By William Rodarmor

When it comes to gardening, less really can be more, especially in the Bay Area. By choosing native plants and tending them appropriately, you can frame your home with a landscape that is easy to maintain while saving water and avoiding chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides. Like green remodeling, green landscaping is usually common sense writ large.

Whether establishing a new garden or adapting an old one, approach it as you would anything else in life: make a plan, bring things together, and hope for the best. The hardest part can be knowing where to start, because we have so many choices. With its temperate climate, the Bay Area is said to grow the broadest range of plants of anywhere in the world.Steps large and small that spare the environment are within everybody’s reach. Try a drying rack for wet laundry, get rid of toxic cleaners, and use paint that won’t give you a headache. On a larger scale, plant trees for summer shade and winter sun, install solar panels on the roof, or remodel an old house instead of building a new one. In fact, the green field is now so vast, a short article can’t do much more than note a few of its many leaves. In this piece, we will talk about overall green goals, consider what makes a house healthy and energy-efficient, and list steps you can take around your home or when building or remodeling. (Because landscaping offers so many green possibilities, we will cover it in a future article.)

There are many, many sources of green landscaping advice, from the invaluable Sunset Western Garden Book to local nurseries. A good introduction is the 62-page Bay-Friendly Landscape Guidelines, written in part by Oakland landscape architect Michael Thilgen. He also contributed to one of the most attractive publications around, Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Region, published by the East Bay Municipal Utility District. This 336-page book combines hardheaded, practical advice with 500+ gorgeous photographs and prose as crisp as a fall evening.

EBMUD originally published it in 1986 as Water-Conserving Plants and Landscapes for the Bay Area. It was enormously popular, and went through several printings. The new volume, which won the American Horticultural Society’s 2005 Book Award, reflects our growing awareness of native and Mediterranean-climate plants and environmental issues like water conservation.

Here are the final sentences of Plants and Landscapes. Notice how the authors reward your making smart choices with a bit of well-deserved laziness. “If you have designed your landscape to take advantage of the site, selected plants that thrive in your microclimates, placed plants where they can grow to their full size and natural shape, and grouped plants according to their needs and tolerances, your landscape should require relatively little attention over time.... Gardening with regionally appropriate plants is one of the few instances where less activity is required to attain better results. Sit back and enjoy it.”.

With a book in one hand, maybe you should take someone like Berkeley landscaper Suzanne McGee by the other. She’s a native plant herself, but one who has put down roots in places as varied as the Philippines, Italy, and Sri Lanka. She’s both a designer and a gardener, which means she’s equally at ease with a graph-paper sketch pad and a digging trowel. (For the record, McGee is willowy, adaptable, and generally drought tolerant. Prefers part shade.)

McGee, who studied art history and was always interested in plants, architecture, and the environment, calls her job “the best combination of things that I like.” She started a gardening business in the 1980s, then began doing garden reconstruction and design after the 1991 East Bay Hills fire. “I’m a designer,” she says, “but I like to install the gardens I design, and I also like to maintain them afterward to keep them developing.” She has stayed involved with one Montclair garden for 15 years that did wonderfully until a 100-foot Monterey cypress fell on it—a drastic reminder that nothing stays the same in a garden.

“The biggest mistake people make is to go to the nursery and pick out plants they like without realizing that they don’t belong in the same grouping,” says McGee. “So they pick a plant that should be in a shady wet environment, and another that likes hot sun, and they put them together.” Another common problem is scale, she says. “People have no idea how big something is going to get. They buy a little plant, and don’t realize it’s going to grow to 30 feet.”

McGee urges her clients to start with a plan, and check out the locals. “I walk with them around their neighborhoods,” she says. “We go look at plants they like, and find things that would work. Only then do we go to the nursery.” This is especially important when money is tight. McGee says that the people who start with a good plan will get the most bang for their bucks. “I look at the whole property and start with a good design,” she says, “ and then phase it in over time. Because without a plan, you have nowhere to go.”

Starting with the basics, be kind to your soil. Let the grass clippings lay where they fall. Buy a compost bin and use it. Shred leaves for mulch. And if you ever have to excavate, keep your dirt. “If you can save the topsoil, you’re miles ahead,” says McGee. “If it’s good topsoil, don’t remove it. You’re going to have to pay to remove it, and pay to bring new soil back, and it probably won’t be as good as what was there before.”

After this year’s very rainy winter and spring, here’s a soil-saving tip from Michael Thilgen: “You can effectively control surface erosion by a combination of mulching and dense planting.” The choice of erosion control species depends largely on exposure, says Thilgen—one group of plants for sunny south facing slopes, another for shady northern exposures. “We rely on a mix of seeded annual wildflowers for quick fill, perennial bunchgrasses and herbs for the mid-term, and slower growing shrubs and trees for the long term,” he says. “There are several hundred species that are appropriate for erosion control in this region. The mix is best designed on a case by case basis.”

Pick your plants as carefully as your friends; even nice ones have annoying habits. Birch trees and magnolias, for example, have invasive and greedy roots, and shouldn’t be planted too close to a building. “They’re go into the sewer lines and under the house,” says McGee.

If you’re busy or lazy, be realistic about how many hours you want to spend on your knees in the garden—including zero. “You don’t have to plant every square inch,” says McGee. “You can do nice landscaping with materials like paving stones and gravel.” She also urges her clients to choose reliable plants. “They don’t have to be ordinary,” she says. “But if you choose the tried and true as the basic structure of the garden, you can rely on them. Those plants aren’t going to die on you.”

There are so many reasons for choosing native plants, it’s worth remembering that they have a few drawbacks. McGee notes that natives don’t always look their best. “They don’t bloom year round,” she says, “and they aren’t very showy in the off season, through the summer.” Also, some shouldn’t be pruned too hard, or over-watered. “We’re in a Mediterranean climate, which divides into winter wet and summer dry,” she says. “So the time to buy and plant natives is the fall, so they can get the winter rains and get their roots going. By the time the next summer comes around, you don’t have to give them too much water.” Finally, many natives are not long-lived. Except under ideal circumstances, seven to ten years is a normal lifespan of a ceanothus, for example.

What if you want results fast, and don’t want to spend a lot of money? “There’s nothing wrong with putting in fast-growing plants if you’re prepared to let them run their cycle,” says McGee. She recently did a succulent garden for a friend on a tight budget with a small bungalow off Solano Avenue. They built some sandy mounds, put in a very simple flagstone path, and then went to the nursery. “We chose the most fantastic colors and textures,” says McGee. “Each plant had to count—I didn’t want anything dinky!”

Their most successful addition was Echium wildpretii, a biennial from the Canary Islands called Tower of Jewels. “We got three of these four-inch plants for $4 each,” she says, “and they grew into giants. Six months later, they are over eight feet tall and full of red spires. It’s definitely worth it to have short-term plants that give a bang while the other ones are coming along.” The delighted client called recently, and said: “Sue, you have to come over, I’m getting so many comments! This place is like Jurassic Park!”

McGee enjoys the excitement, but she also takes the long view. “The Echium won’t last, and you have to let them die, and plan to put in something else,” she says. “That’s part of gardening, allowing things to peak and fall. Because if people want things to stay the same the whole time—forget it! That’s not what a garden is.”

William Rodarmor is a writer, editor, and French translator in Berkeley, California.

Here are twenty ways to make your home's landscape easy to maintain, and help integrate it with the local environment.

1.    Use permeable paving on driveway and walkway to front door.
2.    Channel water from roof to rain barrel.
3.    A birdbath provides water for wildlife.
4.    Replace front lawn with native groundcovers.
5.    Plant low-water plants between pavers.
6.    Plant a variety of native groundcovers, shrubs and trees, but no invasive species.
7.    Give plants the space to grow to their natural size.
8.    Select plants to match the microclimates.
9.    Set irrigation to water according to plant needs, soil moisture, and weather.
10.  Place deciduous trees to west and southwest of house and patio for summer cooling.
11.  Collect leaves under trees as mulch.
12.  Mulch plants to keep soil covered.
13.  Group plants by water needs.
14.  Use drip irrigation for vegetable beds, shrubs, trees.
15.  Build raised beds from plastic or composite lumber.
16.  Put plant and kitchen debris in compost bin.
17.  An evergreen windbreak blocks north winter winds.
18.  Prune trees properly.
19.  Put lawn in backyard where family will use it.
20.  Use integrated pest management to control weeds, insect and disease pests.

(Source: Green Building Guidelines, Alameda County Waste Management Authority & Source Reduction and Recycling Board)