Southern California Native Flower Garden Book
PURPOSE OF PROJECT:
“Flowers are Nature’s most eloquent voice, speaking to us of optimism and fertility. Flowers remind us that we share the Earth with other living things. Nature can almost be disregarded—treated as a faceless background—until flowers bloom. Then we are awestruck at the delicate beauty of life in its myriad forms, its exuberant colors, and its subtle fragrances.” Susan Lamb, Wildflowers of California, 1994
This native flower garden book intends to help create flower gardens with inspired and memorable colors, textures, and scents, while enhancing the health and comfort of the landscape with less effort, water, energy, and expense.
The book illustrates 164 California native plants, presented in the same light as popular exotic flowering plants readily available at retail nurseries. The small trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants, ground covers, and vines described here last a long time and provide brilliant flowers. The nonnative annuals and perennials, so commonly used in flower gardens, require fertilizer, water, and frequent replacement. In sunny Southern California, a colorful flower-filled garden can be so much easier. The plants selected for this book are intended to be the more reliable, widely adapted, relatively available, beautifully flowering, or otherwise attractive native plants for Southern California gardens.
Susan believes understanding the native flora provides insight regarding our overall environment, including soils, climate, and human habitation. For example, one can look out on the landscape and see that the presence of coastal sage scrub reveals a rocky area, grassland suggests clay, and wetland plants indicate seeps and other water sources. Trees and shrubs indicate which way the winds usually blow and how intensely. Long-term habitation can be inferred from the ceremonial plant datura growing at a Chumash sacred site, or the medicinal yerba mansa at a former settlement.
Quality of life is enhanced from knowing and experiencing the delightful scents and tastes of our native plants. Many sweetly scent the air and attract hummingbirds and butterflies with flowers, but these qualities go beyond the obvious with native plants. For example, Cleveland sage foliage possesses a sweeter herbal scent than lavender, and the leaves of white sage are burned for incense. California bay trees cool the air, and the leaves can be used in cooking. Miner’s lettuce and the berries of some mahonia are edible, while delicious and restorative teas can be made from the hips of California rose or the leaves of wild ginger and yerba buena.
By designing gardens with plants that are adapted to our surroundings, we can have all of the beauty without the fuss of lots of water, chemical fertilizers, amendments, pesticides, herbicides, pruning, and trimming. This approach to landscaping maximizes the health of our gardens and households as well as the communities in which we live. The plants that have evolved here also have advantages for the local wildlife such as songbirds, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Hosting living creatures enriches the garden with beauty, life, and charm as well.