Summer Dormant Natives

Nobody complains about silly cold-adapted plants that lose all their leaves in the mild SoCal winter for no reason, look dreadfully bare for months, and make a huge mess we have to rake.  But let a plant try to do something sensible like go dormant in the summer because it believes it won't get water for seven months ('stress deciduous"), and it is treated as an ugly pariah. Don't discriminate against summer-dormant plants!  Know what to expect, so you don't rip them out as a loss, or think they are dying of thirst, and overwater them till they truly die. And accept that a native garden will look a bit scruffy in the summer.

Giant Coreopsis a few weeks after first water

My favorite example of a summer dormant native is the Giant Coreopsis, a plant right out of Dr. Seuss.  It will lose every speck of green in summer.  If you don't de-leaf it, its dead foliage will matt around the stalks.  People will assume you brutally neglected and killed it.  If you de-leaf, they'll think you chopped its crown off. But mere weeks after a good fall rain it is a riot of green. It seems to grow inches a day.

My native garden had been dusty and dormant through the summer.  A few things grew: the seaside daisies never quite quit blooming, and California Fuchsias did their thing.  The desert flowers kept on trucking, but they're not from around here-- they are used to the occasional summer thundershower, which we get maybe every third year.  The rest of the garden was in suspended animation, with some plants showing a little or a lot of dead foliage.  Then I soaked it with micro-sprinklers (for the first time in six months) the end of October, and within ten days the race was on.

Artemisia 'Canyon Grey' six weeks after first water-
so happy it forgot it's a prostrate grower.

California Sagebrush sprouted new fuzzy fronds overnight.  Hummingbird sage perked up. Lilac Verbena started sprouting every which way.  New California Poppies sprouted, and last year's, which had lost all their foliage, came back bigger than ever.  For California coastal native plants, "spring" is the month after the first soaking rain. Now, at the beginning of January all is lush and full.  Not much is blooming yet.   But the garden is abundant with green growth.

I talked to my SIL who lives in Utah today (New Year's Day.)  She supposed that my garden was sleeping.  No, my garden is on steroids!

Aside:  The best time for for pruning, shaping, and "dead-leafing" many natives to help them look their best is right before (or right after) the first good soaking of the fall.  But only if you like to fuss.  Lots of plants can benefit by just running your hand over the branch to free it of the shriveled remains of foliage that didn't survive the summer.  If all the leaves survived the summer, you're probably overwatering.

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