Drought-tolerant and hard to kill
>>> If you have dutifully swapped out your lawn and flower gardens for water-miserly cactus and succulents, you can be excused for feeling a tad nostalgic for the lush, the scented, the flowering.
“When I just see succulents, it can feel a bit sparse or stark,” admits Kelly Fernandez. But she has a solution:
“Herbs,” suggests Fernandez, the herb gardener for the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. “They have so many beautiful flowers, they can definitely soften the landscape, bring in pollinators and make the landscape useful again.”
Some herbs, though, can be as thirsty as the thirstiest impatiens. However, there is a group of herbs that provide everything Fernandez has mentioned and fit in perfectly with a water-wise gardening scheme. Some are native to California, most need little, if any, care, and just about all of them would be right at home on a rocky Mediterranean hillside. And yes, you can cook with them if you are so inclined, or just enjoy their fragrant beauty. “Rosemary, lavender, sage, thyme, oregano, lemon verbena.” Author and blogger Linda Ly, who writes about gardening and cooking in her “Garden Betty” website, ticks off a quick list of herbs that work in a drought-tolerant garden. Ly’s favorite is the perennial African blue basil, a sizable multi-limbed bush that sends up scores of purple-flowered spires that draw bees like a magnet. “It loves the Southern California climate, doesn’t seed and is an attractive design element in the garden.”
These herbs need full sun and a bit of regular watering until they are established and show growth, “then you can back away,” Fernandez says. Sages in particular are averse to over- watering, which will quickly rot them.
The inexpensive, easy-to-find perennials adapt well to California soil that has been loosened for good drainage. They need no fertilizer, happily fitting in, and filling in, a cactus or succulent garden or even a garden of their own. Some, such as thymes and oreganos, make soft and showy low ground covers while upright rosemary is tall enough to be trimmed as a hedge.
“People think of herbs as windowsill plants — they use them for one season, and then they are down,” Ly says. “But they are wonderful landscaping plants. They are beautiful and fragrant. They attract local birds and bees and beneficial insects. It’s a much better choice than putting in rocks and plants that don’t have much to give to the ecosystem.”
Here is a sampling of herb standouts for water-sipping landscaping: