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Tom Karwin, On Gardening: Renovating a garden requires careful planning
Gardeners might look at their gardens with a mix of disappointment, a desire for a delightful display and despair.
The gardener might have recently acquired the garden from someone who neglected it, or neglected it his/herself. (Life can dissuade even the most ambitious gardener.)
Renovating a garden can be a formidable challenge, leaving the gardener baffled and frustrated.
Such situations call for a plan. Here are suggestions for the early stages of a process to take control, build confidence and produce evidence of progress. These initial steps create a foundation for actual landscaping; hands-on work happens a little later.
Draw a diagram of the property
A scale drawing of the entire property supports the design and installation phases of the renovation. Show the improvements: house, garage, driveway, walkway, pond, walls, outbuildings, etc. Show large trees and other significant plants that definitely will remain in place, but omit all candidates for removal.
Indicate which direction is north, to aid in planning for sun exposure.
Indicate major changes in elevation with contour lines that trace equal elevations, or with a separate drawing of a side view of a slice through the property. Visit ongardening.com for an example of a garden elevation change diagram.
This diagram (or “base map”) might be drawn on graph paper to ease measurements, and should be rendered in black ink to enable clear photocopies. Make several photocopies for sketching design ideas.
Decide on basic design concepts
Write down your intentions to, for example, commit to organic gardening, establish a drought-tolerant landscape, adopt one or more thematic approaches to plant selection, or establish a wildlife-friendly environment. This exercise helps provide direction to planning the renovation, but it can be revised during the project.
Establish objectives for the finished landscape
Envision how you will use the landscape: outdoors living, with parties, barbecues, etc.; recreation for children or adults; growing fruits and vegetables; or simply enjoying horticultural displays. Write it down.
Set priorities for development
Break the renovation project into steps that are manageable in terms of time and money. Begin by visualizing the overall design of the landscape, emphasizing the hardscape elements: pathways, planting-bed borders, stairways or walls (if there are important elevation changes), outbuildings, etc.
Subsequent priorities could focus on either specific zones within the landscape, or desired features.
These early actions will contribute greatly to the larger goals of taking control, building confidence and demonstrating progress. Selecting and installing plants happens after investing in these preparations.
Tom Karwin is a UC Master Gardener and vice president of the Friends of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum. He gardens in Santa Cruz. Send feedback to gardening@karwin.com. Visit ongardening.com for more on garden renovation.
The latest in landscaping
As with any industry, the landscape industry works to keep up with popular trends over the years – from xeriscaping to hedges surrounding a property. Trends come and go, but the job of a landscape designer is to stay current with the latest.
Keeping up with trends, whether in landscaping or in fashion, makes for better appeal to the consumer. Improving your home’s landscaping offers a win-win for everyone involved – increased home values, increased outdoor activity and enhanced curb appeal that could help attract potential buyers.
A few of the trends for the coming year include:
Outdoor living
Taking the indoors out continues to be a craze within the landscaping industry. Homeowners want the additional space to entertain and have a place to unwind and relax. To accommodate this need, homeowners are having decks and patios installed.
The options are endless. What once were only natural stone patios, today’s manmade pavers have opened the doors to a wide array of choices, patterns and colors. These are also more economical.
Cooking and entertaining
Outdoor kitchens continue to increase in popularity with homeowners. The choices for a homeowner range from a small, limited kitchen with a grill to an extensive fully functioning kitchen which includes cooking and refrigeration equipment.
Specialized hobbies have played a major part in making outdoor kitchens a mainstay in the landscaping world. Smoking and barbequing are sweeping the United States with the help of television and the Internet. People are taking up these hobbies and turning them into professions.
Extending use
Lives have become somewhat busy and chaotic for many families, leaving little time for them to enjoy their homes. By offering lighting choices and means of heating, the time to enjoy the yard can be extended into the night and longer in the season as well.
Landscape lighting is becoming a mainstay. Lights are used not only to illuminate walking paths, but are being used to accent specimen trees and architectural details of the home’s exterior. The efficiency and ease of installation has made landscape lighting more appealing to the average homeowner. While cost is still a factor, prices have come down over the years.
Homeowners are adding fire pits and fireplaces to their outdoors to ward off the chills of cool nights. Fire pits are an affordable option to add the beauty and warmth of fire, but if a person is planning to stay in their home for many years, a permanent outdoor fireplace will bring many years of enjoyment.
Homesteading
As millennials graduate from college and settle down in their first home, they are looking to be more self-sufficient. An addition to the homestead that is gaining momentum is raised garden beds, or incorporating edible plants and vegetables into the landscaping. Millennials want to leave the world a better place and choose to be more sustaining.
Raised garden beds help keep weeds to a minimum while also helping ward off some animals from destroying the garden. Raised gardens are ideal solutions in urban areas where space is limited. Even apartment dwellers can reap the benefits of a garden through container gardening.
Water
Water features continue to grace the landscapes of many homes. While recent droughts have curbed the installation of large-scale ponds and waterfalls, newer, more water efficient water features, such as bubbling boulders or recirculating pumps, are taking the stage. These features use little water, but still offer the sound and sight of running water. The smaller water features are easily adaptable to any landscape.
Justin Enrietta is the operations manager and one of the landscape designers for Designer Landscapes, Inc., of Farmersville. He has recently joined the landscaping industry after a career in government and higher education. He has received education and training from Blackburn College, Carlinville, and Lincoln Land Community College.
APL to exhibit at new Sheffield show Garden Up
By Sarah Cosgrove
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
The Association of Professional Landscapers (APL) is exhibiting at Sheffield’s new garden show, Garden Up, at Sheffield Botanic Gardens.
Regional account managers Andrew Dunkley and Phil Tremayne will attend the show, on June 7 and 8, to promote APL and explain to visitors the benefits of choosing an accredited landscaper and the Government-endorsed Trustmark scheme, which all APL members must sign up to.
The new design-led event was created by Sheffield-based horticulturalist and former TV producer Richard Nicolle, who has five years’ exhibition experience at the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show, and has also worked on the Sheffield Winter Garden and Peace Gardens.
He said: “The presence of the APL at Garden Up will help to underline the importance of qualified and creditable professionals in the gardening and landscaping industry. Sheffield is a vibrant city with a great many gardens and green spaces and we feel that to live up to its reputation as the greenest city in Britain, it needs a thriving horticultural design sector behind it.
“The Garden Up event is helping to stimulate an appetite for gardening expertise and inspire the market with innovations and skills that can be applied to our gardens and built environments.”
The presence is in addition to regular dates for the APL, including Gardening Scotland, Hampton Court, Tatton, Landscape and The Skills Show.
APL chairman Mark Gregory said: “2014 is an exciting year for the APL with the partnership with WorldSkillsUK, collaborative work with Trustmark and Your Garden, Your Budget at RHS Hampton Court. We are delighted to be able to add Garden Up to this list.”
Kansas arboretum provides native plant landscaping aid
April 16, 2014
Kansas arboretum provides native plant landscaping aid
All the Dirt on Gardening
The Muskogee Phoenix
Wed Apr 16, 2014, 11:37 PM CDT
There is no doubt that a prairie garden is the ultimate low-maintenance, low-water usage and environmentally friendly choice for gardeners. But many homeowners assume that it would mean a messy yard and landscape.
“The more examples of native plant gardens people see, the more they realize the beauty of native plants,” said Scott Vogt, the executive director of the Dyck Arboretum of the Plains in Hesston, Kan.
The Arboretum was established in 1981 as a gift to Hesston College from Harold and Elva Mae Dyck when they bought 13 acres and donated it to Hesston College for use as a prairie restoration garden.
Today, the Arboretum is one of the largest native plant gardens in the region, featuring more than a thousand varieties of native and adapted trees, shrubs, wildflowers and grasses. Eighteen more acres have been purchased for a native plains garden.
“We teach native plant landscaping classes for homeowners,” Vogt said. “Participants bring drawings of their yard, and we help them select native plants and explain how to prepare the site and arrange the plants to the best advantage.”
When class participants complete their first native plant bed, they always come back for the annual plant sale because they found that they can have beautiful gardens with less work, less water and plenty of butterflies. Vogt said they like it because it works.
“Establishing a prairie garden is not effortless,” he said. “If it were easy it would be called growing, not gardening.”
Seeds for the gardens at Dyck Arboretum were collected from within 60 miles of Hesston so they would be indigenous to the area. The plants for the gardens are grown from seed, stem cuttings and root division in the on-site greenhouse.
The annual plant sale April 25-28 will offer thousands of native woodland plants that were grown by staff and volunteers.
“We go out onto the grounds and collect seeds,” said Vogt. “Additional seeds come from companies like Missouri Wildflower Seeds (www.mowildflowers.net), where seeds are also hand collected.”
The Arboretum website has many educational resources. Specifically, the Spring 2014 newsletter’s “Prairie Window” link provides garden layouts as well as lists of recommended perennials, ferns, and grasses. Each entry lists the Latin and common name, flower color, plant height, bloom time, sun and soil preferences.
There are paths to walk, a two-acre pond where visitors can watch wildlife and butterflies.
“Earth Partnership for Schools Summer Institute” in June brings teachers from all over the region who learn to engage K-12 students in prairie gardening on school grounds. An outline of their Multiple Intelligences curriculum is on the website.
“When visitors see the spring native plants blooming from the end of April to mid-May, they say it was not what they expected,” said Vogt. “They are surprised by the beauty.”
Spring-blooming native plants include: Penstemon, Echinacea pallida and Zizia aurea. Summer flowers include Asclepias tuberosa, Rudbeckia fulgida and Monarda fisulosa. Fall color comes from Solidago, Asters, and Sedum (a non-native adapted plant). In the winter the arboretum is dominated by grasses such as Panicum virgatum Northwind, Schizachyrium scoparium Blaze, Andropogon gerardii Pawnee, and Sporobolus heterolepis.
Garden club marks milestone
She planted all sorts of plants, gravitating to weeping trees, shrubbery with unusual shapes and flowering trees and bushes. Two islands were built along the Fox Lake and filled with more plants.
Then in October she came home and found a little letter on her door.
It was from the McHenry Garden Club, which had chosen her yard as its garden of the month.
“I was absolutely thrilled,” Homa said. “It was just so nice for me to think that these people who are garden experts like our yard.”
Two signs went up in her yard – one on the street side and one on the river – and Homa decided to join the McHenry Garden Club, something she had thought about doing before but never thought she was qualified for, and now serves on the committee that picks future garden of the month winners.
“I’ve really enjoyed it so far,” she said. “I look at it as a place to learn because I am certainly not an expert.”
Over the 10 years the garden club has existed, it has grown beyond its monthly meetings, during which guest speakers tackle different topics.
Its members plant and maintain the vegetable gardens and other landscaping at Petersen Farm, club President Judy Walter said. A lot of the bushes around the house came from members’ gardens.
They also maintain some of the landscaping at city parks, in particular around the entrance signs.
They landscaped and built four raised beds for a vegetable garden for the veterans housed at New Horizons transitional living facility in Hebron, showing them how to plant, what to plant and what to watch for, Walter said.
They also put together flower arrangements to take over to the hospice patients at Alden Terrace of McHenry each month.
They host educational programs at the McHenry Public Library and donate books, mostly on gardening, to the library.
But as a former high school math teacher, Walter’s favorite is the two to four scholarships they provide each year to McHenry students majoring in horticulture.
“It feels like this club goes overboard gardenwise to benefit the community,” said Walter, who joined in 2008, a couple of years after she moved to McHenry.
The club is a “wonderful mixture of women,” both young and old.
“We are not – I repeat we are not – old ladies sitting around eating crumpets,” Walter said. “We get our hands dirty.”
Get ready for the garden at the Library
By Penny Markland
How does your garden grow? With help from the library, of course!
After a long winter, we are all ready and eager to see some green. Marg Bill Sullivan of Four Season’s Greenhouses will be at the Melfort Public Library on Thursday, April 24 at 7 p.m. to tell us all about “Gardening Tips Trends” for 2014. They always bring a gorgeous display of their most popular and newest flowers – sure to generate enthusiasm for the upcoming growing season. Coffee and outdoor inspiration will be served.
We have a large selection of gardening and landscaping material to help you plan, plant and maintain your vegetables, flowers and trees.
Lois Hole’s series of gardening books are great because they are specific to varieties of plants that will do well on the prairies. Titles include Bedding Plant Favorites, Favorite Trees Shrubs, Tomato Favorites, Perennial Favorites and more. Best Garden Plants for Saskatchewan Manitoba by Patricia Hanbidge is very helpful in determining which choices will best suit the conditions here. The library also has a subscription to the magazine Gardens West, another great source of ideas and inspiration.
Interested in composting but not sure how to get started? The DVD Home Composting on the Prairies gives you the information you need. This DVD produced by the Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council will teach you how easy it is to create a useful product for your lawn and garden and keep materials out of the landfill.
Succulent plants are currently hot in the gardening world. Succulents Simplified by Debra Lee Baldwin will show you how to participate in this trend with design ideas, seasonal care tips and quick projects using these interesting plants.
If you are looking to try something new, you may want to check out The Book of Kale: the easy-to-grow superfood. This book includes growing tips plus more than 80 recipes using these nutrient dense greens.
New this week in fiction: Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen, a beautiful, haunting story of old loves and new, and the power of the connections that bind us forever. Allen’s books always have an element of mystery and magic, and Lost Lake is no exception.
Fans of romantic suspense will not want to miss Suzanne Brockmann’s new book Do or Die – part of her Reluctant Heroes series. The author is an expert at writing in the popular military romance style.
Melfort Public Library hours are Monday and Friday 10 – 6, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 9:30 – 9:00, and Saturday 10 – 5. Contact us at 306-752-2022 or at melcirc@wapitilibrary.ca or through our Facebook page.
Living By Design: Rooftop gardens elevate the landscape
The urban cool of rooftop gardening can easily transfer to smaller cities and rural areas as well.
“Creating a green roof or a roof garden is a great way to utilize space that you already have,” says Corbett Miller, horticulturist at Taltree Arboretum and Gardens in Valparaiso.
From the simplistic—potted plants and containers brimming with blooms—to sophisticated seating arrangements, walking paths and plantings, these gardens create more outdoor living spaces or, at the least, turning the top of a small outbuilding such as a garden shed or even a dog house, into a visual focal point that becomes another part of an eye catching garden design.
But, for those of us new to the concept, there’s a distinction between green roofs and rooftop gardens.
“For a green roof, think of it as more like a prairie transported to the top of you building, something solidly planted sometimes with pathways,” says Allan Smessaert, Owner and General Manager at Acorn Markets based in Kankakee, who has created rooftop gardens in Northwest Indiana. “Rooftop gardens are more like a living space with no hardscape. It’s more about the seating with built in and portable container.”
At Taltree, one of only eight arboretums in the world to be awarded Level III accreditation by The ArbNet Arboretum Accreditation Program sponsored and coordinated by The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, they’ve created a green roof in their Adventure Garden using a preexisting roof structure to harbor species of plants tolerant of weather conditions like high heat and low water. For this particular roof, three varieties of sedum were planted in a diamond shape central design because this hardy perennial, with its thick, fleshy leaves retains water, tolerates both intense sun and periods of drought, requires little to no maintenance and upkeep and look as good in fall as they do in the spring.
Other plants that work well when designing a rooftop garden are hardy daylilies, ajuga—which is good for attracting butterflies and ornamental grasses like Blue Fescue and Maidengrass.
“In the city everyone has a rooftop garden because they don’t have any other space,” says Ann Marischen, owner of Flower Power Gardens and Chicago Mayor Daley’s Landscape Award winner in both 2000 and 2001, who created many roof top gardens in Chicago.
Marischen, who moved from Chicago to Valparaiso over a decade ago, is currently creating a 60-foot-long by 30-foot-wide rooftop garden atop of a converted commercial building that is now a residence in Valparaiso.
“We’re looking a maybe adding a pergola as well as some big planters for trees,” say Marischen, who also creates containers with evergreens, shrubs, grasses and perennials as well – for year-round beauty. “We’ll have seating areas and lounging areas and maybe, because of upkeep, artificial turf.”
Smessaert says sees rooftop gardening as not much more difficult than land gardening except for technical issues.
“You need to consult with an engineer or architect to see how much load an area can hold,” he says noting that dirt adds a lot of weight to a rooftop. “And you have to watch everything you add to the garden because it really adds up. I have an eight foot container that’s eight foot tall and looks like aged copper but it’s not. Those types of containers are perfect for rooftop gardens.
Though flat roofs lend themselves more easily to creating an up top garden, Smessaert says that even pitched roofs can be garden-able.
“They do it a lot in Europe and some even have goats grazing on them,” he says. “And if you just want to have a green roof for energy savings, it’s very doable as long as it’s not too high of a pitch. What is important is that it’s planted heavily and the roots are holding, like you find on a hillside.”
Maddie Grimm, Director of Education at Taltree, says that gardens on top of roofs are a great place to show gardening techniques that are both simple and aesthetically pleasing. She notes that besides being attractive some of the other benefits of a green roof and/or roof garden include an increased lifespan of roofing materials because there’s less erosion and weather damage and the gardens provide insulation by keeping hot sun from affecting inside room temperature in summer and decreasing heat loss through the roof in winter.
Public buildings are also adding rooftop and green roof gardens as both places to gather and to enhance the view.
Bill Hutton of the fifth generation Hammond based Hutton and Hutton Architects and Engineers says that when they worked on the design of the Hammond Academy of Science and Technology (HAST), they look at outdoor areas and rooftop gardens as a place for students to study and meet.
“We developed the concept of having several areas with seating and plantings,” he says.
A rooftop garden was also part of the design when planning the North West Indiana Veteran Village in Gary which provides supportive housing as well as other facilities for veterans.
Smessaert, who has designed rooftop gardens in New York where the weather is milder, says that Chicago and Northwest Indiana have more severe weather and the cold and the wind are more intense up on the roof which needs to be taken into consideration when landscaping.
“It’s a whole other world up there,” says Marischen about rooftop gardens. “You really have to make sure everything is weighted down. In the summer it’s very hot, very dry and all year round it’s very windy. It’s easier to take care of a ground garden but rooftop gardens can be so distinctive and so special.”
Drought prompts some to rethink landscaping norm
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Drought prompts some to rethink landscaping norm
A landscaper mows a lawn in El Dorado Hills, Calif., March 27, 2014. (Randall Benton/Sacramento Bee/MCT)
Sacramento, Calif., gets about as much annual rainfall as arid Flagstaff, Ariz., but its lush lawns are modeled on those of rain-soaked England.
The capital’s turf tradition is deeply rooted and is even enshrined in the bylaws of various homeowners associations. That may be starting to change, however. Nudged by local governments worried about water shortages, home builders and homeowners associations are showing increased willingness to embrace the drought-tolerant landscapes that more naturally suit California.
A growing number of cities are paying homeowners to tear out their lawns. A few home builders are starting to plan development in a way that they say makes more sense for the region’s Mediterranean climate and regular droughts.
“We’re on the cusp of change. It’s definitely here,” said Kevin Carson, northern California president for The New Home Company.
The developer is building the first major subdivision in decades in the slow-growth university town of Davis, Calif. The Cannery project will feature drought-tolerant landscaping along its bike paths, and most of the front yards will be landscaped with low-water plants in place of grass.
City officials in Davis insisted on the plan. The New Home Company embraced it by hiring a prominent firm of landscape architects that specialize in low-water designs. They’re planning gardens of lavender, California wild roses and bottle brush instead of flat swaths of green, Carson said.
A big unknown is whether buyers will want homes without lawns, a mainstay in the Sacramento region for 150 years. Carson and others said it’s a matter of showing homeowners the beauty and benefits of drought-tolerant landscaping, while counting on preferences to evolve as the public becomes aware of the need for water conservation.
“Consumers’ tastes do have to change, but we have to give them some different opportunities,” Carson said.
Today, there’s basically one way most people think of to landscape a house: a lawn surrounded by shrubs and flowers with a shade tree or two.
It’s known as the English garden, and it’s nearly universal now. But that wasn’t always the case, experts said.
The model took hold in the second half of the 19th century, when seed companies sold the idea from Maine to California, said Thomas J. Mickey, author of “America’s Romance with the English Garden.”
“Nurseries and seed companies had a huge influence on California landscapes,” Mickey said.
Advances in printing allowed for colorful seed catalogs, brought to California by railroad. Salesmen traveled west promoting the new yard plans, he said.
Transplants from the East Coast also brought their notions of landscaping with them to the West. The emerging middle class wanted lawns like the American aristocracy and the English gentry before them. Think of the vast lawns surrounding the grand manor house in “Downton Abbey,” he said.
Well-groomed lawns in the front yards of homes became status symbols and statements about the residents who lived there.
“In America, the lawn was linked to social class,” Mickey said. “It really took off when people had the money to move to the suburbs. Real estate agents would say, ‘Now you can have a lawn.'”
The federal government, too, promoted lawns to homeowners. In its yearbook from 1897, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommended Kentucky bluegrass and described the ideal turf.
“A perfect lawn consists of the growth of a single variety of grass with a smooth, even surface, uniform color, and an elastic turf which has become, through constant care, so fine and so close in texture as to exclude weeds, which, appearing, should be at once removed,” wrote Frank Lamson-Scribner, first head of the USDA’s division of agrostology, which studied grasses.
Suburban homeowners after World War II took the advice to heart, competing to have the perfect lawn. Homeowners today spend tens of billions of dollars planting and keeping up their lawns.
Lawns met with some disfavor in the drought of the late 1970s, when a small minority of homeowners let their grass die and filled their yards with gravel in a landscape more common to Phoenix or Albuquerque.
But the notion never caught on in Sacramento in a big way. Other homeowners planted vegetable gardens and fruit trees, opting to make their yards productive instead of ornamental.
By and large, though, the lawn and a border of shrubbery remained the dominant model.
In last decade’s housing boom, home builders rolled out sod by the truckload in front of tens of thousands of new homes. Most homeowners associations continue to insist that those lawns be maintained, even as the drought became a crisis this year and cities across the region, including Folsom and Sacramento, required homeowners to cut water consumption by 20 percent or more.
“Lawns are pretty,” said Tom Gohring, executive director of the Water Forum, a group that promotes water conservation across the Sacramento region, with a particular eye to the health of the American River. He said even though he and his wife replanted their backyard in drought-tolerant native species, they couldn’t let go of the grass in their front yard.
Many homeowners feel the same. But with tight water supplies, tastes need to start changing, Gohring said. What’s needed is a “paradigm shift” in the way builders, homeowners and homeowners associations view yards and home landscaping, he said. It won’t happen fast but the drought has at least jump-started the shift.
“We’re in the middle of a movement, but it does take time,” Gohring said.
Cities, state lawmakers, and homeowners are exploring alternatives that, should they take hold, could transform the Sacramento area’s front yards in years to come and reduce water usage.
In early March, the Sacramento City Council approved a “cash for grass” program that provides rebates to homeowners who replace their grass lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping. Utilities officials said they had a waiting list for the program before the spending plan was even approved.
Roseville, Calif., one of the leaders in water-conservation programs in the region, launched a cash-for-grass program in 2008 with a budget of $30,000. City officials weren’t sure how it would be received, said Lisa Brown, the city’s water-conservation administrator. They needn’t have worried.
“We had a line outside the door the morning we started. We had expended all of our funding in five minutes,” Brown said. “We had a budget of $100,000 this fiscal year, and that’s already gone. We’ve got a hefty waiting list.”
The program pays $1 a square foot to homeowners to replace irrigated turf with drought-tolerant plants, up to $1,000 per household.
A 1,500-square-foot lawn surrounded by 375 feet of plants that require medium amounts of water uses requires 45,653 gallons per year, Brown estimated. The same size area planted in drought-tolerant landscaping needs only 12,338 gallons of water a year, she said.
Since the program’s inception, at least 500 homeowners have removed about 350,000 square feet of turf, saving an estimated 14 million gallons of water annually, Brown said.
Britta Kalinowski was one of the program’s early participants. She re-landscaped her then-2-year-old home in west Roseville’s Fiddyment Farm subdivision in 2009. Her front yard, once flat turf, is now a mix of rosemary and lavender, periwinkle and crape myrtle, with a variety of height and color.
Instead of mowing once a week she prunes a couple of times a year and sometimes replaces a plant or two, Kalinowski said.
“It’s really low maintenance. I’m really happy with it,” she said. “It looks more interesting. Some of our neighbors are ripping their hair out because they can’t keep their lawns green. They water and they fertilize. I don’t have that trouble.”
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Kalinowski said her neighbors mainly have been curious about her yard, not critical, and some have emulated her example.
In other new home communities, where homeowners association rules govern lawn maintenance, residents seeking to redo their yards have had to submit formal landscaping plans to HOA boards, but most homeowners were ultimately allowed to convert their yards, Brown said.
“It’s controversial,” said Kelvin Nanney, the executive director of the California North Chapter of the Community Associations Institute, which represents HOAs. Dozens of associations across the Sacramento region each have their own rules, he said. Some are more amenable to drought-tolerant yards than others.
“It depends on the association,” he said. “Everybody is trying to do the right thing.”
Two state lawmakers introduced bills this year to make it easier for homeowners to switch to low-water landscaping, HOA rules notwithstanding.
State law already forbids HOA rules that prohibit, or have the effect of prohibiting, the use of low-water plants. But some associations have found ways to prevent homeowners from re-landscaping too much, for instance by requiring homeowners to maintain a certain portion of their yards as lawns, said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego.
This year Gonzalez introduced Assembly Bill 2104 to broaden the existing law, Civil Code section 4735, and make it clear an HOA shouldn’t stand in the way of homeowners who want to swap turf for low-water plants.
“We just want to take the first step in allowing homeowners to change out their lawns,” Gonzalez said. Forcing homeowners to irrigate to maintain green grass in a drought “makes no sense,” she said.
State Sen. Jim Nielsen, a Republican who represents a vast district that stretches from the Placer County suburbs to the Oregon border, has introduced a bill to prohibit HOAs from fining homeowners for underwatering their lawns when the governor declares a drought-related state of emergency, as Gov. Jerry Brown did in January.
Homeowners caught in that bind could face a “double whammy” of being required to cut water use by their water provider or face fines, while also being fined by their HOA for letting their lawns go brown, Nielsen said.
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Cheryl Buckwalter, is president of EcoLandscape California, a group that advocates drought-resistant landscapes. The group published four different plans for homeowners, complete with lists of low-water plants, at its website, www.ecolandscape.org/new-ca.
Planting new drought-tolerant yards takes money, but the up-front costs are mitigated by the long-term savings in water and maintenance, she contended.
She cited a project called “garden/garden” by the city of Santa Monica, Calif. The city landscaped two adjacent bungalows, one with a traditional lawn and another with native plantings. The experiment, detailed on the city’s website, proved cost-effective long term. The low-water option cost more to install — $16,700 for the native yard versus $12,400 for the traditional one. But it saved more than 50,000 gallons of water annually, greatly reduced maintenance time and costs, and eliminated hundreds of pounds of yard waste each year.
What makes sense, Buckwalter said, is for home builders and HOAs to pursue drought-tolerant landscaping on a large scale, rather than having homeowners do it piecemeal. She said she’s hoping to educate those groups and pursue widespread change in the way the Sacramento region is landscaped.
“HOAs and builders are positioned to be the stars and true leaders here,” Buckwalter said. “They have an opportunity to set the example and offer leadership to our residents.”
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Author draws 100 to Ringwood lecture on easy-care gardens
RINGWOOD — Kerry Ann Mendez, a nationally known gardening expert and author, came to North Jersey on Sunday to tell aging baby boomers, apartment dwellers and busy young professionals how they can create luscious gardens with minimal muss and fuss, minus pain and strain.
Mendez, an advocate of low-maintenance perennial gardening and landscaping, lectured to a standing-room only audience at the New Jersey Botanical Garden at Skylands in Ringwood State Park. More than 100 people, some traveling from as far away as Colts Neck, came to hear Mendez’s design tips for creating “knock-out, easy-care” gardens.
Mendez, a self-taught gardener, left a career in higher education to pursue her passion, gardening, full time with her own consulting and design business, Perennially Yours, in Kennebunk, Maine. The 57-year-old spent 18 years as associate dean of admissions at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., before following her bliss by making a new career of educating the public about gardening.
Mendez has already written two books that have won her fans, and her talk this weekend, as well as her future book, deal with low-maintenance gardening tips and incorporating sustainable practices into gardening.
Mendez, manager of Eastabrook’s Nursery in Maine, said that garden centers are addressing the demographic reality that people 50 and older may not be able to commit as much effort to gardening as they used to, especially physically.
Such people “just don’t have the same amount of time, or it’s too much for them,” said Mendez, who herself has arthritis.
Mendez talked to the audience about plants and flowers that require less maintenance — in terms of water and cutting back, for example.
The trend is “organic and sustainable: less water use, less fertilizer, and certainly less time and effort on our part,” Mendez said.
Her new book, due for release next March, is tentatively called “The Downsized Garden: Exceptional, Low-Maintenance Plants and Design Solutions for Aging Time-Pressed Gardeners.”
“Fifties and up is really who this publisher wants to reach,” Mendez said.
Her message resonated with Kathleen Corless, a 67-year-old Oradell resident, who was at the Ringwood lecture.
“My goal is her goal: Less maintenance,” Corless said. “I’m going to focus more on the drought-tolerant plants … I think it’s better on the environment.”
Mendez said her aim in the coming book is to present shortcuts so it takes 50 percent less time to maintain a garden and to offer “design solutions so you get more impact from fewer plants just by the way you’re designing.” That advice can also assist young professionals who want gardens, but are too busy to devote a lot of time to them, Mendez said.
Gardening trends include raising more edible plants and growing compact plants that can thrive in containers, for deck gardening. Container plants are good options for apartment or condo dwellers, or for those who can’t bend down to tend to flowers and shrubs, Mendez said.
Corless has heard Mendez speak several times at the Philadelphia Flower Show, and Sunday she purchased two of her books, “The Ultimate Flower Gardener’s Top Ten Lists” and “Top Ten Lists for Beautiful Shade Gardens.” Mendez spent time after her lecture autographing books and answering questions from audience members, like Doug Chucka, 53, Franklin Lakes, and Barbara Klein, 53, Ringwood.
Chucka asked Mendez about landscaping Klein’s property.
“You look at it from up above, and the property slopes down,” he said. “Would you plant taller things down at the bottom, get shorter as you come up the slope?”
Mendez said she would need to see the site, but suggested Klein plant “something with a bright color, because a darker blue or purple is going to fade at that distance.”
Lloyd Williams, 52, of Oradell, came with his wife to Mendez’s talk. They have a fairly big garden. “It’s on an incline and its shaded,” he said, “so it’s difficult to plot things, so it’s good to come to these types of talks and get advice.”
Tina Gehrig, 45, of Hawthorne, attended with her boyfriend.
“We just thought it was something we’d be interested in,” Gehrig said. “My boyfriend wants to do some more gardening around the house. I always liked gardening, but I didn’t have a house.”
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