here in Albuquerque everyone xeriscapes, you install a drip system and plant whatever is native to your area, just go to a local nursery.

If you go to the library and check out the book "Landscape Plants for Western Regions" by Bob Perry he has a lot of good ideas. In the front of the book he has some plant groupings including mediteranean and western native where he puts together plants that would grow together in nature and so look good together. His groupings include trees, shrubs, troundcovers, perennials, and accent plants. You couldn't go wrong putting together plants this way.

Good for you for wanting to do something besides a lawn. They are just to water wasteful and something more attractive can go in place of them.

Good luck, Maria

My climate is more-or-less Mediterranean here on a mesa south of Albuquerque. I put in a cedar tree which is doing well. Flowering sages are doing well here. Artemesia loves it here. I put in an old-fashioned shrub rose, which has grown huge. Scabiosa (pin cushion) plants do well, as do chysanthemums, agastache, snap dragons, columbine, penstemons, catmint, hummingbird mint, and marigolds, especially if they get a bit of shade. Roses do well if they get some shade.

I put in a red hot poker plant thinking it was draught resistant. It has gotten big, but that plant needs a lot of water! The Maximillian sunflowers (perennials) need more water than I expected. They really take over--spread themselves, so one has to give them a lot of space. They grow 5' tall and put out flowers for about six weeks each year. When the wind is blowing and high heat goes on for days and days, even draught resistant plants need quite a bit of extra water.

I've got grapes and asparagus. They needed extra water this summer. It was so hot for so long the grapes didn't give me any fruit this year. My strawberries do well, but they need daily watering. My artichoke plant died back because of the heat. I kept watering it and it has sprouted new leaves.

You have a lot of choices of Mediterranean plants which have a similar climate to coastal and near-coastal CA: 6 months of cool/ wet and 6 montths hot/ dry. I envy you, because our nights in winter in Southern NM are a little colder and limit some of the Mediterraneans that I can use.
Anyway, Sunset Magazine publishes the Western Garden Book and Western Landscape Book, plant and landscape bibles, really, and you can get them from your local library or buy cheap from Amazon.com. Good luck --- you have one of the best climates in US --- lots of Native plant choices as well as compatible exotics. dl.

Have you tried the book "Dry Country Gardening"? I don't remember the author, but it is good and informative, lots of pictures. Also, check out High Country Gardens catalog online at www.highcountrygardens.com. They have a fabulous catalog with the most information I have ever found. A bit more expensive for plants than the regular nursery, but healthy and larger than normal, also guaranteed. I have use them alot in xeriscaping here. We have a swamp cooler in the house and we have set up a pump to drain the water every 4 hours, which is routed by way of a hose down the roof to the gutter and across to the grape arbor, where the hose deposits the water on the grapes....we got lots this year.

I like High Country Gardens catalog but it isn't really suitable for our climate here. I live in the Oakland hills and found very few of their plants worked here. It's much better to stay local since we have such great nurseries here. Even the big box stores and some of the drugstores (like Long's) have fabulous nursery sections. Get a copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book; it's the Bible of Western gardeners and has all kinds of useful info in it.

Remember you are going to have water in all plants, even xeric ones, until they become established, for at least the first year. Also, the better your soil, the better they will do. Then mulch, mulch, mulch. Soaker hoses work great in mixed plantings and waste so much less water. Use quick couplers to make it easier to switch your hoses around.

A groundcover I'm surprised more people don't use is Convolvulus mauritanicus, a morning glory relative. It's amazingly xeric. Not the prettiest groundcover, but very tough and pest-free.
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Another groundcover that is xeric but won't look good during the winter, is lambs ear (Stacchys byzantia). 'Helen Von Stein' doesn't have the spikey flowers that some folks object to, but the color is a darker green than the standard variety.

Any creeping groundcover will need some periodic maintenance to keep them from running over neighboring plants. It's just a fact of life here in the relatively frost-free zones we live in. I'm always fighting my evergreen vines because they keep trying to swallow their neighboring plants! Any vine that grows to 15' in other regions becomes a 30+' monster around here.

Lavenders will be very happy with little summer water, as will tagetes lemmonii (bush marigold), hunnemania, dwarf Indian hawthorn, tibouchina urvilleana, any of the new pelargonium hybrids (people call them geraniums, which is botanically incorrect; true geraniums are less showy and thirstier), salvias, cistus (rockrose), roses (once established), artemisia, leptospermum (tea tree)

Again, my soil is quite good - we replaced the first 8" of adobe clay with top-quality compost from the Davis St. Recycling Center - and I mulch every year. We like a cottage garden look, not to everyone's taste. I water every 10-14 days, depending on how hot it gets. This photo is from May, when the lavenders, nasturtiums and poppies put on the best show. But I have flowers all year long, actually.
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Oh, and two more plants I forgot:

Erysimums don't live long, but spend most of the year in flower and are evergreen. The shrub type most common is 'Bowles Mauve', which grows quickly into a perfectly round 4' plant with spikey purple blooms that last for months. There are also three common varieties of erysimum that are trailers - not true groundcovers, they don't get much more than 3' long and 2' wide. The variegated one is quite beautiful, with purple flowers. There's an orange-flowered and yellow-flowered varieties that are also easy to find.

And of course, lantana. There are trailing varieties you can use as a groundcover, although it will start to mound higher upon itself over time and get to about 2' tall. They are more cold-resistant than the shrub lantanas, which look pretty shabby around January/February - they get rust from the winter rains - but recover fast once the weather dries out and warms up.

Wow jkom51! What a gorgeous yard!!

I wish you could put together a garden plan for me :) Everything looks *so* beautiful together.

Are those mostly xeric? You mentioned High Country Gardens wasn't good in your area, but seems to be good for mine - 9/Tucson, but I'd love to have a garden that looks like yours, but xeric.

Our front yard is all pokey desert plants, but I want more color in the back... Still making my plans and poring over many books and catalogs :)

Does the Convolvulus mauritanicus you mentioned get crazily out-of-hand the way regular Morning Glory does? I grew MG while living in CA and would *never* grow it again after having to chainsaw it out multiple times - it took over the *whole* yard.

Thanks for any info, and again - WOW!

A.

cpaandmusician - I see you are in zone 9 too. I'm in AZ though, but thought you might like to check out a book that's been really helpful for me - Arizona Gardener's Guide by Mary Irish - maybe you can flip through it at the bookstore or at the library.

There are a *ton* of beautiful xeric shrubs - some with flowers, some with berries, and some with thorns... All are good for wildlife like hummingbirds, birds and bees.

There are also some booklets on xeriscaping and plants that are free from the Water Dept. in AZ here - http://www.ci.phoenix.az.us/EMAIL/emwtlitreq.html

I'm not sure if they'll send them to you in CA, but maybe the Water Dept. there has something similar. It would be worth calling them to find out.

Good luck :)

A.

Here is a link that might be useful: Free Landscaping & Xeric Booklets

amalgamation, thank you for the kind words. I think definitions of "xeric" differ a little, since there's a lot of plants that will live without watering during a dry summer, but they won't look terribly good.

I see no problem with watering occasionally during our bone-dry summers. Even with our high water rates (plus we're on a hillside so they charge extra for pumping), our garden of over 2000 sq. ft. of different sized beds costs about $15/mo during the summer and nothing during the winter when it's our rainy season. I can estimate it precisely because for so long we didn't have any garden landscaping. I was able to easily calculate how much extra the garden water was costing us over our indoor water usage, once we started landscaping.

As I said, we improved the soil, mulch heavily every year, and use soaker hoses. There are a number of plants that have not made it under my demanding requirements. I do not baby plants - okay, I'll except dahlias, hydrangeas, citrus and roses, but that's all - so they get shovel pruned if they don't live. Everything I listed has thrived for the last four years under the tough watering limits I use.

Even my thirstiest bed, with hydrangeas, azaleas, rhodies and ferns, doesn't get watered more than once every 7-14 days, depending on temps.

The only plants I would say have a hard time in my front yard with the limited water are aristea ecklonii (looks like a clumping daylily, but has spikes of small blue flowers once a year) and the beautiful yellow-leafed shrub lavatera olba "Aureum". Our front yard has a hot West-facing exposure and it's hard on the lavatera, plus dry conditions encourage ants and black scale. Sometimes the poor thing looks a little crispy by fall! Goes to show you can't depend on labels - it was labeled "full sun", but it would be much happier in partial shade here in CA.

The aristea - well, I just don't care for it much. A boring plant that flowers only a little bit for a short time, it's been a blah impact overall.

>>Does the Convolvulus mauritanicus you mentioned get crazily out-of-hand?Oops, sorry, the first time around I missed that question Amalgamation asked!

It's a neat little spreader, but is an easy groundcover to keep in check, unlike Ceratostigma plumbaginoides (perennial plumbago) which is competing with the Dalmatian iris foliage to choke out everything in their paths. The C. mauritanicus doesn't seem to reseed itself around, or pop up 20 ft. away the way polygonum does.

Had to link that particular page on drip irrigation.

Actually, I recommend http://www.laspilitas.com/ .

"This website is an effort to inform and entertain you about aspects of native plants and native gardens that we've learned in the last 35 years. The 5000+ pages include garden and landscaping ideas for a hummingbird, wildlife, butterfly, or bird garden. Of course, we have information about California native plants along with some basic ecology of California and its plants. There are horticultural, edible, landscape and design pages mixed with every other use we can think of to bring landscapes and gardens alive, while you have fun!"...

Terran

Here is a link that might be useful: drip-drip-drip Your plants on DRIP!