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Going Native In The Garden

Jerry Emory

I first became familiar with Larner Seeds of Bolinas, California, in 1988. I had just moved into a house on the chaparral-covered slopes of Mount Tamalpais, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and discovered that my yard was completely overrun with a 40-year growth of French broom, Scotch broom, and wild oats--three of the more aggressive exotic plant species in the state. Some of the broom plants were so large they grew as trees. As my wife and I slowly removed these invaders--a task that continues to this day--I discovered some enduring native perennials and bunchgrasses cowering beneath the tangle of alien debris. Freed from this exotic stranglehold, the natives began to flourish, but they needed reinforcement. I called Larner Seeds and requested their native seed catalog, and my life and yard have never been the same. You might say that I have a native plant addiction, and Judith Larner Lowry, the owner of Larner Seeds, is my unwitting supplier.

Judith Larner Lowry herself is an exotic of sorts, a transplant from St. Louis who found herself studying ornamental horticulture at Foothill Junior College in Los Altos, California, during the mid-1970s. She soon met Craig Dremann of the Redwood City Seed Company, where she started an apprenticeship and became "hooked" on seed collecting. Recalls Lowry with a laugh, "After I worked for him for a while he decided I should have my own business because he thought I could never work for anybody but myself."

After hearing about Yerba Buena Nursery in the coastal hills above Los Altos--one of the state's oldest native plant nurseries--Lowry introduced herself to the owner, Gerda Isenberg. "Gerda gave me a list of seeds she wanted collected," Lowry remembers, with obvious pleasure. "So, I started turning toward the natives. Then she hired me as a seed propagator." Lowry worked with Gerda for eight years. "At Yerba Buena you were encouraged to grow everything, all the natives. It didn't have to be a showy plant, or even particularly garden-worthy. We were given a tremendous amount of freedom by Gerda and we were encouraged to experiment."

During her time at Yerba Buena Nursery Lowry began writing and traveling throughout California collecting seeds. She also started Larner Seeds. Initially, her fledgling company offered seeds from both California and New England, the two regions Lowry knew well. But as her work with Gerda deepened, she became more familiar with California, and began focusing exclusively on California natives. Both the company and her writing expanded when she moved to Bolinas in 1984, and Whole Earth Catalog listed Lowry as a retail business. She was immediately flooded with requests for her catalog--a publication that didn't yet exist. Lowry scrambled to produce one and immediately expanded from a native seed provider for specialty nurseries to a retail outlet for homeowners.

"I've always been interested in writing," Lowry explains to me during a recent visit to her home. "I started my Notes on Natives pamphlets because I was being driven crazy by people asking the same questions over and over again. They were good questions, but sometimes I didn't know where to begin. The person asking the question was often gardening in a traditional way based on East Coast or English gardens. That has changed. Most people today at least understand that California has a Mediterranean climate. People always asked me, "What's a native plant?" That's actually a very good question, but it can take a long time to answer."

As we sit at a small kitchen table in her pale gray bungalow, Lowry seems somewhat unaccustomed to her role as native plant expert. She still considers herself a student and apprentice, her teachers and mentors California's wild places, where remnant patches of native plants still thrive. In these places she walks, observes, and naps in fields of wildflowers, eventually sharing her knowledge with employees, clients, and everyone who requests her catalog.

After Lowry moved to Bolinas she noticed that when the exotics were cleared on a portion of her acre of land, a mix of native species either gained newfound vigor, or appeared on their own. She discovered an abundance of California woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca), red maids (Calandrinia ciliata), coast live oaks (Quercus agrifolia), soaproot (Chlorogalum pomeridianum), and coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis), and added native bunchgrasses, coffeeberry (Rhamnus californica), hairy honeysuckle (Lonicera hispidula), California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), and sticky monkeyflower (Mimulus longiflorus) from seeds she has propagated.

Slowly, this mosaic of natives began to dominate where exotics once ruled. And yet, towering eucalyptus grow across the entire Bolinas mesa, and one nearby neighbor (a former nurseryman, and friend of Lowry's) maintains the healthiest hedgerow of pampas grass I've ever seen. When it's appropriate, and when Lowry feels a neighboring home gardener might not be aware of the natives versus non-natives debate, she has been known to approach them. But confrontation is not her style. "I try not to nag people," explains Lowry, "I don't want to be perceived as the native plant police. Instead, what I try to do is to show how beautiful natives can be, and encourage people in that way."

"What amazes me," she continues, "is how many local species are gone from where we originally saw them just 15 years ago. Those species are no longer there because local kids are now using the lot as a racetrack for their bikes. My dream is to have those kids use it as a race track--because it's good for them and they enjoy it--but for them to also use some of that energy to help restore the land around the track."

According to a recent edition of Fremontia, the magazine of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS), there are an estimated 4,850 known native plant species in California while at least 1,045 exotic species grow unassisted here. These exotics range from species inadvertently introduced by humans and their livestock hundreds of years ago, such as yellow star thistle and wild oats, to species which were purposefully introduced, such as eucalyptus.

A quick look at the yellow star thistle, one of the state's most aggressive exotics, is both edifying and a bit terrifying. Star thistle can dominate a variety of habitats and harm or even kill livestock that feed on it. A single star thistle plant is capable of producing thousands of hardy seeds, 95 percent of which will likely germinate. Joe DiTomaso, a weed researcher in University of California at Davis's Vegetable Crops Department, estimates that between 10 and 15 million acres of California are heavily infested with star thistle. "Regardless of exact figures," says DiTomaso, "even my conservative estimates mean star thistle is the most common plant in the state."

"The problem with exotics such as star thistle," says Jake Sigg, president of CNPS, and former Chair of its Invasive Exotics Committee, "is that they degrade biological communities, and they frequently totally displace them. That is, all the native plants in a given area colonized by an invader may eventually perish. And when the native plants perish then the animals and insects of that system go with them." California's rogue's gallery of invasive exotics includes giant reed, French broom, Scotch broom, tamarisk, pampas grass, medusa-head, capeweed, water hyacinth, and hundreds more. As Lowry notes, California is a place where native plants are quickly becoming the exotics. As U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ecologist Andrea Pickart recently wrote, "After all, to the untrained eye, a natural area and open space are indistinguishable. Until you've seen the multi-colored beauty of dune mat in bloom, for example, you may find expanses of wind-blown European beachgrass quite appealing. And exotic plants are often quite beautiful in their own right, which is exactly why many of them were transported here to begin with."

To help educate the public about natives, Lowry continues to sell her seeds, produce her catalog, sit on the occasional conference panel, and write. Her recent book, Gardening With A Wild Heart--Restoring California's Native Landscapes at Home (University of California Press), is a convincing testimonial for why all Californians should find cause for "reentering the garden," as she writes, through planting natives, growing, observing, "accepting the lessons of weeds," and understanding your piece of sacred ground, whether it's a small urban plot or dozens of rural acres. Her book is also a meditation on native plants, a reflective commentary on California's contemporary landscapes, a low-key lament for what once was, and an eloquent defense of what remains and what could be.

Lowry counsels her readers to know their sites well. Is their soil sandy, mostly clay, or well developed loam? Where do the first rays of sun touch the ground, and how does that change seasonally? At high noon, where can shade survive? Which native plant species, if any, grow in their yards? After beginning to know the backyard, explore adjacent "wild" lands--from abandoned lots to parklands--Lowry advises, and get to know the neighbors, that is, the native plants thriving nearby. "What makes restoration of a piece of land so rich and interesting," she tells me, "is when you learn from the land by spending time with it. Not a matter of a few weekends here and there, but years of seasons."

Each spring, Lowry organizes an open house during which people can stroll through her garden, explore her nursery, and return home with some seeds, a plant or two, and an armful of literature. Some of the most fascinating aspects of these events are the results of her experimentation with native edibles. Presented al fresco in an alcove of coyote bushes, Lowry and her crew serve up roasted bay nuts, blue wildrye pinole, sugar cookies studded with chia seeds, miner's lettuce on cheese and crackers, manzanita berry tea, chia seed lemonade, and huckleberry scones (the biggest hit). She is also perfecting what she calls the California Cracker, a hearty biscuit made from roasted and ground blue wildrye seed, chia seed, pine nuts, and wheat flower.

Lowry's passion for natives seems to be spreading. Just 20 years ago it was almost impossible to find native plants for sale in traditional nurseries. Today, nurseries that sell natives can be found throughout the state. Even some chain nurseries maintain a natives corner. (The state's two major droughts in the past two decades helped bolster the argument for drought-tolerant natives.) A handful of California natives are commonly sold by wholesalers and nurseries not because they are natives, but because they're attractive, like California fuchsia (Epilobium canum ssp. californica), hardy, like native sages (Salvia spp.), or extremely functional and easy to grow, like several manzanitas (Arctostaphylos spp.). The bottom line is they sell well.

Nevin Smith, native plant expert, master plant propagator, and Director of Horticulture at the Suncrest Nursery in Watsonville, California, believes the nursery sells close to 20,000 specimens of Manzanita "Emerald Green" yearly. Far more are sold annually by larger nurseries in the Central Valley.

Lowry finds that to make native plants appealing to the general public it is useful to use native wildflowers as an introduction. "Except for the California poppy," she says, "most of our native wildflowers are relatively rare, so they have the advantage of looking like exotic species to residents. People have simply never seen them before, and that interests them. Our wildflowers are stunningly beautiful in mass." But even the interest in wildflowers is wrought with unreal expectations. Lowry receives calls from groups interested in adopting a highway who want instant stands of native flowers. "You know," she says, "you see those highway signs reading 'Wildflowers by Sally's Hair Salon,' and there's nothing there but weeds. Restoration is far more complicated than simply seeding once, then going away."

Lowry also handles landscape architects whose clients want a slice of native prairie in their gardens. "I tell them they really have to see one first, and they'll insist that isn't necessary. Finally I'll get them to look at some native grasses and they'll say, "Oh no, I don't want that!" No matter how many times I tell clients that the grasses will go dormant and turn brown, they don't hear it until they see it. They don't understand that process over time is the real valuable commodity. What they want is a look, not a reservoir of relationships."

When we adjourn our kitchen table conversation to go outside, Lowry first pauses by a bookshelf in her living room that holds a collection of baskets and small bowls woven from plant materials, half spheres of dormant bunchgrass brown and loam black. "I can look at these baskets for hours," she says. Without waiting for a response she opens the door and steps outside. I look at the colors of the baskets--the colors of the earth--and their fine details, and feel the shadow of a passage from her book in a subchapter called "Learning To Love Brown": "I measure my true life as a Californian from the time that I stopped apologizing for a garden exquisite in its light and shadow, its still endurance," writes Lowry. "Reveling in the shades of gold, blonde, palomino, gray, and muted greens, it seldom occurs to me to do so now."

Once outside we inspect Lowry's coastal prairie restoration project. "We've done a careful restoration here," says Lowry, sweeping her hand across the scruffy-topped bunchgrasses. Emerging wildflower seedlings thrive in a section of her backyard some 30 feet across. French broom and other weeds ruled here before the restoration began, but hours of hand labor removing emerging broom and other weed seedlings cleared the plot. Then the area was reseeded using "plugs" of native grass seedlings. Next, plugs of perennial wildflowers were placed in the ground, then the annual wildflowers were sown. Combine these step with dozens of hours of volunteer work--and additional tubs of elbow grease for perpetual weeding--and you have the beginnings of a native prairie. "This is not my most ambitious restoration project," remarks Lowry, "because all restoration projects are ambitious, but it is the most satisfying. We've used the Bolinas strain of clarkia and our blue-eyed grass. This is the way it should be everywhere people are interested in restoration gardening. Every place would have its own little nursery providing native plants from the local gene pool. Of course, economically, it's not very feasible."

As we walk the back streets of Bolinas, we come across a neighbor's house where Lowry has worked. A pleasant white-haired woman appears at the door and gladly shows us around her yard. Without any prompting, the neighbor turns to me and tells me she considers Lowry an inspirational and healing person, above and beyond her amazing knowledge of native plants. "But of course," the neighbor offers, "all of those things are related." Where broom and exotic grasses once grew in her garden, natives now prevail. "Why bother with restoration?" I ask the neighbor. "Why?" she replies with a questioning smile, "because it's the right thing to do, it's important for the land, and it makes me feel good." Obviously another Larner Seeds devotee.

Back at Lowry's office she cleans some California bee plant (Scrophularia californica) seeds she has propagated and prepares them for storage. "The Chemehuevi Indians once collected seeds they called "the little rain,'" Lowry says slowly. "I don't think anyone knows anymore what plant they were referring to, but it could have been bee plant." She fills her palm with the tiny seeds, clenches her hand into an easy fist, and pours a fine black stream back into the bowl. A soft windy hiss emanates from the bowl--the sound of little rain?

In Mary Austin's 1903 Land of Little Rain, she describes an encounter she had with a small stand of yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica) in a moist meadow thriving in the rainshadow of the Sierra's abrupt eastern escarpment. Although not trained as a botanist, Austin was a fair naturalist with a keen interest in plants, and she knew the minute she saw the plant that it "looked potent." Austin bemoaned the fact that in a complex civilization human instinct is "atrophied by disuse" to the point where the powers of plants are rarely understood.

"A little touch, a hint, a word," Austin reflects, "and I should have known what use to put them to. So I felt unwilling to leave it until we had come to an understanding. So a musician might have felt in the presence of an instrument known to be within his province, but beyond his power." Austin eventually relies on a local Indian woman, Se-ora Romero, to teach her the ways of yerba mansa. In the person of Judith Larner Lowry, we have shades of both Mary Austin and Senora Romero.

Jerry Emory's most recent book is The Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide, published by the University of California Press and Monterey Bay Aquarium.