We were brought in to this project to restore this native hillside that had been strimmed repeatedly, leaving mostly bare earth with very little growing. The risk of erosion from run off was serious as the hillside is at around 45 degrees.

We used adaptive management (learning from our mistakes!) to bring this hillside to a beautiful state. I discovered that the exotic grasses can be controlled by simply clipping the immature seed heads off with a pair of shears. We added some light irrigation and over-seeded with native grasses.

Over time small native and non-native flowering plants have showed up among the grasses in the meadow. Some will have come from seeds that have been in the ground for many years and now have been given the right conditions to germinate. Others, like these wild strawberries have moved in more aggressively from the property gardens where they were flourishing as weeds.

This was the first garden where we tried out using coast live oak as low level sculptural elements and erosion control measures. I discuss this approach to using our native live oaks as garden elements more at length in a blog post in our Ideas and Approaches section.

The property is surrounded by wild open land and the clients share the place with many forms of wildlife People have seen wild cats here, turkeys, owls and deer.

A coyote took up residence in the neighborhood and our adventurous client allowed us to build some small wildlife corridors to allow these predators access to the property to help control the rodent population which had grown out of control in the protected, fenced garden.

The wildlife corridor was used immediately and the coyote wasn't the only animal to take advantage of the access. Here's a fox passing through.

The longevity of this project has allowed us to learn how to use other native plants over time. Here is a planting of the western sword fern on the main entry path under some native oaks. We struggled to get this area to look lush but finally got it to work well by applying several short bursts of sprayed irrigation over the course of a day. That's not enough to negatively impact the oaks, which don't like too much water, but is enough to approximate the creek side, wooded environments where these plants do best in the wild.

Where once was a lush green lawn, we replaced with the native meadow sedge, carex pansa.

And finally we stabilized another hillside using baccharis 'pigeon point' another California native.