It’s official - I’m a Certified California Native Plant Landscaper!
In November 2024, I completed the amazing 6-week program at the Santa Barbara Botanic garden, who partnered with Theodore Payne Foundation and California Native Plant Society to create this offering.
The program was built to enhance knowledge of native plants, seasonal maintenance, irrigation efficiency, as well as weed and pest management. And it worked!
Throughout each class I was learning the sexy stuff like plant identification, while other times it was the very important (and boring) parts like PSI and rotors or sprayers or drip lines for irrigation and other things I’ll leave to the irrigation and construction experts for now.
But plants, yes! Give me all the plants!
On one of our Saturday classes we planted a native garden at Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden in Santa Barbara with a beautiful, easy plant palette including hummingbird sage for a little shady patch, and manzanitas, deergrass, buckwheat and sages for the sunny parts.
The goal of the garden is to show the public that a native garden can be beautiful, low water and low maintenance as well as for everyone to see all the more-than-human visitors that the plants will call to - new butterflies and moths, bees, birds and other pollinators that have evolved along with these native plants.
It was a fun planting to be part of and I can’t wait to see it in spring. (It is irrigated, so it should still survive the winter even if we continue to not get any rain.)
Another great part of the class were my classmates! There were many other landscape professionals there but also a teacher who was taking on a native garden at her school, a leader at a local HOA who wanted to incorporate more natives into their landscape, and even home owners who wanted to learn more and share it with their community.
This type of work makes me hopeful for the future because even if the news cycle doesn’t highlight it…. people really do care, and people really do want to help each other. Working in the plant world is a nice reminder of all the good people out there.
So I’m looking forward to paying it forward and sharing all my new fact-based native garden wisdom to share with you and my local community
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