GARDENING : Ending the Yardwork Ethic
Weekend yardwork used to be an American tradition.
Neighbors would wave to each other as they spent several hours every Saturday or Sunday mowing and edging large expanses of deep-green lawns, raking leaves, trimming hedges and pruning and grooming shrubs, flowers and trees.
But today, it seems people are too busy to invest time in their lawns, and hiring gardeners to do it for them is expensive. The solution: low-maintenance landscaping.
“Most of my clients, unless they’re avid gardeners and are collectors of certain plants, almost always ask me for low-maintenance (ideas),†says James T. Jesser, a Laguna Beach landscape architect.
“A lot of my clients just don’t want to be devoted to the lawn, or to be spending a lot of time in the yard,†says Lisa Iwata, a landscape architect with Land Interactive in San Clemente. “They want to be enjoying the yard more or going places.â€
The term low maintenance is relative, however.
“What might be ‘low maintenance’ for one person might be way too much (work) for another,†Jesser says.
Some people are happy to spend a couple of hours a week puttering around in their yards, while others may not want to work in their yard at all.
There are, however, some common elements in low-maintenance landscapes:
Plants are selected that are appropriate to climate and soil conditions. This affects how much water is needed and how frequently soil needs amendments.
Plants are planted with enough room so that frequent pruning isn’t necessary.
An efficient automatic irrigation system is essential.
The overall yard will have more of a gray-green look rather than lush green, with splashes of color. Colorful plants are concentrated in a few areas, rather than spread throughout a yard.
A reduction of lawn area may mean a small patch for children to play on or the use of grass as a ground cover.
Plants that have an informal or natural look are used.
A low-maintenance yard was definitely on the minds of Helen and Robert Rochelle when they moved to a new home on a Dana Point hilltop. The Rochelles had left behind a large home in San Clemente with about 7,000 square feet of lawn. This high-maintenance yard sometimes required having gardeners come twice a week and meant a huge water bill.
“What we wanted was low maintenance and not a huge yard,†Helen Rochelle says. She wanted European-style courtyards, but she didn’t want the hardscape to dominate.
“I wanted charm to it,†she says.
Bob and Kay Campbell had lived in their Dana Point home more than 20 years when they decided something had to be done about their front yard. They wanted lower maintenance too.
“It was always a very clean-cut looking yard,†Kay Campbell says, “but we had a problem with roots and all going through the front yard and erupting. We started by taking out the junipers and taking out the lawn and all the sudden we were in serious trouble.â€
Both the Rochelles and the Campbells called on Jesser to design their yards. Both couples wanted low maintenance, but how they approached it shows why low maintenance is a relative term.
Jesser designed a series of gardens for the Rochelles, who had the yard installed by professionals. There’s a front courtyard with a planter with a large multi-trunked Ficus nitida tree and azaleas. A side yard off the kitchen has a barbecue area and a long planter against the far wall. Five 30-foot high queen palms are in the planter, which also brims with impatiens or some other colorful flower depending upon the time of year.
Both the front and side-yard planters match the white stucco of the house and the walls that enclose the yard.
The side-patio floor is composed of gray and adobe-colored pavers, to blend with the granite floor in the kitchen. The pavers are set in sand and framed with a rim of concrete.
Another planter bed next to the house features a variety of plants, including Hymenosporum flavum trees, which have beautiful yellow blossoms in the spring.
There are also two rectangular areas of concrete with corners cut at angles in this area. These form a walkway to the rear patio and are surrounded by grass, which gives the hardscape a much softer look.
The rear patio is concrete and extends from the back of the house to a low stucco wall in front of a steep slope covered with native plants. French-doors open onto the patio from the living room and the master bedroom and terra-cotta pots with palms or flowers are sprinkled around the yard.
One of the most striking devices is the liberal use of climbing vines. Bougainvillea and grewia caffra espauer are being trained to climb the walls of the house. The green vine and colorful blossoms of bougainvillea frame the front gate to the courtyard and the garage doors. It also climbs up the back of the house, while the grewia caffra, which has a delicate lavendera blossom, is in the side yard.
In this use, bougainvillea is relatively low maintenance in comparison to the frequent pruning it might need if used in areas where branches could get leggy and unsightly.
While the Rochelle yard is relatively low maintenance, Helen Rochelle prefers to have gardeners once a week.
“There’s no such thing as everything being free of problems,†she says. “You still have that extra little manicuring that you want done to a yard. I think it takes someone professional to do it.â€
But the time gardeners are needed has been cut considerably in comparison to Rochelle’s last home. And Rochelle is pleased that in between gardener visits there’s nothing for her to do, except occasionally hose off the patio area.
Rochelle is also pleased that her water bill is now about $20 a month, compared to about $250 a month at her previous home.
The Campbells’ small front yard needed a different kind of design. Previously, the yard was squared off with very specific lines. Jesser created focal points and a design with more curves to give a more spacious look. Professionals did the grading and sprinkler system, but the Campbells did all the planting.
The design includes a kidney-shaped planter with H. flavum trees, mock orange, raphiolepis, ornamental strawberry and agapanthus on one side of the yard. A small area of marathon tall fescue grass is used as a ground cover around the planter.
The tall trees draw the eye toward the second story of the house. And the curved walk--brick in a herringbone pattern--leads the eye to the entryway which also has brick.
Another focal point is a colorful mound of impatiens near the driveway. The bed is edged with small Japanese boxwoods and a lantern on a wood post emerges from the mound of flowers.
The front of the house also has an attached brick planter that has more raphiolepis, hibiscus, asparagus fern and a grewia caffra vine growing between two windows.
There’s another planter bed with three sweet shade trees, agapanthus and impatiens on the far side of the concrete and brick driveway, which was widened with a brick walkway.
Bob Campbell says the front yard is now “moderately low maintenance.†The small lawn area can go for two weeks without mowing, but Campbell prefers to cut it once a week. Some of the other shrubs require trimming and grooming every couple of weeks. But he says the whole job takes a maximum of 1 1/2 hours, including cleanup.
John Tengdin, who is a semi-retired telecommunications consultant, enjoys the two hours a week he spends working in his San Clemente yard. His main concern was to have a yard that would both conserve water and reduce maintenance. Lisa Iwata designed a xeriscape yard for Tengdin and his wife, Carol. The term xeriscape denotes the use of native and climate-appropriate plants to reduce the amount of water and maintenance needed in landscaping.
The sloping front yard is a flowing combination of artemisia (a shrubby ground cover related to sage), California wild lilac, California fuchsia (a shrub with red flowers) and a spectacular Mexican palo verde tree, which has delicate yellow flowers and long needles instead of leaves.
There’s also a front-yard patio. Plants in this area include comfrey berry and autumn sage. Near the front door is a bed with beach strawberry, coral bells and meadow rue.
The side yard is a mix of another form of sage, marguerite daisies in a variety of colors, dusty miller, stock, a lemon tree and areas of wildflowers that bloom in the spring and reseed themselves. Redwood bark is used as a mulch.
The back yard has a patio, which is a series of concrete squares separated by wood strips and set at 45-degree angles with the house. Shade is provided by a 1,500-square-foot redwood patio cover.
There’s also an area of grass about 40 feet by 20 feet at its widest spot, more wildflower areas, a small desert willow tree, buckwheat (a California native plant that has beige flowers), more beach strawberries, a dwarf grapefruit tree and a small coast live oak. A side yard has a redwood deck and redwood planters for herbs and vegetables.
All the plants are on a zoned irrigation system, which allows some areas to be watered as infrequently as every two weeks.
Tengdin built the deck and the fence along the front patio. He had all the concrete work, sprinkler installation, soil preparation and most of the plant installation done by a landscape contractor.
He is perhaps proudest of his wildflowers.
When in bloom, the spectacular stands of wildflowers get as high as 3 feet, with salmon-colored, pink, red, yellow and orange flowers moving in the ocean breeze. When the flowers are not in bloom, the ground in those areas looks a bit bare. But, Tengdin says, “it doesn’t disturb me to not have it totally covered with green.
“All I did was hand broadcast the seeds the first time and sprinkle a little potting soil on top and let nature do the rest.â€
Now that is low maintenance.
