Drawing plans and designing native plant gardens is one thing. Seeing the plants in nature is another. For one thing, some of these plants aren’t easy to establish, and others are next to impossible to find in any nursery. Looking at how the plants grow in nature, what they’re associated with, and which colors naturally coexist helps us create more natural designs.
These plants are blooming in and around the coastal bluffs, adapted to wind and cool temperatures. Anything we would want to use in Sacramento would have to be a local variety of the wildflower species, something adapted to hotter temperatures and lower humidity.
Indian paintbrush also needs to have its roots in association with a host plant. In other words, planting Indian paintbrush by itself will probably fail unless the specific plant it needs is growing nearby. The plants are considered by some to be semi-parasitic, although it seems that nobody really knows all the complexities of growing these plants in the garden. I’ve seen it in association with sticky monkeyflower, for a more local species – and there were sticky monkeyflowers near the plants I photographed – as well as poison oak. Hopefully the host plant was not the poison oak! When part of a functioning, natural ecosystem, paintbrush grows and blooms without problems or care – but once that ecosystem is broken, putting it back together in a garden setting is not at all obvious!