Landscaping by Design

We’ve been taking a three-part “California Native Garden Design” class with Orchid Black at the Theodore Payne Foundation. The intention is to figure out what to do with all of the rest of Farmer Karen’s land that surrounds the vegetable garden.

That is a big swatch of space. (We know: we measured it and drew a scale plot plan of it.) It’s a corner lot, so it has “yard” on the south side instead of that useless skinny strip that separates houses. Between the labor and the cash, Farmer Karen is envisioning this as a phased project to be achieved over an undefined span of time.

But even if your first step is the parkway, you have to look at the global stuff first. That includes:

• What native area is your land located in — woodlands, desert, chaparral, river wetlands?
• What space do you have?
• What kind of sun do you get?
• What kind of soil do you have?
• What kind of slope(s) do you have?
• And, oh yes, what is your goal?

If you have a speaking relationship with Mother Nature, you need to have the answers to the first five questions before you define the last one. You may want a ferny glade with all your heart, but you will work like a mule to get it in a sandy-soiled desert.

Step 1: The plot plan

We started with a Google satellite view image of Fink Estates. That was traced in PhotoShop to get a working diagram to make sure we captured all the necessary measurements. Then we transferred the measurements to 1/8th scale squared paper. Make that several papers. A quick moment with the calculator showed that we would need to tape pages together to hold the full plan. Then we made copies at Kinko’s and maybe someday, we’ll actually ink in the lines of the original.

The glory of a plot plan is that you know at a glance what you’re dealing with. It also allows you to take plants you’re interested in, make scale circles or rectangles and lay them over the plot plan to see how things will fit. And given that little acorns grow into a California live oak that is 82 feet tall with a 13-foot in diameter trunk and a leaf umbrella who knows how wide, this is important to know. 

Given that it may take 20 to 70 years to grow that size, you may want to have circles of varying sizes to represent how the landscape will change over time. You may start out with full sun but when that tree grows, you’ll end up with a shady glade.

Step 2: The soil test

Once upon a time we’d done a soil test for the vegetable garden. But that involved sending a sample to a lab and getting back a report with a lot of information about the soil chemistry.

Orchid recommended two simple soil tests:

1. Soil composition: Fill a quart jar 3/4 full of soil. Add water to fill the jar. Let it settle several hours. Then add about a tablespoon of alum (a flocculant for those of you who like sexy words). The alum makes the particles in the soil clump by type and layer in the jar so you can see the proportions of sand, clay and other materials in your soil.
2. Drainage test: This involves digging a hole 8 to 10 inches deep and 6 to 7 inches wide (about the size of a gallon pot), filling it full of water and timing how long it takes for the water to drain out of the hole. Some experts suggest doing the test twice in the same hole to see how much variation there is.

The soil composition test for Fink Estates wasn’t very exciting. There was very little distinction between layers. (Actually, there was none that my inexperienced eyes could see.) Orchid’s assessment was that it was pretty heavy in clay, which is typical of a Southern California housing tract.

The drainage test, while tedious, was eye-opening. The first draining took about 30 minutes. The second took an hour and a half. This was another sign of clay soil: the clay absorbs water from the first test and holds it slowing the draining in the second test. But it also suggests that the vegetable garden and our new flower garden need longer deeper watering to hold water close to the plant roots.

We didn’t do the slope test that Orchid suggested. Fink Estates is slightly flatter than Kansas. But the test itself is rather ingenious. Put two stakes in the ground 100-inches apart. Tie a string to one stake, pull it straight and level and tie it to the second stake. Then measure the distance from the string to the ground on each stake. Subtract one from the other to get the percentage of slope.

Step 3: Research and layout design

Step 3 is to research plants, moving shapes around on the plot plan and coming up with a design. More on that at another time.

The most frequent mistake people make is not understanding how tall and how wide a plant will grow before they start putting plants in the dirt. Most gardeners have no imagination for plant growth. One of the best take home lessons I got from Orchid was that a garden is a constantly transforming creation.