Before and AFTER! The Most Incredible Native Garden Tour Shows Us What Natives Can Do!

Welcome Gardeners! All I can say is WOW! Nick and Sandy have TRANSFORMED their urban home into a California native oasis. As a botanist and a horticulturist, their enthusiasm for plants is expressed beautifully in this gorgeous Northern California garden! Come see what you can do with natives in the garden with just a little thought, a little time, and a little bit of an obsession! 🌿 Enjoy!

Check out the California Native Plant Society’s Calscape Website! You can get all the inspiration you need to add California natives to your garden: https://calscape.org/

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417 Mace Blvd Ste J # 238
Davis, CA 95618

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[Music] hi everyone Janie here welcome back I have such a fun garden tour for you I want to introduce you to Nick and Sandy Nick and Sandy moved into this home what three years ago three years ago yeah almost to the date oh really oh very nice and you guys will meet fig in just a little second as well the the cutest little pup ever so Nick and Sandy Nick first of all you are the conservation director of the California native plant I am I am so I’ve been doing that working for the conservation program of cmps for about six years wow and so um kind of my whole life is steeped in native plants awesome and you’ve kind of brought work into a home actually both of you right yeah so I’m also a botanist I work in environmental Consulting and education nice for purely natives too or just kind of all around well the Consulting work is in Native habitats but a lot of my job is is identifying invasive species as well oh nice oh very interesting so it’s both so Nick and Sandy are going to show us around their Native Garden this is a young Garden it’s about 3 years old you guys have done the whole thing yourselves yes which is insane so there’s a lot there’s a lot of uh let’s see sweat and energy in this Garden it’s uh it’s true it was lots of wheelbarrow loads and deliveries of mulch and all kinds of other material and you have before shots right we do have before shots which we’ll share with you so that so folks can see that it was pretty much a blank slate uh prior to just a couple years ago and I have to say I drove up I knew the address but I drove up and I could see down the street oh that’s their house because it’s gorgeous I can’t wait to show you all ready Cool all right so let’s first talk you guys about the native plant garden tour what is that that’s tomorrow it is on Saturday so Saturday April 27th the Sacramento Valley chapter of the California Native Plant Society is having its annual Garden Tour and one of the cool things is it’s an opportunity to see a lot of different Gardens this one will be on it obviously and it will be I think they have 25 or 30 or so Gardens my goodness so you can go all around the city and kind of surrounding you know areas of Sacramento County and adjacent areas do all the gardens look like your guys’s Gardens I don’t know my gosh I mean I went on the tour last year and there were some amazing Gardens but this year I’ll only be here yes you won’t get to see I won’t get to see any other Garden well I have I think two more garden tours so you’ll you’ll be able to see two more that are that are from from the Native Garden Tour so but this is beautiful so can we take kind of an overall shot and then maybe I can show the do you have a before shot of the front yard we do we do have a before shot of the front yard and it has um and in fact like the Google image for the the Google Street View image is is very much uh uh kind of indicative of what it looked like it was uh it was first of all it was flat you’ll notice that the garden the garden is not flat it’s not yeah you guys did that we did that actually somewhat out of necessity because when we dug out the path in the backyard we had to do something with the fill oh my goodness so we you made a BM yeah made BM and um and for a year it was just a dirt pile oh nice until we because we the neighbors love that the front yeah the neighbors didn’t love it but we kept promising them that it would look good one day and now it’s here it looks so beautiful I mean you never you know cuz I I was talking to them both so I don’t feel bad for saying this but some people think natives aren’t pretty right some people think that natives are ugly you guys are showing them absolutely not natives are gorgeous yeah well one of the you know we hear that a lot that natives aren’t pretty and that waterwise Gardens are often criticized as being you know not as showy as the homeowner wants right but I would say that when you have a Native Garden or a water-wise garden you still need to water enough to make the plants look good and also temper your expectations if you don’t want to water a lot in in in the summer July and August the plants will look like they’re not watered you know it’s a trade-off but what we’ve done here to kind of combat that is we have a laundry to landscape sale that gets fed by our by our washer system so even if we decide to water Less in the in the summer we still have this green Splash my goodness that kind of combats that you guys installed that yourself we installed it oursel and it’s and it’s uh you know in Sacramento County at least it’s you’re allowed to do this WOW uh which is um you know provided that you you abide by the regulations and rules which we did and so it’s a really cool um way to actually over here it’s over here actually so so so do you guys irrigate this Garden so I have been doing hand watering the whole time and so many so many native plants um will well there are a few native plants that don’t need any supplemental water after planting but most of them need some period of establishment where they’re getting regular water yes so for instance this was planted in last November so we’re looking at exactly 18 months old and and I was watering about once a week oh okay so I was coming out dragging a hose out by hand giving things some some really good deep soakings once a week is not too bad it’s not too bad but it would be like my Saturday morning activity yes so I would you know come out with a cup of coffee and spend a couple hours dumping water on the landscape and keeping it looking good yeah now the thing about California native plants is that there is no shortage of plants that bloom in the spring and look amazing like our California poppies are one of those right everybody they’re all over the place they look great they’re weeds and yeah and sometimes they will they will Bloom into the summer but most of our native plants are kind of I mean they’re they are in tune with the with how our climate is whereby you have these cool wet Winters and then as you go into summer where things are dried out and hot they go dormant right so one of the things that we were very cognizant of and very sensitive to is the fact that we wanted our garden to look good throughout the year yeah which means that we’ve planted certain things that like have that that permanence things like this plant which is called um sacred detura or detura Ria okay and it’s not doing anything now it’s maybe first starting to throw a few blooms but this plant bloomed uh it has these huge white tubular flowers that start maybe in June and it bloomed all the way through September was spectacular and the cool thing about it is they’re it’s pollinated by hawk moths and their relatives and so you have these things that look like these insects that essentially look like little hummingbirds huming Birds they look like I’ve seen them before they really look like huming and we would come out here and they they’re they fly at night or at dusk and so we’ll come out here we’re like walking the dog and you would see these like you could hear them before you can see them these amazing and there’s already something eating it which could be Hawk moth it could be like Lara or something might be too early but there’s you know that’s already you know doing its job as providing food for something which which I’m a little like I don’t even know I’m a little scared of what’s eating that because it’s a very toxic plant oh it yeah it has all these these crazy you know alkaloids which are plant chemicals they’re plant defense chemicals and so can deal with it they can deal with it I wash my hands after I touched that do you really yeah absolutely so just let me pause yeah botanist and horticulturist and and if you couldn’t tell met we met in graduate school so we had this we did graduate school at the same botney program this is amazing you guys are plant nerds just like me we’re real plant nerds so welcome there’s no buffer here there’s no ‘s like oh maybe we shouldn’t spend all of our time talking and thinking and doing plants yeah this is amazing let me see the SW SW Swale sale yeah let me see that real quick before we move on so we call it a bio Swale um so it’s it was it is very heavily vegetated now um it looked a lot larger and in fact I think the the elevation from the bottom of the sale to the top of the mound which is where that valy o is growing is maybe 4 feet actually wow so we actually have uh what I would consider shocking um topography for Sacramento yes you do which I think you have more than in my acre I think you have more difference it’s and it was accidental at some level there was just you know we just made the best of yeah but we were and the plant that we’ve used um extensively in the wet areas and so this gets actually quite wet in fact when we’re running like multiple loads of laundry laundry through the land the laundry to landscape system mhm uh we will this will actually just be quite wet is we’ve used this plant called which is called clustered field sge which is our car prilis which is a um it’s a native said to you know to to this area in fact the um source of the source of this plant was a nursery called Escondido nursery which is just south of here and the seed source of their plants is yellow bypass wow so which is which is right by us I’m sorry I live in Davis right okay By Me So yeah so it’s so it’s pretty close to here yeah pretty close to here yeah and so this is like a you know very um like hyper local yeah hyper local plant and so does it stay I mean with the with the laundry water it probably stays green like this whole year no it stays green all year so I I mentioned that like hyperlocal plant yeah not all these plants are hyperlocal to Sacramento in fact this plant here is a is a desert species called um I think they call it actually desert penin or pensan pseudo spectabilis okay and it’s just gorgeous and I and some of this was just like at some level experimental from our part I saw it some of it some of the idea of planting more of the desert stuff here goes back to Nick talking about stuff that would flower in not just the spring you know what yes so we have a south facing exposure right here it’s very intense and this is the part of the yard that’s right next to the road and it’s going to be 105 in the summertime so again like the parida um or bladder bladder pod which doesn’t have its bladders on it right now um is a desert species so it’s going to be able to tolerate that heat and actually it’s not as happy right now during the cold you know having just come through the cold winter and spring but it’s going to look great at the end of at the end of spring pretty pretty soon we’re in the 80s next week in some ways we plant for the summer yeah so like so we’ve we’ve planted a lot of here let’s like walk over this way so interesting you guys because you’re right it’s probably really easy to do a Native Garden that looks beautiful in the spr yeah and so we’ve planted a lot of of this plant which is called I think they call it common Madia or Madia elegans wow which is just gorgeous and and and this will be beautiful this will be BL this will be beautiful we’ve had this plant individuals of this species that have bloomed uh it’s an annual it’s an annual but have bloomed for like four four to six months wow and it starts now and keeps on going and we’re just like wow one in the front yard that bloomed from this time and we didn’t at this time of year last year we didn’t probably pull it out till December oh my God it didn’t look so great in December but it was still throwing flowers do you think I can go up your neighbor yeah absolutely let’s go there actually noticed they’ve planted a Native Garden oh we’ve helped them do that so little Cameo on there oh nice they’re doing a good job yeah so it’s they’re spreading it’s we’ve you guys are doing you’re getting the word out so then you know some some really cool plants like I mean this plant that’s called Blue Bush Lupin or lupinus alrons gorgeous um you know some things I planted and thought well maybe it’ll go maybe it won’t you didn’t think this one would and I didn’t think it would and it’s obviously incredibly happy it’s really happy and at some level okay so we’re here in the Sacramento Valley we’re on these very very rich alvial soils like these soils that came down from you know many many thousands of years of erosion from from mountain ranges from the SI Nevada and and and so these are very very rich soils that’s why we have agriculture in the Central Valley and then you plant some plants that are from like more lean habitats lean soils and they just grow really fast and are really happy if if they can tolerate it or they rot out what is this one right here so this plant is um I think they call it the grand colia oh uh it’s in the it’s colia Grand Flora it’s in the um it’s in the flocks family it’s not quite blooming it’ll be blooming um you know few weeks so you guys have really stretched your blooms out over the season so that there’s always something beautiful here so natives aren’t like they you it is beautiful it is blooming you just it should be yeah and it and of of course it requires some maintenance so what we have to do is um you know we’re we’re constantly you know I’m constantly out here pulling out things as they’re as they’re going to seed or letting them go to seed and then and then re you know and then pulling out the dead plants yeah so so do you let things seed themselves oh yeah absolutely in fact so like looking at this this is like this big mass of of of uh gilia capitata or Globe gilia MH and I didn’t PL I planted some seeds like last year I planted none this year I want this in my G it’s the the blue will have plenty of seeds the blue color is fabulous it’s just gorgeous are elegant claria or claria angul claria yeah CL angul why did I think claria was like there’s there are so claria is a genus of plants lots of species in California uh they are they they there are some that are tiny and some that are quite you know quite large like this gorgeous I mean yeah it’s almost this one’s pushing six feet tall pretty cool and it’s I think they’ve selected it for garden varieties too it’s not it doesn’t necessar look exactly like this in in nature yeah but it looks like this in our yard it’s beautiful tell me about the Silvery one back there silvery like 10t tall yeah so this is here should I jump over there is that okay so this plant so if you can like get the there’s a a a a Nick for a Nick for scale um is a is a uh is a plant called Salvia apiana or white sage uh uh it’s a Southern California species it grows it smells really good first of all this smells incred this doesn’t work for uh this doesn’t work for uh for a video no you don’t have smell Vision yet it smells so good you guys but um we were just actually remarking yesterday that um that this so this is also a plant that has tremendous cultural significance to Native American people oh interesting uh so this is like a you know although we don’t use it that way but it is but I definitely appreciate that that’s part of its um it this white sage can you Sage white sage or Salvia apana okay and so we were yesterday it was just yesterday Sandy and I were thinking like how um how big is this plant supposed to get yeah and so we reference we looked at some of the reference materials and it basically maxed out in the books at 10 ft tall and this plant is probably pushing 12et how tall are you I’m 6 ft yeah I would say and then that big one in the back is looking 12 feet tall it’s taller than a roof and it’s PR it’s young right this whole garden is pretty young this is just 18 months old this is what you can do in 18 months with the Native Garden like talk about bang for your butt so I think while while you’re here it might be cool to point out this plant here okay which people tend to love um oh look at that which is uh this is a plant called um Calico monkey flower or Dicus pictus which is a rare plant is it yeah so it Rose it’s a very rare plant it’s it’s native to South of here kind of in the foothills of the sanen valley uh kind right when you go up the grap line right when you go up yeah so like so we but we were able to obtain seeds from a grower and um and we’ve seated a bunch of them out here and they’ve done really well yeah I can see it it looks like it’s like tattooed oh absolutely so it actually is trying to look like meat it’s a fly it’s like a fly pollinated species so it’s it’s it’s trying to attract flies isn’t that if you get close enough it does kind of smell a little bit funny okay it would be this wouldn’t be a good day to smell it so yeah it’s like that corpse flower that smells horrible sorry so yeah so then we’ve planted um a number of other kind of uh I mean like what I would say is plants that are not common so common in horiculture we’re Bist um this plant here is called is farnsworth’s Jewel flower what uh or strep Tanis Farnsworth anus I just moved it that’s right um which is a rare plant from the southern spere in Nevada Foothills it’s so really like this is so neat the purple it’s gorgeous and then it’s then we planted it next to this plant which is um it’s one of our blazing stars or met zilia CIA which is just I mean I find it to be just uh just really gorgeous it’s beautiful it’s really really beautiful and I like how you guys pair things together sometimes it’s intentional sometimes it’s not it’s not sometimes you got to let nature do its so the other thing is is like we’ve planted plants like this is a you know a very local species called mugart or ardisia deiana which is a which is this it’s a Romus species it grows uh you know kind of grows in riparian areas smells amazing uh yeah and then you know plants like soap root this smells like the Spa exactly yeah like like what you would want to get in the spa the native plant Spa so this is a this is soap root coming up here which is a you know it’s a it’s a plant that has an underground storage organ that goes dormant during the during the you know uh during the uh during the summer and then pops back up and I just you know I’m in I think it’s almost it almost looks reptilian or something coming out so is it going to flower flower it’s not quite there this one is kind of look at that oh my gosh look at that it’s also taller than I am oh my goodness uh I just I just am love with I’m in love with these PL this plant this is just so like you come by here and you see how the beautiful colors sorry Sandy right but once you take me through it’s like what they’re the coolest coolest plants here tell me about this area over here yeah I’ll can May I’ll walk over there so so one of the things that happened here is that we at we um in the process of making the sail here yeah uh we realized that we had kind of too sharp of a uh um elevational gradient oh yeah and so we ended up putting a little bit of a rock wall in here oh neat and so yeah and so we um planted some of our native bedias or live Forevers oh and we have um some you know kind of uh less common in horiculture an aragam called IR aragam tripodi we have this plant that you guys are total plant nerds yeah we’re totally plant nerds uh we have this plant called love it I love it so much cob Mountain Lupin or or lupinus ccus which is a plant that that grows kind of in the coast ranges really looks gorgeous all year doesn’t I mean look at these leaves these silver leaves it’s just so beautiful and then it’s so interesting to hear you say where these plants are from right and it’s just like wow I can totally imagine that being in the coastal area right and then the another cool thing that our this is a this is one of our paint brushes uh uh it’s castlea foliolosa or like one of our one of our paint brushes uh this is a plant that is hemiparasitic or requires has a relationship with a host plant so it’s kind of stealing some um sugars from another species what is it stealing from well in this case it’s stealing it from one of our monkey flowers so here is uh sticky monkey flower or Dicus arantius and so we we obtain this plant from our from our local native plant chapter uh uh at one of their sales so the Sacramento Valley chapter of cmps um is at least one of the few sources that I know of where you can buy a two two in one plants you know you have the the Hemi parasite Casta oh my god with a sticky monkey flower and you kind of have to grow them together at least to get them started that is i’ I’ve never heard that before I never knew there were parasitic plants like that well there are there are some plants that are truly parasitic and those are much more challenging to grow yes so um is it is it through the roots that it’s paric yeah right so it it attaches to the to the to the roots of the monkey flower and you know it’s it’s probably doesn’t harm the monkey FL too much right but it’s but it’s um it’s getting a little bit of a a boost essentially yeah I I hope you guys can see how beautiful this orange is it’s like touched with orange basically on the ends it’s it’s the most stunning thing I like I want this plant in my garden I you know I’m making a list right and then and then this is another like just you know almost um fluorescent plant uh this is our our what they call sulfur buckwheat wow or aragam umum which is a plant from the mountains and um just a I mean it’s truly the color is fabulous yes so it’s so interesting you have desert plants Mountain plants Coastal plants like you have it all we’re all over the place but they’re all doing beauti they’re all doing fine um and this is a a plant that we’ve grown to really love it’s called Sonoma Sage oh okay or creepy Sage I mean our native sages are wonderful um and this is a plant that grows pretty low and um obviously is blooming really nicely we’ve planted some of our native grasses this is actually our state grass oh or uh or um purple needle grass oh interesting I didn’t know we had a state grass we do have a state grass that’s very that’s news the poppy is the state wild flower yes so you have to have a state grass as well you got to have a state grass you have to mean yeah what’s the plant right behind you this is called bee plant or California bee plant what and it’s um I mean I guess they named it be plants cuz bees like it okay uh but it’s a um it’s a pretty common plant it lives all over California interesting and um it has these little tiny um you know kind of small little flowers magenta flowers interesting you guys there’s so much to look at here I just keep turning around I want to show you all we’re like we’re we’re in a little Swale in a sale or a Ravine and we’re just surrounded by Natives and we’re in a neighborhood by the way yeah we’re in a neighborhood it’s beautiful it’s so beautiful this is kind of where we started I mean things like blue-eyed grass which isn’t a grass is actually an iris wow yeah oh it’s so pretty and then of course like people love our tidy tips I mean know I mean like I mean how do you not love this plant how do you not love this plant this is so cute talk about another one I tried growing these tidy tips but I grew it on an e facing I don’t it or he and I gave up and now I look at this and I’m thinking just need to throw some seeds in a really hot spot I mean look at it it’s I mean it’s growing up it’s growing in the cracks of the driveway look at that and you guys have to leave this I mean you have to leave it oh look look at look I carefully weed whack leaving the stuff that I like oh my gosh and then you know look at little fls yes you guys this is incredible and then something that you you won’t see on this tour you won’t feature it probably is our um is our California fuchsia okay which they bloom I mean we’ve planted them extensively because for the same reason that we talked about before they bloom after pretty much everything else I think that that is such an important message for this guard for this tour that people need to realize is that like natives yes there’s a peak season obviously but be be smart about it right and what might look just like a bush right now in a couple months is going to look it just as good as the Tidy test andgo as well oh yeah like so it’s just starting to flower but this is um our golden rods oh yeah those flower like super long into the into like I mean there are plants I mean they’ll be blooming in September you know I’m going to be like driving by your house you should yeah come on in come on in it won’t be this L and hot time CU it’s summer yeah but the but the California fuches and then of course people know them as like a really good hummingbird plant because they are uh it’ll just be covered in these in these tubular red flowers and then we’ll have hummingbirds hanging out here on a hot summer night guys so look at this what are you doing stop what are you doing come here come here are you so excited here so this is actually here here sit sit fig show us your Meadow this is Fig’s Meadow so this is um so we don’t we we removed so part of um the process of developing the backyard into this landscape was getting a grant from the city of Sacramento a Turf conversion rebate yeah and and so there was some very very sad Turf here so let’s show the before you have a before shot we’ll show we’ll we’ll show you a b you guys can see what used to there’s some very sad Turf here and so the city allows you know gives you like a a per square foot price uhhuh to convert your your lands your your previous Turf based Landscaping to water-wise landscaping and so what we did here is picked we picked a um a mix of grasses and grass-like plants we planted a lot of this same clustered field sge it’s beautiful or car pillus there’s a couple of other things in here that have not done as well okay uh We’ve planted um well actually we have some creeping wild Rye that’s coming in okay and then also some of our native fesus or festar rubra okay and you think these aren’t doing as well as the they just they just are not as umic is that under the shade of the crpe Myrtle that the festas might do better than the than the carrot and this one is I think is the prettiest of all the plants in the meadow yeah um which is called Jun grass or keria macrantha wow you guys but it’s a I mean it’s just like the the the if there’s a battle it’s probably going to be the sge that’s going to win I mean but the thing this is on my list you know it’s going in my it’s going my co thing about this I would say is that we end up with kind of the look and feel of a of a lawn uh or like you know a lawn like thing like and we’ve had people sitting out here hanging out here and and it gets a little it’s pretty tall but it’s also nice to to sit on do you ever do you mow it I have I I have not I have actually cut it back with shears you’re so funny so you got to get a video of that Sandy next so I come out here and I chop it with shears I would weed whack it yeah yeah oh you got so and then and then of course you know the dog is I was about to weed whack it and then he had cut it with Shear so there’s Mr fig is grazing in his Meadow yes this is his Meadow so the so in in case there’s other dog owners who are looking for the most the best tasting grass mhm creeping wild Rye okay he’s tried them all and he basically only eats creeping Wild Ride fig you’ve decided with the creeping Wild Ride it’s delicious so I have no grass at my new property we’re starting it but I will be doing this for my dog exactly this because this is the easiest yeah I’ll probably go I’ll probably go with that maybe I’ll give him a treat with the creeping wild they love the he loves the creeping wild R creeping wild Ry gets quite big and so I actually end up even pulling it because it’ll move in it it goes out of bounds really easily okay I try to be careful with it um look at that uh what is the Ry grass yeah well so we have melas oh is that something different yeah so we have I thought it was this plant no that’s that’s Kera there okay or Jun grass and this is a our melic California melic our melica californica wow this is really pretty it’s a gorgeous grass wow and then we have another grass which is uh which is a its sister species or like it’s a close relative yeah called melica imperfecta ooh why is it called imperfecta I don’t know it’s perfect to me a you’re so sweet Nick yeah and so um you know we’re growing a lot of colines back here and beautiful hummingbird sage which smells really good once again it doesn’t work for your viewers but you can enjoy oh this is amazing so this Garden is very layered not only with you know sights but also scents and textures the grasses and all that kind stuff you guys did and and then I kind of could we go over and look at our little rock garden that we put in please well first can we talk about your pathway yeah you guys installed this yourself yes it required a lot of um so so first of all it’s like prior to this that it was on grade with the with the it’s the same grade as this um as patio yeah and so we couldn’t just like add a path here we had to excavate it dig it out and so we so we rented a a little like Toro Dingo which is like a walk behind excavation tool and then that’s where we moved well that’s how we moved the material in a shovel and a wheelbarrow oh hand powered move most so much work and so that’s what so the um the mound in the front is the material that we excavated out of this path for this pathway for this path that also extends out so it’s probably like oh fig fig wants to be on video so he’s very dramatic um it was maybe like 20 yards of material that we made from it the back to the front oh there’s a hummingbird over there I’m not going to be able to get it we have a a resident hummingbird that guards the yard I think year round nice so if I could say like what we did here is we excavated about six inches of material for the entire system here okay um and then for the entire path system we installed um metal you know metal edging so steel edging Y which was you know which was a it was an investment it’s not cheap right but we love the look of it yeah and then we actually just installed this janary it because it’s the last we want this to last beautiful 20 years if we had done basically anything else we’d be redoing it and so we put we put about um three or four inches of of what’s called road base which is essentially gravel and you know whatever that material is you can find it in any Gardens or um you know rock shop Rock Shop yeah and the material and the material that we used is basically crushed um it’s it’s crushed B salt interesting I was going to ask what what like is it black decomposed Granite it’s basically like it’s basically like um it is like black decomposed Granite but it’s not Granite it’s volcanic a little bit cheaper than getting the great teos and we and we like the look of it it’s beautiful it’s a little Dusty so like I mean it is what it is he compos granite’s Dusty too I I just put it in and it’s pretty dusty too but this this is beautiful and then so one of the things that we we’re we’re getting into is like oh my gosh we’re into the we’re we’re past the I think we’re past the phase of of having big places to landscape uhuh so I um you know a friend of mine uh told me that he was doing a crevice Garden or a rock garden oh my God and and I was like I want to do a rock so I bought so I bought a book oh my God and read about how to do this wow and then we bought you know a a car load full of of these uh you know thin rocks thin you know and then 450 pounds of rocks and then we made a we made a mix which is uh which is actually the same material as this so like path finds and plus sand and plus lava rock and so we excavated a a a pretty you know a decent you know depth here and then filled it up so basically getting rid of the clay soils was important to improve drainage got it that’s so we dug out the dug out the clay so that we could put this good drainage material which these a lot of these species these plants want I mean we’re grow and then once again all native plants we’re growing can you can you tell me what this one is so that’s that is uh one of our bitter roots or Lisas wow louisia l patala or you know so that’s one that’s a I mean I love that plant that’s one of our native onions or our scyth Leaf onions jeez there’s that one again yes the pus Calico monkey flower this is a plant that we got from a botnus friends it’s another of our Lisas or louisia koni good so far as I know very few people have have been have grown that plant we’re growing some of the Native Native Rock ferns this is this is just the coolest thing like so would you would consider yourselves plant collectors it’s a it’s it’s essentially a plant collection now F fig fig is very he gets very excited on plant tours and then one of the things hey yes f one of the plants I’m most excited about here is this is a plant called um thistle sage okay and if you videotape the the um the leaves you’ll see why they call it thistle sage because the leaves look like a thisle this is a plant that I it almost looks kind of like like the weed Dragon yeah I fell in love with this plant when we were living in Southern California and going out to the desert and in in like the soken valley um get fields of it I tried to grow this last year I failed and then I realized that what I really needed to do was to grow it in a spot that had really really sharp drainage and so this is that spot interesting so you know this is your your microclimate of microclimate perfect drainage um we see how it how it you know how things come back cuz this is year one yeah but we’re pretty so we’re pretty well and that’s an annual that’s an annual got it so it hopefully it’ll seed and come we’re pretty excited about I’m I am pretty excited about how this how the you know how the rock garden is ising is very interesting and I have to admit I’ve actually never seen a rock garden you know I’ve heard of like the crevice Garden you put in the stone walls and stuff like that but this is a whole different level of yeah and it wasn’t and it wasn’t actually first of all it wasn’t that expensive to do yeah no and it wasn’t that hard yeah although I will say that he suggested we do this when his back had just gone out which seemed yeah he was thinking really clearly at that I always think I always think clearly the next weekend we got it is better oh then you could do it wait so does that mean I get to yeah you you do all the you all do all the hard work he had it planned all along so then here’s a let’s do here’s a so like so just kind of like we’re going all around the state here yeah this is um Palmer’s pensan Penman palmery it’s a desert species yep it’s a desert species um this plant it’s blooming now so I don’t know if you remember a couple years ago when it was like it was like7 here oh do I remember that we all all gardeners remember that year so this plant flowered after that again no it was like it’s nice it’s really nice here it’s like thanks can I have some more please yeah so so it was like it was like what do you what are you even thinking W yeah so how did your garden hold up with the 117 probably not it wasn’t I mean it was a lot of stuff was kind of dormant anyway so it was fine so it didn’t matter um but you know some things weren’t happy I mean nothing was really happy no my garden was not happy I think we had already purchased some of our plants for the front which God so it was stressful because we were afraid that they they were pots on the porch and we actually stalled in a Mis system for the porch calling this now keep the the plants for the front it was a rough 10 days I remember it being 10 days cuz I complained every single day so then this is our red bud oh it’s beautiful so tell me the name of this red bud so red bud um is cus Oxalis okay and so it’s Western Red Bud which is a it’s I don’t know if there’s any flowers left on it it was the flowers were lower down it it has these these kind of bright pink flowers beautiful I I’m obsessed with Red Buds I love love Red Buds uh we did plant bamboo as a privacy screen Y which is which is you know like a little bit um maybe a little bit strange for a native plant Gardener but I’m from South Florida and uh I just needed a little bamboo you had to put you had to add and and in reality this is this is not a waterwise choice yeah but as far as like as having a living screen which is just like you know a green background for the light wrestle landscape I think is totally worth it it wouldn’t it wouldn’t feel the same in this yard if you don’t have the bamboo and and it was it was planted only three years ago as well wow and the plants were maybe like as tall maybe six feet tall wow they got this high in like a year or two so I think it’s a good choice so then one thing that I think is pretty cool is that since this is getting a lot of you know it gets water it needs water you guys irrigate it we irrigate this it has a drip system it’s one of the few places has drip so I decied to to kind of into that drip system and grow a buch of native plants that require a lot of water okay so we have something like these plants like Cardinal monkey flower and our uh Native rushes and um there’s a there’s like a an aster called cyia Trickum cheleni or or or um I don’t know what the common name is but anyway so we we’re growing a bunch of um of really cool like plants that grow in in typically in wet areas so this is your wet microclimate kind of that was your amazing drainage microclimate the front yard is your desert and Coastal my like this is just I feel like I’ve been all over California in this yard kind of yeah in a way it’s really really neat say somebody’s watching this video and someone decides H that’s it I want to do a Native Garden yeah how like what would be your first recommendation where they get started I would say so uh so this is not just a Shameless plug for the organization I the cant societ is so good California Plant Society or cnps has a resource called calscape oh which has things like like sample designs and you can put in your I think it’s even your address oh my God and you can and it’ll give you plants that are good for your area no really it even has links to nurseries that grow and sell these plants wow and they’re they’re unveiling a you know a new um a new version of calscape which is going to have you know like like I think any day now which will even be better the other thing I would say is that that like so start small yeah yeah so you don’t have to go like and do all 5,000 square fet of your yard right off the bat start small see how see what goes goes well yeah the other thing is this is what we did with our Rock gard and we weren’t sure how that would go so we did a small area yeah we did another small area then you just keep going the other thing is I would say um go and find some Gardens that or go on the garden tour see what you like right um go to like the Davis arborium amazing yeah there’s tons of native plants there you can get inspiration from from various places awesome and so even if you’re not in California I mean probably Most states have the same resources yeah there’s there’s there are a lot of I mean there’s I think there’s a Native Plant Society in almost every state I want to say I feel like I’ve seen or heard something from if you’re if you’re like you know in the in Florida I know they have one called natives for your neighborhood which is similar to calscape perect so I mean the California and Florida are very different states I imagine everything in between somewh different yeah something similar absolutely so yeah so just find um or then get inspiration from nature yeah so some of the plants that we’re growing here are plants that I’ve fallen in love with going out into nature and I’m like I would love to grow that I want that one and so you know that’s part of the fun yeah like you can feel like like this is this is California it’s so much fun and I love how nerdy you guys are abouty I keep saying that but I say that with so much love and joy of like you guys are so awesome and I just want to thank you so much for sharing it with us well I I just I’m I’m glad to share I think that hopefully if we’ve we Inspire one or two people to to do something along these lines then this is the that’s that would be a really great thing I think I think you’ve met your goal after this tour for sure all right everyone well I hope you enjoyed this thank you to Nick and to Sandy and I hope you all have a chance to get in your garden today cool [Music]