Plant Truth. Find it at the University of California.

Dianella ‘Coolvista’

Before you ask, no, I don’t know why it’s not “Cool Vista” – it is two words, after all!

In the worst case scenario, these things got watered twice all summer, at 29 day intervals, qualifying them for a low water rating. Some plants got more. but all of them looked about the same. Clean foliage, good structure, and spreading slowly from the base. The blue flowers have come and gone, but the plants are looking great.

Lavandula allardii ‘Meerlo’

At first, when I saw these at a nursery expo in pots, I kinda hated them. They looked pale, anemic and sickly. Their color wasn’t a true gray, but not a real variegated yellow and green either. Nor was it the typical lavender sagey gray. They were kind of yellowish, like something that didn’t take its iron supplements like its mother wanted.

In the field, it’s a whole different story. The plants are lush, full, round and most importantly don’t look yellow and chlorotic.

Vitex ‘Flip Side’

A few scruffy flowers remain, leftovers from an explosion of color earlier in the year. Still, the plants look decent for things growing on very little water in a dusty field.

I’m not sure how I’d use these – probably as a summer screen for blue color. Chaste Trees tend to flower just before crape myrtles, although this variety seems to rebloom more than the original species.

These aren’t trees; they’re large deciduous shrubs. The original variety was much more tree-like.

Apparently, dried berries are a favorite medicinal plant for witches. I’d be safe and just admire the flowers in the landscape and skip any thoughts of ingesting the stuff, be I mundane or magical. You never know if you’re allergic, nor what the potency might be.

Mahonia x media ‘Marvel

Was this the late Stan Lee’s favorite shrub? Maybe. When it flowers, it’s definitely suitable for a comic book, one with a character who looks like an upside-down offspring of Big Bird and a shaggy yellow octopus. I’m sure the nursery catalogs have alternate descriptions.

This plant likes shade, or partial shade. It’s evergreen, a bit spiny, full, upright and although they’re just beginning to bud, the flowers are a treat for winter eyes.

I don’t know if rabbits find this a delicacy as they do Mahonia ‘Soft Caress’, but these plants were unchewed at the test garden.

These plants come from generally low-frost Australia. They don’t tolerate phosphorus, something included in about every fertilizer on the planet. They want good drainage. We tend to have none of these conditions.

Grevilleas come in all shapes and sizes, their only similarity being the uniquely shaped flowers.

My favorite grevillea is probably G. lavandulacea ‘Tanunda’. It’s a low gray mound with incredible hummingbird magnet coral flowers that combines incredibly well with Spanish lavender. I used to admire these when I worked as a student intern at the UC Santa Cruz arboretum. Alas, unless you’re growing them in phosphate free sand, they die. They don’t live long in any case, but not to worry since it seems nobody sells them any more.

I have killed a number of grevilleas, even the “sure thing” types like ‘Noellii’. They either turn black (oops! Phosphorus in the soil) or gradually inch downward into death and decay.

‘King’s Fire’ might be a close second to ‘Tanunda’, although it looks nothing like it. I used to like ‘Boongala Spinebill’ too, even though it was a huge spiny monster, even bigger than ‘Kings Fire’.

These plants are absolute bee magnets. It was almost impossible to get a photo without at least one bee in the flowers. Not that I was trying for a bee-less shot, and they were simple honeybees going about their business. It’s supposed to attract hummingbirds, too – and considering the hummingbirds at UCSC, it probably does, elsewhere.

Brick House Rose

This was my favorite rose, although once I read the name I had to dance some Commodores music to get it out of my system.

It’s a good red with neat foliage, seems to tolerate low water reasonably well and has a good, compact form.

White Knock Out Rose

It does have beautiful flowers. The old petals, not so much. They hang on the plant like sad, brown, used handkerchiefs instead of dropping cleanly like the petals on ‘Brick House’. So instead of a white and green compact shrub rose, I get something that looks like it needs a lot more maintenance.

Buddleia ‘Hugster Blue’
discovery plant – not evaluated

I suppose the most successful plant in this batch is ‘Hugster Blue’ buddleia. It also has the dumbest name. I didn’t want to hug it, and worse – it’s not even blue! It’s a nice violet, but no non-daltonien artiste would call it ‘bleu’!

Hugster also sounds like a brand of diapers. So, in the interest of literary, too-late attempts at better plant names (it’s already patented), here are my alternates, hopefully more memorable and accurate names:

• purple paradise
• imperial purple
• After sunset (yeah, it can be purple, never blue. Too poetic?)
• purple turtle (where did that come from?)
• Cobalt Violet

Hamelia patens ‘Sierra Red’
discovery plant – not evaluated

The Hamelia has great flowers. The leaves would be beautiful and lush, probably if we were in Oaxaca or somewhere far south of here. I looked it up online, and although our plants’ flowers were nice, the lush leafiness just wasn’t there. Still, they were alive, compact, and flower now, when not much else is in bloom.

A bit of research on the Internet says this thing will freeze to the ground, but eventually emerge inverse sphinx-like when things get warm again. Another plant that would probably rather be in Oaxaca having some mole and shots of Mezcal, where it’s warm in the winter.

Distylium ‘Vintage Jade’
shade section

The Distylium ‘Vintage Jade’ looks like it could be a decent foundation shrub for part shade. It doesn’t seem to do much with flowers, reinforcing its use as an evergreen foundation plant to mix with more colorful nandina and perhaps sarcococca.

The great thing with low-growing, boring, evergreen plants is that they make everything else look good. They’re also neat and hopefully require little maintenance. It’s kind of like using gray in an artwork to make the colors pop around it.

Muhlenbergia capillaris
not evaluated

The Pink Muhly (Muhlenbergia capillaris) just was not camping happily. The illustration above is the best looking plant in the place. The others looked more like twigs of imminent death. Certainly none of them boasted the cloudlike pink plumes they’re known for elsewhere.

This echoes our experience with this variety of grass, except that their plants, even moribund, look better than ours. Our plants appear completely dead. They might have three or maybe even five spindly leaves sticking up from masses of brown twigs.

Result of all this: don’t specify M. Capillaris if you’re in the Central Valley. Use Muhlenbergia rigens if you want your muhly grass to thrive (native, but looks different, or M. dubia, which looks like a smaller rigens.

A possible alternate is Muhlenbergia reverchonii, Rose Muhly (or Seep Muhly). If I can ever find it, that is. It looks like a beautiful grass, like M. Capillaris but more compact with deeper color (?)

When to water?

The facility uses ET (evapotranspiration) data from a nearby weather station to determine when to water. They use their own calculations, since this is science. They can’t just turn on an internet connected irrigation controller and let it go, since nobody would know if things went wrong until it was too late and the experiment was muddied.

Water is applied when the soil water reaches 50% of its holding capacity. This is dry! This year it translated to watering three times over the summer at 29 day intervals, clay soil, drip irrigation.

They used to water at zero, but some years this meant watering but once in the summer. That’s really dry!

Three lines per bed, three watering regimes

Is that plant on the high, medium or low water use line?

Shhh! I can’t tell you! It’s a secret! You’re supposed to evaluate the plants based solely on their appearance.

I think the raphiolepis and some of the mini crape myrtles were on the low lines, since they looked like death warmed over. So I could have traced their lines and figured it out. But it is what it is, life is short and time is precious. Too precious to run around a field tracing drip lines.