This didn’t start out as a laboratory for resilient landscape design. It was just a low-maintenance garden for aging people to enjoy. Then one person was no more. The other lost mobility. Parts of the garden received no irrigation. Pruning back and weeding likewise disappeared. Yet the garden survived, mostly intact.
It’s not manicured – far from it! The look is artsy, chaotic, exotic, colorful and often surprising. A tidy garden looks unkempt and uncared for as soon as it’s left to its own devices; not so with a resilient garden. The plants, weeds and almost-weeds coexist in dynamic harmony, fading in and fading out as the year progresses.
This is not resiliency in the normal sense, where it survives natural disasters. This is resilient in the sense that the garden will survive if maintenance is erratic, even sometimes nonexistent.
There is one higher water use area where views from the house converge where bromeliads, orchids, ferns, palms and epiphytic cacti forming a focal point around a specimen staghorn fern. The rest of the garden is a series of experiments using exotic and native plants adapted to the site’s soil and climate.
The soil is not easy. It’s a greenish alcaline clay that many plants just can’t tolerate. The process of finding suitable plants is very much trial and error. Some things – aloes, cacti, California sage scrub natives and some Mediterranean plants thrive. Others – aloes, cacti and some Mediterranean plants don’t. It really comes down to each plant, each variety. When something works, it tends to do well and multiply, often with a bit of help.
The other solution is to use pots, where the soil is not an issue. Since many plants are succulents, water is not so much an issue either. Other plants, mainly bromeliads, store water and can pass through dry spells.
Just to add more layers of research, plants should add artistic value: interesting forms, colors, patterns. If they’re not artistic, they should have some benefit for small creatures. The third requirement is that they thrive – but not too well.
These are the main themes, with a bit of overlap
Oak trees
We planted one coast live oak; California scrub jays planted the rest. Much of Los Angeles used to be forested with oaks, so this is a bit of restorative landscaping. During acorn season, the jays flock to the tree. During other times of the year insect-eating birds scour the trees for food. There is also a cork oak that was supposed to be a coast live oak but surprise, it wasn’t. It came to the garden as a tiny thing in a pot, mislabeled, still too small for the bark to look corky. Like our native oaks, it needs little or no water now that it’s established.
Exotic Garden
Often vertical gardens are maintenance intensive, with fertilizer injection and irrigation systems built in. This garden is simpler: sword ferns grow with minimal support, staghorn ferns just need a support to keep them well above the ground, three species of bromeliads hang from a structure, joined by epiphytic cacti. In season, the bromeliads and cacti burst into flower, but the rest of the time they form a contrasting tapestry of foliage. There are a couple of orchids – mostly Laelia anceps hybrids, that hang on but aren’t exactly thriving in the vertical spaces they occupy.
Small palm species complete this garden, along with Russelia equisetiformis, red fountain grass (non-invasive), Echeverria, sword fern, Agave attenuata, Tradescantia pallida and other bold plants with often colorful flowers complete this garden. There’s a few Aeonium ‘Sunburst’ scattered around, just because they’re great plants to admire and look good year round. A Roldana petasitis grown from a cutting given by a gardening friend brings a showy display of yellow flowers in spring, starting the new year.
Slopes
The main plants on the slope are a mix of toyon – a berry source for birds – and lemonade berry, another native shrub that thrives with no care. Joining them are some palo verde trees, agaves and naturalized pelargoniums.
Cascading plants
The hilly site creates great spaces for plants to cascade. Some are experimental, like orchid cactus flowing from pots staked into the soil at the top of a retaining wall, and large bromeliads that may or may not decide to cascade. There’s donkey tail sedum and a dragonfruit cactus that I found in a trash can as someone cleaned up their garden. Ghost plant falls down lower walls, taking a long time to grow but needing almost no care.
Tapestries
Many spaces have interwoven plant species, the way plants occur in nature – except these are from suitable climates all around the world. Aloes grow with Jerusalem sage, Senna artemisiodes (a butterfly food plant), bulbine, kalanchoe, cacti, erigeron, Calliandra, Senecio, eriogonum, Encelia, sages, agaves, lavender, red yucca, ghost plants, Cotyledon, Gasteria, rockroses and others, grouped according to size and growth habit.
This approach not only mimics the way plants grow in nature, it maintains its appearance if one plant is not doing well and through seasonal wet-dry periods where some plants (notably the Encelia) go almost completely dormant and appear dead.
Mixing succulents and woody plants with the same water requirements also mimics what you’d find in a desert and avoids the cactus garden look.
Accents
Most views have some kind of accent or focal point. Sometimes it’s a bold Cordyline, a giant Kalanchoe beharensis, a giant green Agave salmiana (on the slope where it’s not accessible). There’s a twisty Cocculus laurifolius tree growing out of a mix of bromeliads (a variegated hybrid Aechmaea I picked up when the World Bromeliad Conference was in L.A.), a mat of blue-gray ghost plants and intertwined with a tall Cereus peruvianus cactus. In time, if all goes well, an Aloe ferox will shoot wild red flowers out of its spiny crown.
Irrigation
The irrigation system uses a new controller that uses data from the Internet to adjust itself throughout the year. It can also be remotely operated, so nobody in the home need reprogram it. Almost everything is on a drip system, and the few things that aren’t on emitters use micro-spray and shrubbler heads to dispense water slowly over the poorly draining soil. Many areas planted with native shrubs and ground covers receive no artificial irrigation other than an occasional spraying down to wash dust from their leaves if there’s no rain.