I’m all about natives and gardens that are appropriate for California. Everyday I think about how gardens interact with wildlife and bigger issues like global heating, the shortage of water in our dry state, and the risk of fire. Using native plants is one of the keys connecting those concerns with ethical gardening practices.

In our landscaping work we use native plants whenever we can – if they work well. However, as a garden designer I have an obligation to our clients to create not just environmentally good gardens but also gardens that are good to look at, that please the eye, as much as possible year-round, and that work well as living spaces for our clients. 

It's nice when those two goals come together. There are a handful of spectacular, hard-working plants such as manzanitas and a couple of eriogonums and some good grasses such as muhlenbergia rigens that do a lot of the heavy lifting in native gardens, but overall, the numbers of good structural plants in the California flora are quite small.

One useful idea I have come up with has been to recast our native coast live oak tree as a garden plant. Quercus agrifolia, in nature, grows to be a huge and spectacular tree that supports masses of bird, insect and plant life both in its branches and under them.

Quercus agrifolia, coast live oak, growing in the wild - photo credit Robin White

Yet it potentially has another role as a garden plant. The coast live oak lends itself easily to being shaped and kept small (managed) to fit within the confines of gardens. Starting from small beginnings, oaks can be sheared, hedged, mowed, or sculpted and can play many different roles in the garden. 

Live oak used as a garden plant (front left) - photo credit Robin White

Coast live oaks can actually spend part of their lives sheared down into small bushes even in nature. A few decades ago, I lived in Santa Cruz, the coastal California town, which is surrounded by wild parks, ranch land, forests and hundreds of square miles of rural-urban interface, a sprawl of houses in rural areas each on a few acres. 

With largely no hunting permitted, this is perfect terrain for deer to thrive. I noticed that when deer interact with native live oaks, they nibble down young seedlings, creating odd shaped natural sculptures. In some cases, this natural pruning process goes on for many years. The deer nibble and then the oaks put on new bright green growth tips, only for the deer to nibble again.

Deer-nibbled live oak bush - photo credit Robin White

Gradually, over the course of time, the oaks turn into a shield-shaped mound that grows slightly larger with each passing year. The deer won’t jump into the middle of a mound like this to eat the new leaves and neither will they push in too much from the sides, presumably because the somewhat prickly leaves and branches scratch at their legs. 

Eventually the mound of oak gets so large that a single shoot in the middle will finally grow up, out of reach of even the largest deer, and the oak finally has chance to turn into a tree. The shoot grows into a canopy and the canopy shades the old medallion which dies away. 

Large expanse of deer nibbled live oak bushes finally becoming a tree - photo credit Robin White

It seemed to me that this process could be adapted in the garden to freeze oaks in the form of blobs or mounds or even in fairly large-scale ground cover “lawns” (as long as it is possible to find a way to get in to shear them). This would put live oaks, our own, climate-adapted California native, in the ranks of the formal topiary plants along with such well-known members as yew, boxwood and privet, which have belonged in northern European gardening traditions for centuries along with plants such as olive, rosemary, myrtle and teucrium that play the same role in gardens in the Mediterranean. 

I got an opportunity to develop this idea in a garden when I was working on a project in Altadena, California. My client wanted a purely native garden but didn’t insist on it being naturalistic and was brave enough to let me both bring in some grand pieces of local stone and try out my oak idea. The plan was to use the sculptural forms of the natural stone as a foil for matching oak chunks. 

Sculpted oak mound in Altadena Garden - photo credit Robin White

Altadena is in the southern part of the native range of the coast live oak, quercus agrifolia, but well inside. The range stretches from northern California to northern Baja so the live oak was in keeping with the client’s vision of a native garden. We put the oaks on occasional summer irrigation to establish them and found that they were successful and stayed looking good year-round. Obviously, the coast live oak grows happily without irrigation in nature so is a good candidate for the completely dry garden in coastal California. The oaks in the photos of this garden were receiving 15 minutes of water once a week and were perfectly healthy for over a decade. (Unfortunately this garden was a victim of the 2025 firestorm that destroyed thousands of homes and gardens in the area).

In another installation on a native hillside in Berkeley I was able to create much larger oak mounds as part of a meadow restoration. In this case I was using the oaks as a kind of ground cover. These mounds have become so large that they have merged together into larger oak areas, pointing to a larger scale approach that could be used for wider open spaces.

Oak mounds for bank retention in Berkeley Hills - photo credit Robin White

An additional benefit to this planting on a hillside is that the oaks are performing the role of bank stabilization. Not only do the leaves deflect falling raindrops and so decrease erosion, but the roots of the oaks, mimicking the branches above, create a reinforcing mat of live wood underground that holds the hillside together. This approach might present hillside homeowners with the option of growing their own natural erosion control, instead of installing the concrete and steel mesh nets that are commonly used to anchor steep hillsides. 

Oak mounds for hillside retention in Berkeley Hills - photo credit Robin White

One final advantage to using oaks in this way is that they might be able co-exist with deer. Since my observation of deer grazing was the impetus for the whole approach it seems possible that deer could be enlisted on un-fenced properties to help with pruning.

Obviously planning any kind of topiary is not a low maintenance garden approach. The oak shapes need to be sheared about once a month during the growing season, say from March to September. This might seem a lot, but compared to the amount of time people spend grooming their lawns it is minor. And in this case the long-term investment of continually shaping plants that will look better and better over time is its own reward.