We’ll call this our first community project. Working with neighbors and fellow members Silicani Designs and Xanscapes, we put in 50+ hours of volunteer design, pruning/cleanup and installation time at Rancho Colorados Swim and Tennis Club. The space is a full-sun hillside with surprisingly good soil. The goal: a dry garden design featuring a collection of interesting and striking plants that would provide an eye-catching backdrop to the pool and a lovely plant-filled walk up the path to the tennis courts. With an extremely limited budget for materials, we started in our private collections pulling specimens that we were willing to donate/relocate and enjoy elsewhere, as well as lots of propagations and offsets. We ended up with more than 20 succulent varieties and over 10 California native plants. All of the installed plants are low or very low water requirements, which was an essential component of designing this garden. It’s a wonderful collector’s garden, which makes it difficult to choose plant highlights. A few personal favorites: Agave striata, Aloe ‘Blue Elf’, Aloe striata ‘Ghost Aloe’, and Phacelia californica. Thrilled that this is a project I will continue to enjoy with family, friends and my landscape designer buddies Karly and Xander. More photos to come as the plants do their thing.

Lafayette, California, Zone 9b

Plants: Aizoaceae, Agavaceae, Apocynaceae, Aristolochiaceae, Asclepiadaceae, Asteraceae, Cactaceae, Crassulaceae, Ericaceae, Fagaceae, Lamiaceae, Liliaceae, Lythraceae, Poaceae, Portulacaceae