No. Designers serve as a bridge between clients and contractors. My job is to listen to what clients want, study the project site, and create a design that’s feasible for contractors to build.

I can make recommendations - and advise against certain businesses - but I don’t have exhaustive knowledge of every contractor in LA. Some clients ask for design work after they’ve already picked a contractor, while others search for contractors only after they have their designs in-hand. Both methods work well.

All gardens require maintenance, and that’s part of the point of building them. Gardens get people outside where they can enjoy the seasonal changes of plants, breathe the fresh air, and soak up vitamin D. Low-maintenance gardens are absolutely possible, but if you want a garden you never have to touch, then you might be happier with a painting of a garden or a binge of Monty Don’s classic BBC show Gardener’s World.

Every place in the world except Antarctica has native plants, and natives are always the best choice simply because native plants have evolved to thrive in their specific local environment.

Plants that are native to Southern California have adapted over countless generations to handle the intensity of our summer heat, our sparse rain, and our occasional fires. Additionally, native plants have well-established relationships with local insects and animals, providing them with food and habitat while getting help with pollination and proliferation in return.

There is an essential California-ness to our majestic oak trees, just like there’s an essential Colorado-ness to aspens and an essential Michigan-ness to paper birches. Native plants give gardens a sense of place, a feeling that if you woke up there, you’d be able to look around and accurately guess, based only on the plants, where you are.

Plants that are drought-tolerant are usually natives that have evolved techniques for staying alive through long, dry summers. Common misconceptions about drought-tolerant plants are that they require no water (they do) and that they always look good (they don’t). Most drought-tolerant plants cope with drought by going into hibernation. They drop their leaves and look dead, but once they start getting water again, they leaf out and return to normal.

Invasive plants are bad because they didn’t evolve in the region they’ve invaded, which means local animals don’t recognize or eat them, and they’re not part of the natural food chain. Invasive plants tend to grow quickly, out-competing native plants for water, sunlight, and space. They also tend to have tiny seeds that are distributed by the wind, making it all-too-easy for the seeds to spread everywhere.

The invasive plant I encounter most often in residential gardens is Mexican Feather Grass (Nasella - formerly Stipa - tenuissima). It’s a gorgeous grass, but its tiny seeds stick to everything from dog fur to car tires to the bottoms of shoes. Neither livestock nor wild animals eat this grass, so it has no predators. For clients who love the look of this grass, I recommend native alternatives that fit into our local ecosystem while also looking absolutely gorgeous.

To learn more about invasive plants, visit the California Invasive Plant Council.

Xeriscaping (ZEE-roh-scaping) means “dry gardening”, which should not be taken literally. All plants require water. A xeriscaped garden is neither completely dry nor water-free, but it does use significantly less water than a traditional garden. A properly xeriscaped garden has dense clusters of plants and utilizes methods like berming, bioswales, and boulders to use water as efficiently as possible. Xeriscaping is a great approach for gardens in Southern California, but please note: a yard full of gravel with no plants is not xeriscaping.

No, lawns are not inherently bad. They have a bad reputation because they require sprinklers, which use a lot more water than drip irrigation. If clients have dogs or kids that like to play on a lawn, I think that’s fabulous and I will happily design it. If clients want their front yard to have a lawn but they don’t plan to ever use it, then I’ll present some alternatives. Lawns are great when they’re well-used, no bigger than necessary, and irrigated as conservatively as possible.

Artificial grass is plastic, which - in my humble opinion - has no place in a garden except in irrigation components. Artificial turf smothers soil, creating an ecological dead zone. It does nothing to cool a space, and weeds grow right through it. There are many better alternatives to artificial grass, all of which use significantly less water than a real lawn.

No, but this is a common misconception. Southern California has a rare but biologically rich climate that is found in only a few places on Earth. Our climate is Mediterranean, which means we have comfortable, rainy winters and hot, dry summers. Our climate is roughly equivalent to places like southern Europe, the southwest coast of Africa, and the southwest coast of Australia. (See the pattern of this climate only occurring on southwest coasts?) The good news is that plants that thrive in one Mediterranean climate are likely to thrive in others. We call plants like these “climate appropriate”, and they’re the next best thing after natives.

Palm trees have fallen into a bad reputation that is based on several misconceptions. One is that palms require a lot of water when the reality is that most palms have low water needs. A second misconception is that palms are not native. We have a beautiful native palm that not only thrives in Southern California, but has become a symbol of Los Angeles that I would be sad to see disappear. Our native fan palm (Washingtonia filifera) is a fabulous tree, especially in parkways. The final misconception is that palms are bad in fires. Living palms are not highly combustible, but dead fronds are. The danger of palms is significantly reduced when dead fronds are regularly removed.

For gardeners like myself, squirrels are the worst because they rip immature fruit off vines - tomatoes, grapes, cantaloupe, pumpkins, watermelon, etc. - take one bite, then leave the fruit to rot. If they were eating the whole fruit or taking it home to their squirrelly babies, that’s one thing, but that’s not what they’re doing. Hence, they are the worst.