Want to Conserve Water? Forget the bathroom—look in your front yard
By Dave Wielenga

ANNIKA KNOPPEL by RUSS ROCA

A couple boxes of low-flow shower heads sat in the foyer of the Long Beach City Council chambers last week—free for the taking, the better to encourage public cooperation with the Immediate Extraordinary Water Conservation Alert recently declared by the water department. It’s a nice touch—especially if people actually take a few minutes to install the things . . . and then immediately go outside and begin killing their front lawns and ripping out their sprinkler systems.

Skimpier showers, fuller dishwashers, and more-efficient shaving and tooth-brushing techniques are fine, but state and local water agencies calculate that 73 percent of the water consumed by Los Angeles County’s single-family homes is used outdoors. In Long Beach, that translates into more than 5.2 billion gallons of water a year.

“We make the assumption,” says Matt Lyons, director of conservation for the Long Beach Water Department, “that most of that is for lawns and plants.”

No matter how pretty they look, typical Southern California lawns and gardens are unnatural and destructive. A savannah of lawn and non-native flowers takes away natural habitat from indigenous butterflies, birds, insects, and animals. The water runoff usually carries fertilizers and pesticides—necessary to keep these non-native plant species alive—thus polluting rivers, lakes, bays, and the ocean. (Also? A single lawnmower emits as much pollution in an hour as driving a car 100 miles.)

“The typical Southern California lawn is the most-expensive landscape to maintain,” adds Lyons.

Now that’s compounded by a three-pronged drought—the lowest rainfall since Southern California started measuring it in 1877, eight years of below-normal precipitation in Northern California and Colorado, and environmental regulations that reduce the Southland’s take of other imported water.

The solution is to replace front lawns—as well as the landscaping around government buildings and the center dividers of roads—with California native plants. They use much less water, replace habitat, reduce pollution, and remind everybody about what Southern California really looks like.

“We can’t tell people they can’t have a grass lawn—at least, we don’t want to be in that position,” says Lyons. “Instead, we want to encourage people to have what we call a Beautiful Long Beach Landscape.”

The water department Website offers a variety of tips and links to facilitate that transition—for removing grass, replacing the irrigation system, and selecting native plants on the basis of soil, color, scent, and habitat. In practice, however, the process bogs down at a very crucial point.

“The hardest part was actually finding California native plants,” says Becki Ames, Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster’s chief of staff, who remodeled her front yard when she and her husband remodeled their house. “We struggled.”

Few local nurseries and home-improvement centers carry California natives in significant numbers. The best selection is at the Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano.

“I wanted my nursery to specialize in native plants,” states Annika Knoppel, president of the Garden of Eva, a 10-acre nursery that’s flourished beneath the power lines in northernmost Long Beach since 1993. “But you just don’t make a living off of it. To survive, we have to give the consumers what they want. Still, I’ve kept a pretty wide selection of natives . . . you know, just in case the public ever gets educated.”

Without education, people’s preferences in lawns and gardens tend to be hereditary, says Jorge Ochoa, a horticulture instructor in the beautiful gardens at Long Beach City College’s Pacific Coast Highway campus.

“They want that patch of grass surrounded by the plants they used to see in Grandma’s garden,” says Ochoa.

Even with education, people seem reluctant to change. “Ninety-five percent of our plants in our school garden are exotics,” Ochoa acknowledges, nodding toward a spectacular lace-cap hydrangea—leafy green with blossoms as big as your hands. “It’s difficult to see a plant like that and say you don’t want it. But with the water shortage, well, sooner or later it has to happen.”

There are signs of change, says Tracey Jenkins, who’s been working at Armstrong Garden Center in Long Beach for seven years. “Our customers’ preferences have changed enough to justify putting in a native-plant section,” she says. “We have people coming in and asking for Manzanita, sage, salvia, and native roses. They go home, plant them, and the environment has just gotten a little better.”