The days have become warmer and we are all enjoying longer hours of daylight… including your native plants in the landscape!  You may have noticed your plants pushing out surprising amounts of new growth and rewarding you for your efforts this past fall and winter by producing lots of flowers.  Your Ceanothus and Arctostaphylos have been particularly rewarding, both long-lasting evergreen shrubs finished flowering and now are producing fruit and new growth.  Spring is in the air as you notice birds and butterflies visiting your garden.  Your Salvia's are going strong with Eriogonum, Monardella and Epilobium getting ready to follow them up with more blooms all summer.  If you sowed wildflower seed last fall, they have finished their show and maybe your poppies are still blooming with your aptly named Farewell-to-Springs, (Clarkia).

Information about spring and summer activities in the native garden, getting rid of your lawn, plant lists...

About this this time of year, we start telling our customers all about summer water in the native garden.  We usually hand them our older Sage Advice article printed on blue paper which is affectionately known as the "Summertime Blues" handout.  Now for your convenience, our updated version of this handout is available in color and with all of its glorious detail for your use here on the website.

California native plants are well adapted to our climate and can tolerate extended periods of heat and drought in their natural setting.  For natives to display such resilience during our long, hot, rainless season, they need to be well established with extensive, deep root systems.  Branches shade the root zone and leaf litter or mulch will protect the topsoil from excessive drying.  To have well-established landscape plants in the summer, you must plant in the fall, winter or spring.  Summer is the most difficult season to install natives in the landscape, but not an impossible time.  We encourage our customers to wait until fall if at all possible.  If you are managing new plants during the hot season, here are a few tips...

 Download the pdf:  Summer Water for Native Plants

Enter our Drawing for $50 Gift Certificate!

The Replace your Lawn Workshop series we conducted this year was a great success and clearly many of you (our wonderful customers) were hungry for the information we provided about killing your lawn, design elements and plant selection.  Enter our drawing by taking our survey and help us create more useful programs in the future!

You can provide valuable feedback about our past workshops and give us your suggestions as we consider workshops and seminars for this summer and fall.  We are eager to hear from both our retail and wholesale client base in order to create programs that will be useful to all.

Please take a moment to fill out our survey and enter a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Casa ‘La Paz’ which can be applied to retail plants or books!  The last date to enter the drawing will be June 19th and the winner will be informed of their winnings and announced on the website on our final retail Saturday June 20th.

Take the Survey by clicking on this link:  Tree of Life Survey