Stormwater Pollution Prevention Program tours. She grew up in the Los Angeles area and went to college at the University of Santa Cruz. After college she spent the next thirty years living all over Northern California, in Lake, Sonoma, Marin, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz counties. She has hiked and backpacked all over the state, including desert, mountain, and coastal regions, gaining her familiarity with native plants and their habitats.Leslie’s background is in horticulture and botany, but she also has naturalist training and worked for over eight years at a museum lab preparing wildlife specimens of museum quality. She has assisted with spotted owl studies, as well as wolf and grizzly bear studies as a citizen scientist. Her knowledge of tracking, wildlife, and native plants of the West greatly enhances her ability to create successful designs and wildlife gardens. Low water gardens has been her specialty in the Bay Area for over twenty years, but she also has designed tropical, English, and Zen gardens. Her expertise is best described as a habitat specialist.She now splits her time between the wilds of northwest Wyoming and the Bay Area. Her ongoing blog can be seen at www.thehumanfootprint.wordpress.com. Her business website with photos of many jobs can be viewed at www.ecoscapes.net.

Book preview

Our Climate

In a changing climate, water is fast becoming the new oil. Northern California serves the water needs for 2/3 of the state. Besides agriculture, much of our water goes to landscaping. With some planning and good design, you can still have a wonderful garden with very low water needs.

In my many years of designing for clients, I’ve found that people think of gardens in an idyllic manner that is a throw back to some place from their childhood. Garden heaven is a utopia from everyone’s personal past, whether it be a hide-out at Grandma’s, or watching your mother tend her flower garden. People also want to have a garden that reminds them of their ‘home base’; for instance, clients who come from the mid-West to live in California like to have lawns; or people from the east invariably ask for birch trees. These requests come from an unconscious longing that is akin to ‘comfort food’—and could be called ‘comfort gardens’. As a designer more than half my job is to educate clients about ‘The West’ and what is appropriate to grow here.

California is part of the West—the Far West—and is essentially a dry state. Much of California could be considered a dry climate, with minimal amounts of rainfall. Our native plants have adapted to two seasons rather than the well-known four season climate. These two seasons—wet and dry—are called Mediterranean and are found only in five locations around the world. The Mediterranean climate is found in the Mediterranean, of course, as well as Chile, South Africa, California, and Australia. So most of coastal California is quite unique in terms of climate and plant adaptations. In designing a low water garden, this is crucial knowledge, because not only can you use California native plants, but also supplement these other ‘Mediterranean’ plants that have the same cultural needs.

Natives-and-other-low-water-plants

Although we don’t know exactly what climate change will bring in the future, some things are for sure. The West has always gone through dry periods, some of them lasting for hundreds of years. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Anazasi were forced by severe drought to abandon their homelands in the Four Corners region and migrate southward into Mexico. Scientists are predicting that, at least in our near future, California will experience severe and long dry periods with rain