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 Photo Left Photo By Joe Hu/Town Crier Above Photo By Arvind Kumar/Special To The Town CrierMelanie Cross sits in her garden next to the manmade water feature in a backyard that emphasizes native plants.
Tucked into a corner of Palo Alto located between Los Altos and Los Altos Hills is a private 1-acre garden that gets better every year. It’s one of those places you just don’t want to leave. Maybe it’s the sound of water from the two small waterfalls that punctuate the stream and pond. Maybe it’s the variety of garden rooms in a mostly open design that gives a feeling of spaciousness and draws your eye to interesting features at every turn. Or maybe it’s that the plants are mostly native, so they contribute a strong sense of place.
Melanie Cross created the garden approximately 10 years ago with a mix of Mediterranean and California native plants and each year she has added more natives.
Cross has studied native plants for 30 years. She had three goals when she chose mostly native plants for her garden.
First, she wanted to provide an inviting habitat for insects and birds – native plants excel at this task. Coyote brush is an especially good host for insects, supporting nearly 500 insect and arthropod species, according to research by the namesake of Tilden Botanic Garden. Insects, in turn, feed the birds.
Second, Cross was interested in low water usage and maintenance. Many natives flourish without additional water once established. Furthermore, “most natives require very little maintenance unless they’re overwatered,” she said.
Third, she favored specific plants like mugwort, for example. Another favorite is the grove of native alders planted three years ago, along with an arbor, to shade the west side of the house. The cool refuge under the streamside alders “smells so nice from the leaves transpiring,” she said.
Finally, native plants caught her attention on hikes. When she bought her first home 30 years ago, the former owners, who had planted some natives, encouraged Cross to visit Yerba Buena Nursery in Woodside. At the time, Los Altos Hills resident Gerda Isenberg, who founded the nursery, was available for expert consultation.
Low maintenance is an elusive goal of many landscape designs. One of the keys to achieving a low-maintenance garden is “knowing where to plant and how big the plant can get so you won’t have to prune it,” she said.
When Cross hired landscape designer Jolee Horne of Mountain View to design the plantings, they took special care to space shrubs the correct distance apart for the expected mature size, rather than planting them to make the landscape look instantly finished.
For new plantings, they used fast-growing non-natives such as gaura, Santa Barbara daisy and cistus as fillers. Native plants such as toyon, clothed in red hollylike fruit this time of year, often stay small for their first two or three years, while they are growing extensive root systems that allow them to become drought tolerant. As the native shrubs grew, the fillers were gradually removed and native grasses filled the spaces between plants.
Each time plants are removed, “it’s an opportunity to try something else,” Cross said. The lavenders that originally covered part of the sloping front garden were gradually replaced with Bee’s Bliss sage. Both the Bee’s Bliss sage and the four or five varieties of native buckwheats that flow gracefully down the hill are longer-lived and look better this time of year than the lavenders, she said.
Another aspect of low maintenance is allowing some plants to reseed and plant themselves around the garden, including coyote brush, toyon, oaks, golden currant, bush mallows, milkweeds and yarrow.
An important factor in keeping the garden low maintenance is having someone in charge who knows the plants and knows what maintenance is necessary. In this garden, Cross is that person. She closely supervises a three-person crew that works a couple of hours a week.
As the garden evolves, some parts take more time to maintain. A meadow with a labyrinth made from fieldstones with Island Pink yarrow and other plants between the stones is a high-maintenance part of the garden. Some remaining non-native plants, particularly hybrid tea roses, need extra work.
Well-behaved non-natives such as crape myrtle, fruit trees, catmint, oakleaf hydrangea, non-native flowering sages and doublefile viburnum have also earned places in the garden.
Like many local gardens, Cross’s garden has hard adobe soil that bakes in the summer sun. Because the garden covers such a large area, the soil was not amended as a whole. New plants get some compost, though, and a couple of years ago, 40 cubic yards of mulch were spread around the garden.
As in many parts of Los Altos Hills, the sloping topography improves the drainage, making it possible for natives to flourish. In mid-December, a Wayne Roderick seaside daisy’s lavender flowers were in full bloom, and a canyon sunflower brightened a dry, shady spot.
Most wildlife is welcome here. Deer are not a problem in the neighborhood. After losing 100 plants to gophers 10 years ago, Cross hired a service that keeps gophers under control by placing poison underground. No other pesticides, herbicides or sprays are used in this dog-friendly garden.
The most dramatic part of the garden is the naturalistic water feature. Water flows from a deep upper pond, down a small waterfall, into a stream that flows under a wooden bridge, down another small waterfall and into another deep pool. Streamside plants such as spicebush, alders, rushes and California wild rose surround the water feature. In warmer months, a stunning golden currant overhangs the pond.
Built by Steve Grimes of Grimes Natural Landscape in Los Altos Hills, the water feature is surprisingly low maintenance. The secret is a biofilter. No regular chemicals are needed to keep the pond clear and the fish and turtles healthy. The upper pool contains lava rocks inoculated with bacteria, which eat the nitrates that would otherwise cloud the water. Every five years, built-up sludge is cleaned out by opening a valve, and the sludge is returned to the garden as fertilizer.
Hummingbirds favor one of the stone shelves in the upper pond. On cold mornings, Cross has observed as many as seven hummingbirds waiting their turns to take a bath in the gently flowing water.
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