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Hot Topic: Water Conservation and Landscape Retrofits
 As the temperature rises this August and September so does interest and awareness in the alarming shortage of water our state is facing. As always, we hope you consider using California native plants in any plan to retrofit a water-thirsty landscape. Choose natives for the water efficiency and savings they offer as well as for their natural beauty and habitat value. Bring nature close to home for all the right reasons.
If you are changing to a more sustainable and cost-effective landscape this fall, you should be in the planning stages now. Research your options. Hold off until fall to plant any native plant material, but now is the time to start thinking about your design goals – water efficiency, authenticity, habitat value, bio-diversity, theme…
As you consider how you want to approach your landscape projects this fall, we would like to point you to some incentives, as offered by local water districts, and other useful resources to inspire the planning process.
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A Rose Is a Rose: California wild rose – Rosa californica
 In 1906, the language employed by author Mary Elizabeth Parsons (The Wild Flowers of California) was, shall we say, a bit more “flowery?”
"The wild rose is one of the few flowers that blooms cheerfully through the long summer days, lavishing its beautiful clusters of deliciously fragrant flowers as freely along the dusty roadside as in the more secluded thicket. In autumn it often seems inspired to a special luxuriance of blossoming, and it lingers to greet the asters and mingle its pink flowers and brilliant scarlet hips with their delicate lilacs."
Will our common wild rose enjoy such admiration today? It should.
Inspiration: Featured Book: The Landscaping Ideas of Jays,
by Judith Larner Lowry, UC Press 2007
 An excerpt from The Landscaping Ideas of Jays:
"As I walk and drive through California, I mentally relandscape the world and hardly know I’m doing it…....In my imagination, I weed the roadsides as I go, removing the invasive species that follow our cars and preventing further spread into the land. I employ a panoply of strategies, from mowing to plowing to mulching, and also a favorite fantasy: my backseat full of weed specialists, my Dream Team. Tools in hand, they leap out of the car at a moment’s notice to remove the harbingers of ill tidings: the first Italian thistle, the lone clump of pampas grass, the ominous stand of yellow star thistle…....Driving and looking, I restore drainages, create native prairies, and people these imaginary spaces with children…….Turning off the freeway into the neighborhoods of a city or town, I superimpose wildflower fields where now there are lawns…....My eye does not stop at each lot line; nor do the pollinators, lizards, butterflies, or desert tortoises."
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