Issue 2 - September 2026
Welcome to September
Happy Sunday, everyone! Fall planting season is set to begin here in Southern California, which means it's time to talk about one of my favorite topics: California Native plants. This month I'm digging into why fall is the best time to plant them, the strange and clever ways they've adapted to survive our dry summers, and why you don't need a yard full of cactus to have a water-wise garden. I've also got some thoughts on what a slow-growing manzanita can teach us about the people in our lives.
Want to Contribute?
Starting this issue, I'm opening the newsletter up to submissions — articles, poetry, prose, whatever you've got growing in you. If you're one of my current students, just come find me in class and let's talk about it. If you're a past student or a reader I haven't had the pleasure of teaching, send me an email and we'll figure out what you'd like to share. I don't have a fancy submission form or a web page for this yet - just reach out, and we'll go from there.
Monday Live Stream
I'm back to my old usual time this week: 5:30pm, weather permitting. This one's going to be a working stream — I'll be over at my parents' place tackling some cleanup around their tangerine tree. Asparagus fern has been creeping into it, which needs to go, and the tree took some damage during the recent heat waves, so I'll be assessing what's going on and figuring out how to help it recover. Might do some light pruning while I'm at it. Come hang out and watch me get my hands dirty.
As always, if you want the reminders and links each week, join the notification list or subscribe on YouTube and turn on notifications.
In The Garden: California Native Plants
If you've driven past my yard, or seen me talk about it on a livestream, you already know I'm a little obsessed with California natives. This month, I want to get into the why — why we plant them when we do, why they look the way they look, and why keeping them alive sometimes means doing less rather than more.
Why Fall?
California native plants have spent thousands of years figuring out how to survive our long, dry summers. So when we plant in late fall, right as the rains start to arrive, we're giving them the best possible head start — months of cool, wet weather to put down roots before they have to face their first real summer test. This is why late October tends to be the sweet spot for planting. You can still plant as late as March and do just fine, but the earlier you get a native in the ground during this window, the better its odds.
Part of what's happening underground during that window matters just as much as what's happening above it. Native plants need time to build not just their own root systems, but relationships with the mycorrhizal fungi living in the soil — partnerships that help them pull in water and nutrients they'd otherwise struggle to reach on their own. This is also why so many natives don't love living in pots. Without room to stretch their roots and build those fungal relationships, they tend to stay stunted, and they have a much harder time making it through a hot summer.
How They Beat the Heat
Adaptation is really where these plants shine, and it shows up in some interesting ways.
A lot of California natives are partially or fully deciduous in summer, which throws people off if they're used to the year-round green of a lawn. As the heat sets in, some natives will yellow, brown, and drop leaves — sometimes a few, sometimes all of them. The plant isn’t dead. Less leaf surface means less water lost through photosynthesis. You can help them look a bit better through summer with a little supplemental water, but be careful — some natives can't handle much water once the weather turns hot, aside from maybe their first year or two while they're still establishing.
Then there's the question of color and texture. Take white sage — that pale, almost silvery foliage isn't just for looks. Those fine hairs covering the leaves (trichomes, if you want the technical term) reflect sunlight away from the leaf surface and trap a thin layer of humid air right against it, which slows down how fast water evaporates. It's a built-in sunscreen, more or less.
Other plants take a completely different approach and go underground. One of my favorites to point out is manroot — yes, that's really its common name, and if you've ever dug one up, you understand why. Manroot stores an enormous amount of water in a swollen underground root that can grow to a startling size over the years, letting the plant survive long dry stretches by simply living off its own reserves. Deep taproots do something similar for other species, reaching down past the dry surface layers to water tables most plants never touch. And some natives coat their leaves in a waxy cuticle that seals moisture in the way a good jacket keeps rain out.
There's a common misconception that if you want a water-wise garden, you need to fill it with cactus and succulents. And look, cacti are great — I'm not knocking them. But in our part of California, I'd actually argue that a woodland or chaparral-style garden does more for you. That kind of planting builds healthier soil that can actually absorb and hold onto rainwater, rather than just letting it run off, and it gives food and shelter to the birds, insects, and other critters that a rock garden full of succulents just can't support in the same way. With this year shaping up to be the strongest El Niño in years, if not decades, that ability to soak up and hold onto water is going to matter more than usual — a chaparral garden isn't just pretty, it’s a sponge ready to absorb those heavy rains when they arrive.
Soil, and Why I Don't Fertilize
Here's something that trips a lot of people up: California natives generally don't want amended soil. Not compost, not fertilizer. Just plain native soil, maybe a bit of mulch on top, and they're happy.
Fertilizer tends to throw the soil's microbial balance out of whack, usually by feeding more bacteria than a native plant actually benefits from. What these plants really depend on is that mycorrhizal fungal relationship I mentioned earlier, and fungi tend to do better in soil that isn't loaded up with fertilizer and an overabundance of bacteria.
If you want a quick primer on planting technique itself, I've got a full video on how to plant natives — I'll link it here rather than rehashing the whole process.
How to Plant California Native Plants
Getting Them In the Ground, and Keeping Them Alive
However you plant, a few things matter every time. Dig your hole to the right depth, and I like to water the plant in before it ever goes into the ground. I'll also build a small berm around the base — six inches to a foot out, depending on the plant's size — so I can flood that berm with about an inch of water. An inch of water travels roughly six inches down into the soil, which is usually enough to saturate a young root ball and make the surrounding soil enticing to those curious roots.
And this is where people sometimes make a critical mistake, leading to “unexplained” plant deaths. Both the root ball and the surrounding soil need to stay moist, not just one or the other. If the root ball dries out while the soil around it stays wet, the roots may never bother reaching outward — they don't have to. And if the root ball stays wet while the surrounding soil is dry, the plant is essentially still living in a pot, roots and all, with no incentive to grow beyond it.
I should also say — different natives come from very different places, and it's easy to over-generalize. We tend to say "natives don't like a lot of water," but that's mostly true of chaparral and desert species. Riparian plants, the ones that naturally grow along rivers, streams, and lake edges, can actually handle quite a bit more water than people assume. The catch is that a lot of our water here in California carries mineral salts — not table salt, but naturally occurring minerals — and those can build up in the soil over time in ways that aren't great for plant or soil health. It's part of why rainwater is so valuable whenever you can capture and use it.
For the first couple of weeks after planting, especially with a smaller root ball, I'll water every two to three days, then ease off to twice a week, then eventually settle into once a week. Once a plant reaches its first year and beyond, weekly deep watering is a solid rule of thumb for most California natives — even the ones known for wanting less water, like manzanita and ceanothus, can typically handle a weekly soak just fine. That said, many of those same lower-water plants, along with several of our native salvias, actually prefer monthly watering once they're mature. My advice is to plant in zones by water need, so you're not trying to make one watering schedule work for plants that want very different things.
I'll add one more thing I've changed my mind about over the years. For a long time I used drip irrigation on my natives because that's what I'd always heard recommended. These days, the thinking has shifted more toward overhead watering being better for a lot of natives — it more closely mimics rainfall, and it reaches the whole root zone rather than just a few concentrated points. That said, it's not universal. Toyon, for example, can develop a leaf spot problem where splashing water repeatedly hits the lower leaves, turning them dark and causing them to drop. It's a good reminder that we can't put "California natives" in one tidy box and treat them all the same way — even within our state, we've got wildly different ecosystems (desert, chaparral, woodland, riparian) behaving in wildly different ways, and the "right" answer often depends on which one your plant actually came from.
Once your natives are mature, I always point people toward Calscape.org. You can search by your address and get a list of plants that are well-suited to your specific spot, along with guidance on how often each one wants water once established.Just remember that native doesn't automatically mean local. A plant that's native to Northern California might be poorly adapted to conditions down here, and vice versa. The less adapted a plant is to where you're actually putting it, the more work it's going to take to keep it alive — which is fine if it's a food crop you're growing on purpose, but frustrating if you didn't realize you'd signed up for it.
And here's the payoff for doing all this right: get the right plants in the right spots, get them established properly, and a lot of California natives will eventually let you step back almost entirely. Some, once mature, can survive with no supplemental water at all — though I'll be honest, they'll look a bit better and greener with occasional water even if they don't strictly need it. It's a tradeoff between looks and long-term resilience, and it's really up to you which one you're optimizing for.
On Patience
One last thing worth saying: native plants mature at wildly different rates, even within the same species. Some manzanitas will reach full size in three or four years. Others, closely related, can take seven or eight. And some of the larger manzanita varieties can take decades to fill out — not unlike an oak tree, which just keeps growing, slowly, for longer than any of us will live.
Thought of the Month: Different Roots, Different Timelines
I mentioned that manzanitas can take anywhere from a few years to a few decades to reach maturity, depending on the variety. A yarrow, on the other hand, can go from seed to full bloom in a single season. Neither one is doing it wrong. They're just built differently, running on their own timelines, and they'll get where they're going in their own time.
I think the same is true of people.
Years ago, when I was working at Toys "R" Us, a woman I was trying to help got frustrated with me because I couldn't locate an item — in a department I didn't even work in — and told me, flatly, that I would never amount to anything. I remember exactly where I was standing when she said it. I remember how bad I felt at the time - part of me believed her. I was stuck at a dead-end job and I couldn’t see the future I wanted.
Not long after, I helped another customer who was looking for board games for a solid fifteen or twenty minutes. He came back to the store afterward, specifically to find me, and told me he thought I was meant for something more than working retail. I don't know if he remembers that conversation at all. I still do.
I bring this up now, years later, because I think sometimes we forget how much weight our words can carry — for better or worse — especially when we're speaking to someone who's still early in whatever they're growing into. A slow start doesn't mean a smaller outcome. It might just mean a larger root system hidden beneath the soil.
I like to think of myself as one of the slower-growing plants. It took me a while to get my roots down. Depending who you ask (and depending on my sense of humor in class on a given day), I'm probably still not fully mature. But I got here. And I think it's worth remembering, the next time we're tempted to write someone off — a student, a coworker, the employee checking us out at the store — that we might just be looking at a manzanita that hasn't hit its stride yet.
See you Monday evening for the livestream.
