What I’ve learned over the years is that the rumored difficulty of gardening with these plants is somewhat exaggerated, largely based, as it is, on the well-deserved reputations of a few genuinely finicky species.

Malosma laurina vs. CalTrans

While it may not be a bad idea to adjust your expectations downward when it comes to planting Woolly Bluecurls in your garden, you don’t necessarily have to resign yourself to watching helplessly as it withers and dies each summer after an all-too-brief flowering

snag [snæg] noun:  1. a standing dead tree

Given the growing number and popularity of native cultivars, a conscientious native gardener might be forgiven for asking: what is the larger environmental impact of cloning an individual plant on an industrial scale, ad infinitum? Globally speaking, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Here in California, it is way past time to add buying an exotic, industrially grown plant for your garden to the list of formerly common-but-no-longer-acceptable abuses of the environment.

Showing someone around your native garden during the height of summer can be a little awkward, to be perfectly honest, as most people are surprisingly unfamiliar with the concept of summer dormancy – the evolutionary survival strategy employed by many native California plants in order to survive our long, dry summers.

“What makes you think ‘native’ bees are so great? First of all, they don’t even live in hives, like normal bees. Did you know that some of those so-called ‘bees’ actually live in the ground for God’s sake? I ask you – what kind of a bee lives in the ground? By itself?”

If your gardening activities are calibrated to support local wildlife, there is very little you could do that will have a more positive impact on wildlife than preserving and promoting the health of a mature Coast Live Oak, each one of which attracts and supports a vast web of living things.

Humans may be the planet’s “preeminent weedy species,” but as stalwart California native gardeners, we have the power to liberate our small plots of land from the curse of anthropogenic weeds

The bright orange, maroon-spotted, lavishly petaled Spotted Humboldt Lily is almost preposterously flamboyant, looking like something you’d find growing in a tropical jungle that somehow lost its way and ended up in the relatively stark landscape of Southern California’s mountain ranges.

It isn’t difficult to understand why people hate poison oak. So why have I actually planted, of my own free will, this shrub in my own backyard, where, three years later, it continues to thrive? Toxicodendron diversilobum, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

Aren’t all plants inherently “good”? Well, yes and no.

While it may be true that Los Angeles is only able to support its current population of roughly 4 million thanks to an enormous engineering project that imports water from faraway places, the city is not located—as is often asserted—in a desert.