Still Life

The land we live on is a small patch of coastal scrub in San Carlos, California. When we moved here in 2007, it looked like a picture from a magazine, with Japanese maples, Chilean jasmine, French (via China) roses, all kept in a tidy corral by an English Box hedge (from southern Europe). 

But the garden was just that, a picture. A "still life." The plants were picture perfect, tidy and pruned. They would have fed the ecosystems in their native countries, but here, far from the insects they co-evolved with, they were simply pretty objects for us to look at.  Our gardener came and meticulously clipped the plants, mowed the lawn and aerated it. He clipped seed heads from our Mexican sage and kept things looking, well, picture perfect.  

Before: Our garden as a "still life" picture, with imported 

plants, providing no food for local ecosystems.

But as it turns out, this picture has a very steep price. 

My husband and I were so busy working that it did not occur to us that there was something seriously wrong with our 'picture garden'. This all changed in 2020 when things slowed down a bit during the pandemic. We started to spend more time in the garden and wondered why there wasn't more life there.  

The French word for a still life painting is "nature morte" or "dead nature" and I think this best describes gardens like ours - filled with imported plants that do not feed anything. Our garden seemed nice, but it was a food desert to the starving bees, butterflies, salamanders, birds and mammals. These species have been here for thousands of years and co-evolved with native plants so that they are specialized to eat certain ones. like monarch caterpillars eating only milkweed. But my house and imported garden replaced their habitat. When we multiply this by the vast number of gardens like ours across the country and the globe, these food deserts quickly become a starving planet.  

A Western Monarch nectars on a Showy Milkweed 

shortly before laying eggs on it. The monarch and 

this plant co-evolved together and it is the only food 

source for caterpillars for this butterfly and for the 

Queen butterfly as well.

So, in the fall of 2020, we decided to turn this around. We added native 'keystone' plants to our garden first. These are the plants that support the greatest number of caterpillars as these are the biggest converters of plant material to the entire remaining food chain. Native local varieties of buckwheat, manzanita, ceanothus, coffeeberry, currants, gooseberries, filled our garden.  During this first year, we started noticing a wider variety of bees and butterflies visiting the flowers. 

Common Checkered Skipper resting on sage seed heads, 

after spending her caterpillar stage on native mallow. 

As we worked, we also discovered that our landscape was not entirely 'dead.'  A massive Valley Oak produced acorns and leaves that fed mammals and insects alike. But we had not realized that in the past, we'd been working against nature through our obsessive tidiness.  As soon as the insect laden leaves, acorns, and small branches landed on the ground we would sweep them up and put them in the green bin. As our bounty was hauled off to create methane in landfills, our local birds starved. The insects, especially caterpillars, are the only foods their babies can eat. 

As soon as we learned this, we started leaving the leaves. The biodiversity exploded!  In addition to bee and butterfly diversity, we noticed moths of all sizes. There was even a humorous moment as I tried to capture a short video of an elusive but colorful one, resulting in a 'high speed chase' through the thick blanket of leaves. It escaped its opportunity for fame. With the moths came a wider variety of birds. We had never seen western bluebirds in our neighborhood before but here they were, scouting out nesting sites in our oak and foraging for insects among the leaves. Hummingbirds visited the flowers for nectar, and hovered around the oak, flicking their long tongues to catch gnats in the air (80% of their diet is protein from insects).

Lesser Black Letter Moth pupa and adult. 

Both need leaf litter and debris to overwinter 

and both provide food for baby and adult birds. 

We left the acorns on the ground, and they were eaten by deer, blue jays and woodpeckers. Acorns also provided food for three orphaned baby racoons that moved into a hollow part of the oak's trunk and a squirrel family in a hollow limb.  I gathered some acorns to start new trees to give away, but had to choose carefully as insects would bore into them immediately, again providing food that would move its way up the ecosystem. 

A young orphaned racoon finds a home and food sources

 in the embrace of a Valley Oak (Quercus lobata). 

Note that the leaves are from a soon-to-be removed 

Japanese maple that grew next to the oak, but has no wildlife value.

Now, as we enter our third year of embracing this new, yet ancient, way of gardening we look out our window and see something quite different.  It is not a static still life, but rather a living breathing and excitingly vibrant vision - a "nature vivante" that is teeming with life.

Learn more about habitat gardening here:

Habitat Revolution - California Native Plant Society (cnps.org)

Some SF Bay Area Resources:

Gardening (cnps-scv.org)

Gardening info « Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour

Design your garden here:

Calscape - Bay Area Garden Planner

Handy Habitat Checklist:

NWF_Garden-Certification-Checklist.ashx

Ahhh, sit back and enjoy the birdsong - so much nicer than our old boring lawn!