2014 Native Plant Week, Replace Your Lawn, and Design Help for Your Garden
The third week of April (12-20) is California Native Plant Week! We’re celebrating by hosting our Replace Your Lawn (RYL) Workshops to inspire individuals who want to get rid of that expensive water-guzzling, care-intensive lawn, and make way for a gorgeous native garden. We are presenting our Replace Your Lawn (RYL) workshop series in a special three-part installment about the basics of converting your lawn into a beautiful, carefree, sustainable habitat. Oh yeah, did we mention water savings as a big part of the deal?
We’re preparing a unique place to receive inspiration for this particular RYL series with the Grand Opening of our new Butterfly Garden! We’re planting out recent favorites that have proven to be tried and true California native plants for Southern California gardens. Our new planting will be grouped according to common design criteria many homeowners are looking for: groundcover replacements for lawn, slope plantings, sunny dry areas of the garden and more. Get ideas about how to group your plants together in your project by having a look at techniques we have seen work time and again. Then in May we bring you Designers each week who will instruct about how to implement strong design principles in your native garden, join us!
Saturdays at 9:30 am:
April 12: RYL I – Kill the Grass! & Grand Opening of New Demonstration Garden
April 19: RYL II – Establishing Your Garden with Winning Plant Combinations & New Garden Celebration
April 26: RYL III – Design Elements: Creating a Cottage Garden with Native Plants
APRIL 2014
Saturday, April 12
9:30 AM – RYL I – Kill the Lawn Workshop
In the first installment of the Replace Your Lawn Workshop series, we cover the usual first step: killing and removing the lawn itself. Killing a lawn requires taking the time to identify your grass type, evaluating your options for removing it based on its tenacity and active growing season, and choosing a method that fits your budget, time frame and ideology. Jeff Bohn will walk you through the options in this informative workshop that covers the content of this handout:
Replace Your Lawn: Kill the grass!
10:30 AM – Native Plant Week Demonstration Garden Walk Through Tour!
Join us after the workshop for a curated tour of our new garden planted in celebration of California Native Plant week. Your guide will speak about the design and plant groupings used and explain the rationale behind our design. Join us!
Saturday, April 19
9:30 AM – RYL II – Establishing Your Garden with Winning Plant Combinations
Tree of Life Native Nursery founder Mike Evans will speak about how to group, plant and care for natives in your garden. Using the new demonstration garden and incorporating over 30 years of experience, Mike will share some basic horticultural principles that can guide you in any landscape project. Sharing his knowledge and passion for native plants, Mike will equip workshop participants with tools for planting beautiful, sustainable, carefree and water-saving gardens using CA native plants.
Just after the talk, celebrate our new garden with us by joining us for some native foods and refreshments to celebrate another wonderful Native Plant Week!
Saturday, April 26
9:30 AM – RYL III – Design Elements – Cottage Garden Themes using Native Plants
One of our Designer’s in Residence will round out this April’s Replace Your Lawn workshop series with a design talk about how to create the cottage garden look using California Native plants. Susan is an experienced landscape designer who has successful gardens planted all over Southern California. Come learn some of the design tools of the trade to implement in your own garden projects.
MAY 2014
Designing Stunning Low-Water Native Gardens
With the drought heavy on people’s minds, the project of redesigning your landscape can feel completely overwhelming. This May, we have invited our Designers In Residence to take turns speaking on different design topics to help inspire you and give you technical assistance on your native garden projects. More on the May workshop series here.