Native Plants through a Modern Lens

MODERN & NATIVE:
Contemporary Design Meets

In a push for citizens to install greywater irrigation systems in their homes, the SFPUC (city water department) has launched a program to offset the cost of materials for qualifying households.  The so-called Laundry-to-Landscape program requires a formal application with proof that the property has a working washing machine and a yard that is level or downsloping away from the machine's outflow.  The first 150 qualifying households will receive a 95% subsidy toward the purchase of a hardware kit (hub connectors, three-way valves, etc.) to divert greywater from the sewers and use it to irrigate the garden. Only 1- or 2-unit residential buildings are eligible, and only these buildings are allowed to install greywater systems without a permit from the building department. To encourage and promote the use of graywater systems in larger and/or commercial or industrial buildings, the SFPUC also offers a rebate up to $225 toward the cost of obtaining a permit. To be eligible, the graywater system must be used for subsurface irrigation only.

Join Madroño founder and president Geoffrey Coffey for a talk and slide show at the Brisbane Library on modern gardens using locally appropriate native plants.ADMISSION:
Free!

But so many existing fences in the city are ugly, common, built on the cheap, installed by rote with no insight, like mere place-holders.  We swoon at the magnitude of lost opportunities.  If well designed, the fence can strive for art even as it performs its necessary, divisive duties.  The key to the sublime lies in transparency to sunlight.

Landscape design can bridge otherwise impassable hurdles.

Consider the case of this San Francisco backyard: a sheer slope on the southeast face of Mount Davidson, where a concrete drainage trench carries winter's seasonal river and then runs dry for summer and fall. The trench cuts off houses from their gardens and limits human access to the yards uphill. At this particular house, the existing deck was built out to the edge of the trench, with no means of getting across.

Question: How to deal with this ugly yet necessary piece of engineering?

Answer: Add another level of deck to bridge the gap. Set the platform at an angle to diverge from the rectangular facade of the house, and to suggest triangular shapes in the landscape. Cantilever all four edges 24" over the beams, thus hiding the posts so the deck appears to float above the ground.

This deck, with bench and arbor, is both a place to inhabit and to pass through. We cut a path in switchbacks up the slope from the point of contact with the platform, removed all french broom, fennel, and ivy from the hill, and replanted with native pinegrass, junegrass, and needlegrass; a field of silver lupine and scattered Ceanothus to attract butterflies, especially the fabled Mission Blue; elderberries and manzanitas for bird-friendly flowers and berries; and more.

Consider the sedge (genus Carex), that vigorous and beautiful groundcover, when thinking about plausible substitutes for lawn.

This high-tech lumber from Boulder(CO)-based Engineered Timber Resources is manufactured from 100% reclaimed and recycled Poplar wood veneer sourced as waste from the furniture and pulp industries. 

The marriage of living plants and cold steel ranks among the most enjoyable elements of practicing landscape design in the San Francisco Bay Area.

SCENARIO: Single-family residence on steep 2-acre property in Los Altos Hills, California. The lovely and level back patio was marred by the slope immediately above it: ugly bare dirt, too steep for traditional planting, and eroding at the base of the house's diagonal support beams. The situation called for a bold stroke of design creativity.

QUESTION: How to turn this liability -- a barren and degraded slope -- into a lush and attractive asset?

ANSWER: Save the slope with a green wall of perforated steel plates, coconut coir, and local native plants.

My comrade Pete Veilleux, native plant landscaper and bushwhacking enthusiast nonpareil, asked if I would like to join him on a hike to see a secret corner of Oakland. Not far from his house in the teeming East Bay 'hood where oaks no longer grow, steep mountains cleave the landscape and bulwark an ancient, fragrant forest of bay, oak, and madrone. So we climbed the ridge between Cull Canyon and the Upper San Leandro watershed, near Dinosaur Peak so-called for its rocky outcrops like the spiky plates of a stegosaurus, to seek out some of our favorite native plants and the hidden connections lurking in the everyday.

No trail marked our route; we parked on a friend's private property and walked for a spell up an old fire road, then plunged into the underbrush. Directions? We headed due southwest and uphill.

Veilleux waxed rhapsodic about the bay trees all around us: the manifold shapes of trunk, the lush color of the leaves when they catch the sun, and above all the scent, that wonderful smell. "I think Umbellularia californica is the most versatile and under-used California native plant in the landscaping trade," he said.

"Not in my yard," I replied. The mature bay reaches heights of 120 feet, and as wide. He allowed that regular pruning for size might be necessary. Mixed among the bays all around us, oaks and madrones whispered in the wind as if in awe of the bay's position as climax forest community, the ultimate dispatcher of other trees in the ecosystem.

Few explorers would expect to find a beach hidden in the middle of a redwood grove. Yet such incongruities lurk in the mountains above Santa Cruz, where ancient seabeds upthrust millions of years ago by tectonic turmoil gave rise to stark hills of sand now tucked among lush evergreen forests more than five miles from the sea. Fossilized sand dollars and shark teeth in the ground testify to the marine origin of these Santa Cruz sandhills, whose so-called Zayante soils support a rare and unusual community of native plants found no place else on earth.

The Bonny Doon Ecological Preserve is the largest and most accessible of these unique habitats, with 550 acres and a network of trails open to the public during daylight hours. Walking these paths of heavy sand, one expects to hear the roar of the surf around every corner -- yet the ear meets nothing but the sound of a mountain breeze whispering through the surrounding woods.

Here we find a dominant population of the rare and endangered Bonny Doon manzanita (Arctostaphylos silvicola), an upright shrub from 5-15 feet tall with gorgeous silver foliage and a gnarled trunk of deep red vein-like branches. Sunlight shining at an angle through the leaves can cause this foliage to glow as if from within, rendering the landscape otherworldly and magical.

Distant rumblings from city hall portend a boom on Treasure Island, the former Navy base on the brink of becoming San Francisco's newest residential neighborhood. This exercise of urban planning in the middle of the bay will be a closely watched experiment. Early drafts of the master plan have called for sustainable design and green building development, for example, including an open space and landscaping component that emphasizes the use of locally native plants.

No plant is native to Treasure Island -- this 400-acre landmass was built of quarried rock and bay-dredged landfill in the late 1930s. But the first seawalls for that project were raised from the northern shoals of Yerba Buena Island, the natural island now joined with man-made Treasure Island like a siamese twin. And the steep slopes of Yerba Buena Island, though radically altered by invasive weeds and the hand of man, still harbor remnants of the original native flora, a population from which the landscape planners may wish to draw their inspiration.

Consider the coast red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa var. racemosa), enthusiastic seeder of moist forest margins, a proven survivor even in the deepening shadows of eucalyptus and monterey pine. This robust deciduous shrub can reach tree-like heights of 15-20 feet, filling the middle space beneath a taller canopy with a cheerful bloom of frothy white blossoms from March through July. Just now the fruit has begun to form, dramatic clusters of scarlet berries adored by birds. After the leaves drop in late fall, the bare elderberry still holds interest for its branches, which have a large pith and are easily hollowed out. The Ohlone used these twigs for flutes, whistles, and clapper sticks (a drum alternative); indeed, the genus name Sambucus pays homage to the Greek sambuke, a musical instrument made from elder wood. Excellent as a specimen plant in the garden or as a focal point in an urban park, and a tasteful alternative to cotoneaster, the coast red elderberry should rank high on anybody's landscaping wish list.

Water paints with shifting colors the divided contours of the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma, California. The blues and greens of oak and bay forests on protected north-facing slopes complement the fire and earth tones of chaparral on the south-facing sides. Here at the southern end of the basin, riotous riparian woodlands follow snaking Stuart Creek through a steep canyon to Agua Caliente, the pepper of volcanic springs beneath the valley floor. Lowland meadows collect water in seasonal puddles, where vivid wildflowers come and go with the equinox.

On two sides of the Old Sonoma Highway, one such meadow is divided by two authorities. The southwest side of the field falls within the boundaries of Sonoma Valley Regional Park, a public 162-acre parcel near Glen Ellen; the northeast side belongs to the Bouverie Preserve, a 500-acre jewel in the private necklace of Audubon Canyon Ranch.

A former quarry beside the Bouverie visitor center (rumored to have supplied the stone for the nearby Jack London House) is today a vernal pool, a depression of hardpan that fills with water in winter and goes bone dry in summer. Smaller pools and swales sweep the adjacent meadow in a network of linked seasonal wetlands -- up to Highway 12, of course -- then continue as another isolated system on the other side of the road. Spring sees the transition from flood to drought in these unforgiving flats, a mere sliver of time in which a succession of highly adapted native plants take the stage and dance with the reaper for a week or two, then disappear again.

Passover comes this Sunday, a rite from the Biblical story of Exodus, wherein the enslaved Israelites win their freedom from Pharaoh. It seems a fitting context for a discussion of The Acres, an indentured ecosystem on the wildland-urban interface.

These substantial and privately-held native grasslands rise between the town of Brisbane and the state and county park of San Bruno Mountain. A walk here is like a page from the California history book -- steep hoary stands of melic and fescue athwart canyons of buckeye and oak, and vast savannahs of butterfly sage punctuated by johnny jump-up, silver lupine, and broadleaf stonecrop, the larval food plants of rare and endangered butterflies.

Carved into jigsaw-puzzle pieces by an "unrecorded subdivision" (i.e. illegally) in the 1930s, with titles now held by hundreds of individuals, The Acres live in a state of bondage. Houses already cover twenty of the original 111 parcels (all on the lower slopes), and developers have mapped routes for possible roads and building envelopes throughout the remaining 120 wild acres. Opinions among owners radically diverge: some would like to preserve their land as open space, while others want to build. One fellow proposed turning his one-acre parcel into an Indian casino. Where is Moses when you need him?

The near-horizontal pitch of these slide-prone grades would appear to discourage your average builder -- but the Bay Area real estate market is anything but average. Already the narrow private roads on the lower, comparatively gentle slopes "typically do not meet fire code standards," according to the City of Brisbane. Some of the proposed new streets in the steeps are merely drawn on paper; others follow the mad path of Virgil Karns, an eccentric local landowner from decades ago who joyrode his bulldozer up and down these sheer ridges in his spare time.

Often charming, occasionally gritty, surely up-and-coming -- witness the real estate renaissance of Bernal Heights, S.F.'s neo-boho neighborhood where once-dilapidated homes now zoom at the speed of commerce beyond the million dollar threshold. Yet a liferaft floating at the center of this frothing urban sea remains undeveloped: Bernal Hill Park, a peak with a far older balance sheet of life, death, and rebirth.

Start your walk on the south side, where all good rags-to-riches stories begin. There on the wrong side of Bernal Heights Blvd. (south of the road), a proud blooming patch of hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) bears up in a weed-choked vacant lot. This plant grows in oak woodlands, chaparral, and scrub along the coast of central and southern California, reaching its upper limit in the Bay Area, where it thrives; it spreads by rhizomes and makes an outstanding groundcover in both sun and shade. The lance-shaped leaves give the finest fragrance of any sage you'll find, and the dramatic pink blooms draw squadrons of hungry hummingbirds. The rogue patch in the vacant lot is the last (known) survivor of the naturally occurring species on Bernal Hill -- so if you find it, please treat it with care.

Continue north and uphill, where 20 acres of grassland house other jewels from the pre-Colombian flora. Shooting stars (Dodecatheon spp.), for example, have burst aloft early and prolifically this year; these members of the primrose family develop shuttlecock flowers pointed like rocket ships, peppering the meadow with gorgeous violet flames. The botanical name is Greek for "twelve gods," and with as many easily intergradable species in the genus, the promiscuous taxonomy of Dodecatheon feels worthy of those old landlords of Olympus. Bernal Hill is the type locality for Dodecatheon clevelandii ssp. patulum, a noteworthy subspecies that thrives on serpentine. Go see it now in plenty on the north and northwest slopes beneath the microwave tower, facing the skyline of downtown.

The trappings of prosperity pursued by contemporary city dwellers emphasize the appeal of "living large," hinting that the ends of financial aggrandizement will justify any means. But here in the Bay Area, we also enjoy a wealth of nearby natural resources that remind us of just how small any one person is in the grander scheme of Earth. These two sides of the spectrum meet in the old-growth redwood forest of Muir Woods, located only 15 miles north of San Francisco's financial district yet rooted in a time that predates our mercantile madness by millions of years.

Here the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), the tallest species of tree in the world, grows to heights of 250 feet and dwarfs the oak, bay, madrone, and douglas fir that usually dominate the canopy of northern California forests. Walking among these giants, one feels the hushed weight of history, a sense of being watched over by the elders. In fact, many of the specimens here were already reaching for the clouds when Columbus set sail -- the mature trees of Cathedral and Bohemian groves average between 600 and 800 years old, with the oldest at least 1,100 years old. But even these are young for a redwood, which can live to more than 2,200 years of age and grow over 350 feet tall.

First-time visitors to Muir Woods often crane their necks and stare upward like tourists in downtown Manhattan, spellbound at the spectacle of the skyscraping trees. But don't forget to look down -- the understory deserves its share of attention too, especially now at the beginning of the year when some of our greatest botanical treasures come into bloom.

"I just hiked to the top of Cedar Mountain Ridge," wrote Pete Veilleux, proprietor of East Bay Wilds landscaping, "and found some very cool plants including a bigberry manzanita 40 feet tall!"

Incredulity rippled through the native plant coven. The standing record for any manzanita was 32 feet, according to Tilden Park Botanical Gardens local expert Bert Johnson. A 40-foot manzanita has never been recorded. Veilleux explained that he hadn't measured exactly, but only eyeballed the height; Johnson urged him to return as soon as possible with a yardstick or a tape measure. Tempted by the thrill of the chase, I joined Veilleux and Paul Furman, landscape architect and photographer, to revisit the mountain and measure the monster manzanita.

Cedar Mountain Ridge rises near Livermore in southeastern Alameda County between the Crane and Rocky Ridges, a veritable wonderland of rare and unusual plant communities. It's 20 miles up Arroyo Mocho to this enchanted region, mostly private property off-limits to the public. Veilleux discovered the manzanita in a remote canyon above the Los Mochos boy scout camp. "I would never trespass," he said, then elaborated with a grin: "I try not to get caught."

I phoned the boy scout camp three times requesting permission for an informal botanizing expedition. My calls were not returned.