From junk-filled yard to serene landscape
Southern California couple transform eyesore into a do-it-yourself native plant wonderland
ALOSANGELES t the top of a rollercoaster hill, Thomas Zamora and his husband, Raul Rojas, enjoy two spectacular views — of the Pasadena hills to the east and of the meandering expanse of native plants, succulents and vegetables in a backyard that once was nothing but dirt and junk cars.
It’s been an evolution of nearly a decade, say Zamora and Rojas, but today, their backyard boasts a deck rimmed with pots of colorful succulents and wide waterpermeable paths of flagstone and river pebbles, lined with fragrant plantings of California native trees and floweringshrubs.
There’s a raised bed full of vegetables, a potted lemon tree and a few red-blooming Australian grevilleas and South African leucadendron left over from the early days of their landscaping journey “because the hummingbirds love them so much,” Zamora said. “They fight over the flowers, so we couldn’t stand totake them out.”
But almost everything else in the backyard, along with the terraced planters out front and the parkway, is devoted to California native plants, a passion inspired by the Theodore Payne Foundation’s Native Plant Garden Tour in 2015, when the couple saw what beautiful gardens others had created from native perennials, shrubs and wildflowers.
“That started us on our journey of ‘Frankensteining’ our landscape,” Zamora said, laughing. “The tours helped us get ideas for what elements we thought would look great in our yard. It wasn’t a formal process, because we did things ourselves. We found things we wanted, and places to fit them in, and just sort of winged it.”
They winged it so well that their home is now a regular part of Theodore Payne’s NativePlant Garden Tour.
The couple’s garden is alive with bees, hummingbirds and other pollinators, and there are chairs and even a flower-shaded bench for visitors to sit and admire the view. The space exudes serenity and invites wanderers — and is clearly a labor of love for both Zamora and Rojas.
“Every Sunday is garden day and we enjoy the process,” Rojas said. “It’s a place for exercise and meditation ... our happy place. And who doesthe weeding? Us!”
On their tidy potting bench, a butter knife rests in a pot, at the ready to tackle any unwanted sprouts. “The best weeding tool is a butter knife,” Rojas says confidentially. “My grandma taught me that; you just jab the knife in at the base of the root and pull the weed up by pinching itbetween two fingers.”
Clearly the technique works, because weeds — the bane of most gardens, including native plant landscapes — are visible nowhere in this yard. The plantings are jumbled but meticulous with brimming pots of succulents on the front porch and overflowing terraces of blueblooming rosemary, a Mediterranean plant, along with native plants like evergreen currant (Ribes viburnifolium ), island alum root (Heuchera maxima), fragrant blue pitcher sage (Lepechinia fragrans), bush sunflowers (Encelia californica) and island buckwheat hybrid (Eriogonumx blissianum)
It all looks perfect, down to the beautiful tangle of poppies and other native wildflowers in the narrow strip of parkway. But the process offered plenty of challenges, Zamoraand Rojas said.
Both men are California natives whose families enjoyed gardening and being outdoors, but they grew up around more traditional plants like roses, fruit trees andsucculents.
When Zamora, an art department coordinator for TV shows like “No Good Deed,” bought the 1923 bungalow in 2009, the smallish backyard was filled with hard dirt and three junk cars, which thankfully were removed before he moved in in 2010. In the beginning, before he met Rojas, he focused more on the interior of the house and dabbled at planting just a few flower beds outside. He said his focus then was on showy drought-tolerant plants like statice and Pride of Madeira, afast-growing perennial with giant purple blooms native to the Portuguese island of Madeira.
“I didn’t realize these plants are invasive along the central coast,” he said. “I was just planting things because they looked pretty, and I knew they would grow because I’d seen them in other places.”
He added the leucadendron and grevillea for their showstopping, drought-tolerant blooms. But he also planted a white sage (Salvia apiana) because he admired the silvery green foliage of one of Southern California’s most famous indigenous plantsduring a local hike.
After Rojas, an entertainment publicist, moved in in 2012, the couple got more serious about the yard, visiting plant stores and nurseries to get ideas. In 2015, during a visit to Potted in Atwater Village, they saw a flyer for the Theodore Payne tour and decided to give it try, and the gardens they saw finally gave their landscaping a sharp focus: native plants.
“It was one of the best decisions we ever made,” Zamora said.