Dateline>City of Angels

How green does your garden grow? That’s the question asked by my Atlanta writer pal Hilda Brucker in her Greener Good piece, appearing in this month’s Continental Airlines inflight magazine.

Based on interviews with experienced botanical and landscape experts, Hilda notes the growing recognition that the average home’s lawn and garden have a greater impact on the environment than most people realize. Excessive irrigation, chemical treatments, fertilizers and pesticides from an estimated 30 million acres of lawns in the U.S. can contribute significantly to contaminated storm runoff, which the EPA has flagged as a “major source of water pollution nationwide.”

Hilda’s piece makes a strong case for an “ideal yard” sporting “a sustainable landscape of plants that thrive under local conditions without requiring copious amounts of chemicals, coddling, or irrigation.”

Now this is one “green cause” I can get behind…

I’ve always found it ironic that here at the edge of the Mojave Desert (in one of the world’s few true Mediterranean-type climate regions), Southern Californians remain so fixated on big, boring lawns. Worse, each year we’ll run thousands of gallons of our region’s precious water through our sprinklers to keep that lawn full and lush when there’s a much more practical alternative available.

I’m referring to, of course, a native garden fed by a drip irrigation system. I can vouch firsthand for their beauty, ease of maintenance and water savings because I inherited an extensive, well-planned drip system from the previous owners of my first home in Silver Lake. They had used it to water a traditional garden that had become overgrown and (for me, at least) unmanageable. I kept the drip emitters, ripped out most of the exotic plants and shrubs, replaced them with mostly native, drought-tolerant varieties, and cut my watering times roughly in half.

After about a year of cultivation, I found myself sitting pretty and entertaining guests in a strikingly brilliant yard that practically took care of itself. (Especially on warm summer evenings, the sights of cacti and wildflowers, along with the fragrance of Winslow sage and rosemary can be incredibly relaxing.)

Readers unfamiliar with the breadth of natural offerings are probably scratching their heads. After all, how showy can a native garden be? To answer this, I recommend a trip to the Theodore Payne Foundation in the Sunland area, a nursery dedicated to the promotion of plants, shrubs and trees natural to our region. The color, diversity and adaptive use of the flora may surprise you. Contrary to popular belief, when left to Mother Nature’s intentions, Southern California’s indigenous tapestry boasts much more than dry, ugly chaparral and tumble weeds.

Now, having moved to a new home, I’m starting all over from scratch — this time planning and installing a large, intricate drip system on my own. It’s a lot of work up front, but I know from experience that the ultimate payoffs of a distinctive, self-sustaining, native garden await me.

If for no other reason than to save money in the face of the DWP’s drastically rising rates, I wish more Angelenos would join in this particular green crusade. Not only would they be helping to conserve our precious water supply, but helping to transform the city’s landscape into something far more visually interesting.