Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, Aug. 29. I’m Jeanette Marantos, a feature writer for The Times’ Lifestyle section who writes mostly about plants, landscapes and gardening.
Lately, most of our plant stories have focused on change — specifically the way wildfire, drought watering restrictions and global warming are forcing many Californians to reconsider what we grow in our yards and even on our balconies.
Native plants, once dismissed as weeds, are now a mainstay in my Ventura garden. I have fruits, vegetables and sunflowers growing in my front yard instead of lawn, and a drip irrigation system I’m still trying to understand. I don’t worry so much about curb appeal; I’m trying to create habitat for threatened insects and birds, grow food for my table and build a view that makes me happy when I look outside.
I didn’t come to this easily. I was born in Riverside into a military family, which meant we dipped in and out for a few years, first to Guam, then New Hampshire, but always returning to Riverside to the sprawling ranch-style house my mother adored.
When they bought the house in 1965, it was part of a new tract of homes. The developers rolled out lawn on every front yard — 3,000 square feet’s worth at our house — with a couple of stick trees propped near the curbs. As you looked up the street, it was a sea of unfenced green on either side. The backyards, however, were all sunbaked bare dirt tinged with weeds, and many houses, like ours, had a large slope rising above an expanse of flat ground.
My parents poured heart and soul into their yard. They were both avid readers of Sunset magazine, the bible of any and all gardeners in SoCal, and their improvements were mostly DIY, based on my father’s modest income and the necessity of keeping four children in shoes and Ding Dongs (an addictive hockey puck-shaped cake wrapped in foil).
Instead of a pool, we had a badminton court. We had a patio covered by a redwood deck that family friends helped my father build. My mother planted a rose garden with 20 plants. They tried and repeatedly failed to grow dichondra in their backyard — a round-headed grass that doesn’t need mowing but really thrives only in cool coastal climes — and quietly competed with everyone else in the neighborhood to have the greenest, lushest lawn out front.
Nearly every morning, I woke to the rhythmic swish of our Rain Bird sprinklers, arcing water across our wide, thirsty yard with the same soothing song — chu, chu, chu, chu chhhhhhhhh! Chu, chu, chu, chu chhhhhhhhh...!
My parents cajoled, bullied and eventually bribed their children to pull weeds from the hated slope, which they eventually covered in strawberries, citrus, jade plants and ivy. The covered patio became a shady oasis of philodendron and other tropical plants. Red hibiscus flourished along both sides of the house, a tribute to our stay in Guam. They kept those thirsty plants so well-watered that the ground there was always wet.
That was the California landscape of my youth. In retrospect, it feels like a pipe dream, given the reality of this region’s limited water and propensity for drought ... a lovely memory that is no longer sustainable today. While I sometimes miss the Rain Bird’s song, I can’t justify the idea of wasting that much water on a SoCal lawn today — not when our lakes and reservoirs are going dry.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk more about the transition from lawns and nonnative ornamentals to native trees and plants that can infuse our neighborhoods with shade, fragrance, riotous color and — most importantly in these times of animal extinctions — sources of food and shelter for our birds, our butterflies and other threatened wildlife.
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