 And we're live there and I'm going to go ahead and open up the room now. We are live. All right, welcome. We see you filling up the room. Always good to get a confirmation from someone in the audience that they can see our screen and hear my voice. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Also, if you know what native land you're joining us from, you could put that in the chat box. While we wait for the room to fill up. And if you don't know, you can. Whoops, what's going on here. There we go. Use this. Why can't I get in the chat box. No, that's weird. Hello. There's a great site called native land. And it's an interactive map. You can check that and see what native land you're joining us from. I'm hoping I'll be able to access the chat that got weird, but we'll figure it out. All right. I'm going to get started here right at the top of the hour. I'm going to be using the chat box. I really hope I don't know why it's not. Oh, oh, I think I got something here. It's so strange. I'm hoping it just has something to do with my, my screen sharing so it will stop after I've done screen sharing. Yes. That sounds beautiful. All right, we're going to start here just a moment. Welcome you to viewers as well. There is going to be time for Q&A. Please use that Q&A function on your zoom. And we have a very lovely guest helping us with the Q&A today. I hope that references be available. Does that mean questions? There will be time for Q&A. We will, I'm Susan will provide some great references. And once I am out of share, I'll put some links that will be very beneficial. Susan gives us a giant database list of amazing folks and resources. So I will share those out. All right, let's jump in. So we're being here today and this is drought tolerant gardening with San Francisco native plants and joined by the California Native Plants Society, our Yerba Buena chapter. So thank you for coming. We have our, our typical weather today here in San Francisco, which I love. Little foggy little sunny. The public library acknowledges that we occupy the unseated ancestral homeland of the Romiticholoni peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that the Romiticholoni understand the interconnectedness of all things and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Romiticholoni people for their enduring commitment to war rep mother earth. The indigenous protectors of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Romiticholoni have never ceded lost nor forgotten their responsibility as caretakers of this place, as well as for all the people who reside in their community. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their territorial homeland. And as universal guests we affirm their sovereign rights as first persons and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Romiticholoni community. We recognize to respectfully honor Romiticholoni people we must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge and how we care for San Francisco and all its people. And our library does this by providing lots of resources, reading lists, we love a reading list so I will put that in the chat box, and then we have events really geared towards indigenous focus. So if you ever want to see anything or you have any ideas for programs, just let me know and my email will be in the chat links. Now I just want to give you some updates on what's happening at the library we have an amazing lineup of people of people, humans, amazing humans, authors, writers, poets, artists. We had our first live event on Thursday in person and zoom we did a hybrid. So that is now beginning to happen to September 29 we have San Francisco's oldest running journal. I don't know if it's the oldest running journal, it's been going since the 80s, issue number 121 Zizava readers from Zizava issue number 121. We partner with Moab this week for Willie Shoyinka, amazing noble poet laureate and artists and activists and art book. And then that evening we have author Brian Comey Dempster who will talk about his new book of poetry about raising his son with disabilities. We went through a tech check with him and it's going to be a very emotionally and powerful and still joyful event so come check that out. Tomorrow we are celebrating Viva. That is Latinx Heritage Month for us. Tomorrow we have Jaime Cortes in conversation with you'll see more Reyes discussing Jaime's new book Gordo. Definitely check out that book. And then on Tuesday super excited to have Carolina de Robertis and Julian Delgado lo opera discussing Carolina's new book, the president and the frog and this is a partnership with San Mateo County Public Library and Berkeley Public. And now I'm going to breeze through we have a ton of events like I said, starting in October we are going to be celebrating Filipino American History Month we have cooking. We have authors, poets, flower demonstration from a local business here in San Francisco. And we have some on the same page is our bi-monthly read where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book, and we are celebrating the work of Carla Cornejo Villavan since you'll be undocumented Americans and nature boosts and more book clubs with total SF the Chronicles team Heather Knight and Peter Hartlock and November in the correct auditorium join us in the correct come on down. On the 19th Bonnie squeeze why we swam talking about swimming in our beautiful ocean and Bay. All right, did it we got through library news. And now I would love to introduce Susan Karasoff, who is a member of the California Native Plant Society Europe of women chapter. And Susan has an only only the easiest plants survive approach to gardening. She grows a buffet of colorful native edible and pollinator plants, specifically gardening to feed caterpillars bees humming birds and people. So everybody please welcome Susan. All right. And Susan Karasoff from the California Native Plant Society, the San Francisco chapter is named Yerba Buena and we're going to talk about drought tolerant San Francisco native plants. So we've got librarian Anisa Malati monitoring the YouTube chat, and we've got Mary Beth James to the do also from California Native Plant Society, monitoring the zoom question and answer the q amp a. So please put your questions in the q amp a. It's easier for us to scroll back and forth on q amp a than it is on chat so please use the q amp a. You have a lot of information, and you will be able to review it on YouTube because there's, there's just a lot of information here. We're going to talk about why plant native plants. How to garden with native plants. Then we'll talk about the details of my favorite drought tolerant native plants and gardens. So let's look at what it's like to have a year on buffet for people in wildlife in your garden and some native garden resources. So why plant native plants. Well, we have some serious insect decline going on. And because insects co evolved with native plants. And when we don't have those plants in our landscape then we also don't have the insects, all of our caterpillars learned to eat just one or a few native plants adult butterflies can eat all kinds of nectar from all kinds of plants but caterpillars need to eat the leaves of the native plants that they co evolved with and we have got specialist bees that also need pollen for their baby bees from our native plants. And we don't have insects turns out we also don't have birds. And so we need to have those insects in our landscape so that we have all of the insects and wildlife that we love to have that keep our ecosystem functioning. So we used to think that if we just stuck all of our local wildlife in a park that that would be fine. But it turns out that there are a couple of completely different studies by completely different researchers. One researchers who did studies and did a set of German nature preserves and a researcher who did research in a Puerto Rican nature preserve and they are seeing the same trends for insects which is a deep decline. Less than 4% of the land United States or national parks state parks and protected areas. So we cannot depend on parks to save our ecosystems and keep our wildlife alive. It's up to us. We've got the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and they did a study on how urban areas can support wildlife and it turns out we can do this. But urban biodiversity success factors that they came up with were native plants so that we can feed those insects that feed everybody else and green corridors for stepping stones so wildlife can move back and forth. So what you've got are some pots on a north facing balcony, you can still feed your ecosystem, and the quality of the green space so no invasive plants reducing introduced non native plants, reducing our lawns, and not using pesticides. And that pot size makes a difference because that pot you've got on your balcony is going to make a difference, but for some of our wildlife they just need a bigger space. California quail are in cubbies of 50, 50 birds at least they are a ground nesting bird, there are state bird, and they used to be native here in San Francisco and they aren't anymore because we just didn't have the space for them plus there's predators. So we're going to try to reintroduce them in both the Presidio and Golden Gate Park because those are the spaces big enough to hold a piece of quail. Recent information from the San Francisco Estuary Institute on a completely different project called Hidden Nature which is so fun so wonderful you've got to see that they've got maps of San Francisco what it used to look like, and where all of our different plants are from. Very scary chart is how many of our birds and mammals and amphibians reptiles we've lost the red is the lost and the green is the total. 68% of San Francisco is paved and less than 4% of plants in San Francisco are native so every plant we choose plant is an opportunity to feed our ecosystem. Doug tell me is a wonderful researcher he is a ethnic studies insects at the University of Delaware. And about 20 years ago he started looking into which plants actually support which plant leaves support the most caterpillars, and he was shocked to discover that different plants feed different species of caterpillars and different numbers of caterpillar species. And that information was so groundbreaking in the Delaware area that the US Forest Service paid him to replicate that work to to at least find all of the published work for every county in the United States. And that is now available at the county level at the National Wildlife Federation database so we can we can see how many caterpillar species, any particular kind of plant will support for San Francisco and oh, oh by the way, National Wildlife Federation that is both our native plants and introduced plants, and you may be shocked and horrified to see how few caterpillar species are fed by introduced plants. So that camellia that I the house we have has two camellias those leaves feed no caterpillars here. Just, just none ginkgo speed none introduced plant leaves feed between zero and two insects they're not helping our ecosystem, as opposed to the native plants where if we have willows it's over 300. We've got post live oak. It's almost 300. Our cherry freeds almost 300. We've got wonderful flowering currents, and California lilacs and maples, those local plants feed a lot of caterpillars with their leaves. And when we have caterpillars, when we have, we have more birds. So we need to have those caterpillars in our landscape, so that we can get butterflies and they can get birds. So plants evolved in San Francisco's varied soils and weather. If you look at that chart, we just have so many different kinds of soil types just in seven miles by seven miles. We've got sand, we've got clay, we have three kinds of different rock. So it, it turns out it's important to know what kind of soil you have so that you can choose plants that will be adapted to your soil and weather. I'm in the northeast part of the city in North Beach, and it is just very different weather than my friends who live over in the sunset in the Richmond who have sand and fog and wind. We've got sunny clay, they have sand and fog and wind. I've got friends who are on serpentine rock, it is amazing. So not only do we have all those different soils, we've got three north south fog and wind banks. And San Francisco, like all of California actually has very, very different weather from month to month. We have a rainy season, which is the winter. Not only do we have rain that's different from month to month, but from year to year that rainfall varies enormously. Our average is 20 inches of rain, but our rainfall ranges from seven inches to 50 inches. We get 50 inches when we have atmospheric rivers. Those are the incredible, wonderful rivers of rain that come over the Pacific and dump a lot of water here and elsewhere in California. Los Angeles depends on atmospheric rivers, we depend on atmospheric rivers. The flooding that was in Napa and Sonoma, those were due to atmospheric rivers. We've had those in San Francisco before. We get, California gets over half hour rainfall from atmospheric rivers. So the important thing here, if you are thinking, oh, climate change, it's going to be hot, I should plant something from Los Angeles, please don't. Please plant something from San Francisco that has a range all the way down to Los Angeles, so that when we have terrible rain years like we did last year when we had eight inches of rain, those plants will survive and will thrive. But they will also survive the years where we have atmospheric rivers. I moved here from Los Angeles, I grew some of my favorite plants in Los Angeles, and they all looked at the years where we had atmospheric rivers and killed right ever. They don't like that level of rain. So we need to have plants that will survive both our very dry years and our very wet years. And plants evolved in plant communities. Just talked about San Francisco Estuary Institutes Hidden Nature Project. That is an interactive map. It is just fantastic. I love it. I'm learning a ton from it. And they just rolled this out earlier this week. And for those of you who are listening, this is the, we're in September of 2021. So you may be listening later on YouTube. But this is a wonderful map if you haven't had a chance to go to the Estuary Institute and play with it. It's a lot of fun. Plants evolved in plant communities. And so in nature, when a seed is produced, falls on the ground, there's, there's some shade, there's some water. There are older plants that have deep root systems or wide root systems depending on the plant that can help nurture those baby plants along when the rains come. And our plant communities are as varied as oak woodlands, coastal dunes scrub, dunes, grasslands, riparian, which is a fancy word for creekside. Plant communities help baby plants survive in nature. And so Anisa, is my video not on? Oh, all right. I see my video. Okay. Sorry, so riparian areas are our damp areas. We actually have a bunch of damp areas. So the plants that evolved in the damp areas, not what we're going to be talking about today. We're only going to talk about the plants that evolved in the dry areas. And plant communities are the base of our local food web. Those plants help each other survive and then feed all of the other creatures in the ecosystem. So what is drought tolerant? So California summers are dry every year. If you have garden on the East Coast or the East or something. Our climate looks very, very different. If you were a new gardener, please, please, please, please do not plant in the summer. I can't plant in the summer. I'm an experienced gardener, a terrible gardener, but an experienced gardener. I don't plant in the summer. I don't plant when it's dry, only plant when it's wet. And our native plants evolved to survive those dry periods. But they, because they evolved in plant communities, they evolved with plants that have deep root systems and wide root systems to help share water and nutrients. Not all plants, even drought tolerant plants are going to be drought tolerant in your garden. So if we don't have those roots and fungus systems to share water and nutrients with nearby native plants, it's just kind of all on its own and that's just not how our plants evolved. Take a look. That's the Oakland Museum has got that wonderful California oak grass and you can see how deep those roots are. In urban areas, we're often missing existing and suburban areas. So we're missing the existing native plants. So those new baby plants don't benefit from that root sharing until there are native plants with large root systems to help them along. Another thing that happens is that in dry years, native plants will just have many fewer flowers. They've got a choice about where to put their resources, think like a plant here. I can work on growing my root systems so that I can collect more rain so that I can live through the dry summer. Or I could spend it on flowers and seeds and they just, they don't do very much. In a dry year, you'll just get a few flowers in a, I look at my garden in a dry year and I just think, oh, my plants are rolling their eyes. Really? Seriously, it's so dry. You expect me to flower? I'm not going to do that. Just a few. And then there's specific adaptations to drought. Some of our native plants have thick, fuzzy leaves, which is actually lots of fun to pet. Some of them have pale colored leaves, pale, that pale gold color on that grass or pale colored gray leaves. They don't absorb as much sun so they don't get as warm so they don't evaporate or transpire. When plants breathe, it's called transpiration. And sometimes they go dormant in the summer where their root systems are fine. And you may be used to winter dormant plants. Our maples, for instance, are just like East Coast maples in that they get color in their leaves and then they drop them in the winter. But in the summer, we have some California native plants that are what's called deciduous where you just drop your leaves. The leaves curl up, they die, but the plant is fine. It will start putting out new leaves as soon as the rains come. So which native plants are not drought tolerant? We talked about the creekside plants. We've got creekside plants, lake plants, marsh plants, we've got fens. So these are all areas that are either damp year around or they're damp for nine months. Not, not what a drought tolerant plant would be. We've got a lot of shade friendly plants and I did a presentation for the library about shade friendly native plants. A lot of those are not drought tolerant. So if you think about going when you're out walking and you're perspiring and you want to get a little shade because you want to be cooler, you get underneath a tree. Same thing with all those plants that evolved underneath trees. We handle a lot of shade, which is the good news. And we have a lot of shade friendly plants, but not all of those shade friendly plants are really drought tolerant because they're used to being shaded and they're used to not, not losing as much of their water through their leaves. We do have some shade friendly drought tolerant plants and we will talk about those together today. And when you think about California, California is this enormous place. We have all kinds of plant communities, we have all kinds of soil and weather. So a plant that would be drought, drought tolerant and say Humboldt County is not going to be drought tolerant in San Francisco and a San Francisco drought tolerant plant may not be drought tolerant down in Los Angeles and a drought in a Los Angeles plant isn't going to be drought tolerant and Death Valley. Each one of those areas has got plants that are adapted to both high rainfall and the low rainfall, and the average rainfall and the average rainfall in Humboldt County is just a whole lot higher. I planted that maple because I wanted a short maple there are two native maples to California, the big leaf maple that is native here in San Francisco and the vine maple which is native up in Humboldt. And it needs a lot more water. I was surprised. I shouldn't have been anyway. So, so do look at your local native plants for the ones that will be able to handle both the dry years and the wet years when they are established in the drought system. Some of our water districts are going to pay you to take out your lawn or your thirsty plants or your paved area and replace it with drought tolerant plants. Water districts that do that are very specific about what they consider to be a drought tolerant plant. There is something called woo calls. I don't know who named that anyway it's water use classification of landscape species. Website run by University of California. It is a really good site it asks you where you are, and you can choose very low water, low water, medium water or high water those high water plants are things like the willows in the, in the creek side or riparian ecosystems, medium plants are plants that were near those creeks, or definitely understory plants we have a delicious huckleberry bush that's a blueberry relative it's a woo calls medium plant. You don't want to plant that if you really need to use low water you're looking for the low very low or low water plants. And your water district will insist that that is what you use when you landscape which is fine those plants are easier anyway. The metropolitan water districts in Southern California which is the wholesale water district for 19 different retail water districts has started to recommend not drought tolerant plants but drought tolerant native plants they've got a new program called the water rise wise. They'll pay you to replace your turf, and they want you to use woo calls very low or low native plants marine waters got rebates Contra Costa counties got a really interesting program with some really pretty pictures on their website so even if you don't live in Contra Costa County. Go take a look at their website and look at pictures of people's front lawns what was their front lawn front areas front gardens, they're gorgeous. They will let you replace with any will calls low or very low, but the ones that seem to survive the best are the native plants I've been out walking there and it's just they've got some really nice looking front gardens. So today San Francisco public utilities program, which is my water district. It gives green infrastructure grants and urban watershed stewardship grants but those are pretty much for areas where you're taking out paved areas. The watershed actually does run down into San Mateo County, but it's just for our watershed, they are going to rebate. If you do. If you have a water saving rainwater saving container system, they'll give you rebate for that state of California's that urban greening grants they require woo calls lower very low. So just on a presentation with the state of California, they've got additional money for this additional money for restoration, both coast, coastal and waters, but also inland, all kinds of new grants have just come out from the state. That's going to be pretty amazing. So far they've only required we calls low and very low I did ask if they would consider restricting that to local native plants and wait crofits that they would but I don't think he he realized that it's not currently a requirement so please consider doing that. If you're going to spend the state's money please save water not just for the climate but also for biodiversity. So let's talk about how to garden with native plants. During rainy season can't say that enough if you're an experienced gardener you are exempt, but the rest of us, the new gardeners and the just not very good at this or the lazy, I'm also a lazy gardener. We should plant during the rainy season. You can use one of your raincoats and plant during the rainy season. I actually like to plant in the rain. It just means that I have that much less work to do and when is the plants grow. It really helps to know your soil type and to choose plants that are adapted to your soil. It helps to understand if you've got a sunny or shady area, and choose plants that are adapted to sun and shade. When we think about what plants look like in nature, sometimes they evolved in shady spaces, sometimes they evolved in very very sunny spaces a lot of our grassland plants need full sun. Pioneer plants, the plants that come after there's been a fire, they need full sun. You will be more successful if you know what your sun and shade are and what your soil are. If you just don't want to have to care, I will actually get to some plants that don't care, I promise. And I find that I am more successful when I plant larger sizes, not not five or 15 gallon those are just stupid expensive, but four inch pots or one gallon pots. So not two inch pots, those take way too much work and too much water. And please leave your leaves on the ground. Both feeds the soil and it hides caterpillars from birds that want to eat them when they're in their cocoons. So understanding your soil and your sun and shade and your water conditions in your plant size will really help you. I'm not kidding, plant turning season. Here's a little thing on checking your soil type. Because we've got these three different kinds of rock you can look at the rock and get an idea from the color and the texture. What those without rocky soil looks like so your serpentine plants are going to be different from your church plants which are different from your sandstone plants, and I'm really sorry about that. The National Park Service at the Golden Gate area has got a fantastic section about data and information sheets about our rocky soils and our other soils. And they've got a great section if your child is into geology or you think your child might like to learn about our local geology, they've got the best information on our National Park site, it's fantastic. The way you can can go figure out your soil is you can, there are a couple things you can do, you can go outside, take a spoon, and just dig some of your soil and put it into a pines or quart container and take it with you to a native garden, gardening store and just go Okay, this is my soil. What is it. The next thing you can do is you can look at home. You can take a cup of water with you and a pencil or screwdriver something pointy, go out into your backyard, poke in there, and see what you've got. If your soil chips off, it's probably rocky, and it's serpentine it's church or it's sandstone. If it doesn't chip, but it's clumpy, it might be clay, if it feels grainy it might be sand, you can pour the water into it so all of our soils, especially in the dry season, have kind of a skin on them, they're trying the soil is trying not to lose water the soil wants to retain its water to has do any roots from any plants you've got in that soil. So pouring a little bit of water on there and then waiting and then pouring some more water clay it'll sink in really slowly sand, you still have to get through that skin but once you've done that. It's going to sink in a whole lot faster. And it just feels like soft cake crumbs it might be long really do have long here in San Francisco, oddly. English gardening books assume you have low loam English gardening books are pretty to read they don't apply to us ever and neither to the East Coast books. Read California gardening books if you're interested in gardening and in learning about someone's gardening experience in California it just the rest of those people have wet summers and we just don't watering drought tolerant plants so we've got watering donations from a bunch of California Native Plant Society chapters and from the state California Native Plant Society Santa Clara Valley has got free information on their website. They've also got some wonderful videos and California Native Plant Society State has got wonderful videos as well and wonderful information on their website. Both of them have historically a bunch of zoom presentations and other video presentations that are on YouTube. Great, great place. Calscape, which is the California Native Plant Society. Plant selection website has also got some information on watering native plants and then some native native nurseries do as well last believe which isn't, which is amazing. So, plant during the rainy season, I'm not kidding. And water the plant assume what water put water in the hole, wait for it to sink in more water in the hole, wait for it to sink in, you need to get water that in that in that hole to surround it. Because if you are not actually planting in the rain, which I may be one of the few people crazy enough to do. If you're like, no, I'm not planting in the rain, then your soil needs to have water. It needs to have water in it for that plant to survive. And that water is going to be evaporating the plant in the hole and water the plant then the water will start to evaporate from the from the soil underneath that you that you dumped the water into. And then it'll hit that brand new baby plant and it'll stop and and get some water into there. Water for the for every day for the first five days after planting no matter how tiny or big that plant is. And then if it's a two inch pot you need to water it more often every other day for the first year until the next rainy season starts four inch pots three to four days one gallon pots, five to seven days. I don't plant five or 15 gallon pots, but I would think you would also need to do every five to seven days just to make sure that those roots have the opportunity to live. We do have native bulbs, a bulb is like an onion bulb or more often a pearl and involve a small bulb. So we have our bulbs, really adapted to our dry summers and so they've got to have at least two months of dry so if you've got it in a container you've got it in a, in a planted area. Just be sure not to water those they, they really know kidding needed dry. But native plants and you just have all the gorgeous wildlife show up so much color so so many friendly wonderful things. It's just a wonderful experience to see all the wildlife that enjoys your garden and look at those chewed leaves celebrate those little guys to leaves means you've got caterpillars caterpillars means you've got birds got functioning ecosystem. The functioning system is ecosystem is what it's all about two leaves or what we've got to have. So please, please leave those leaves on the ground birds are going to use their dried flower parts for nest materials. So play a bunch of things together so that if you've got dried flower parts leftover from flowers that we're flowering in the winter or the spring and they look dry in the summer birds are going to use those so please just consider the Japanese Wabi sabi aesthetic of just this is beautiful. We have to delete these things in place. The birds need the dried flower parts. They eat native plant seeds caterpillars need those leaves on the ground or soil needs those leaves on the ground, our native bees, 70% of them nest in the ground. So honey bees those are from Europe and Asia. They've got hives there. They have really big colonies are bumblebees have got maybe seven or eight little baby bees associated with them it's really small. They need to be able to nest in the ground. Sometimes they nest in abandoned some of them nest in would sort of abandoned bird, bird nests, and some of the nesting stems interestingly. So your native plants are going to feed wildlife at all the plant and wildlife stages, including when the plants go dormant so plant to feed your ecosystem in every season. All right, we're finally going to talk about plants. Let me just introduce you to how these plants were chosen because if we've got 400 plants here that are native to San Francisco and let's just say 100 of them came from the creek and and lake and marsh area. I don't know the 300 plants. Oh, I'm not talking about tree hair plants today. So what I did was I combined whatever the woocall system said on very low water use and low use low water use with cal scapes. Very low water use and low water use plus cal scapes very easy plants. And then I asked a bunch of friends, hey, have you been able to kill any of these plants and if anything was able to be killed off the list it went I have actually killed a few of the plants that that had all of that those combined factors. Yeah, if I've killed it, it's not on the list list. So I'm planning to present just the very easiest of plants, there will be some plants that are for sand, wind and fog. I am taking that information off of the internet. I've asked my friends who grow in those areas, but I have never successfully grown any sand plant, because I grow in clay, I have tried, I have tried to plant sand friendly plants in clay. They died. So can't recommend that book, but there are some easy plants. If you are living very close to the coast, and you've got Dune, what was Dune or Dune scrub area if you've got sand and fog and wind we've got easy plants that love, love that weather, and are adapted to it. So we're going to look at it from a gardener's point of view, we're going to do some icons and guides that you know what you're looking at. And then we'll look at it from garden uses ground covers shorter flowers, flowers, grasses, shrubs, vines trees, container plants and some plant collection examples. Thank you Mary Beth for that idea. So here are some guides when we were looking at these plants. We're going to look at the number of butterfly and moth caterpillar species fed by those plant leaves so that you can have birds in your garden. We're going to look for long blooming plants, something that's blooming at least for three months or longer. When I put in a plant in a garden, in my garden, I wanted to bloom and bloom and bloom and bloom and bloom. I think that I mentioned bloom, so lots of long blooming plants. I have done an edible native plant presentation for the library before. It's on the San Francisco Public Library's YouTube station YouTube channel. In that presentation, there are different kinds of parts of edible plants, just like you wouldn't eat a tomato leaf you only eat a tomato. There's nothing with any native plant. There are parts that are edible and parts that are not as edible. In this presentation only those little cherries, they mean edible. My other presentations, they always mean berries. This presentation just means that there is some edible part. If you're interested in edible native plants, please consider seeing either that California Native Plant Society website where I got a plant list for edible plants, as well as a plant list for shade plants, as well as a bunch of other plant lists, and or watch the San Francisco Public Library presentation on edible native plants. But I wanted to make sure that all of you drought tolerant gardeners know that you can still grow an edible garden, even if it's drought tolerant, which is exciting. So let's talk about ground covers. I have way too many ground covers. I go through these four plans. Red Fescue is one of our native grasses that can be mowed. Bunch grasses are really neat. Some of the native bees that we have that nest in the ground specifically like to nest in bunch grasses. Fantastic. You can mow that particular bunch grass. Yerba Buena is just the most fun plant. Our Native Plant Society chapter was named after Yerba Buena because it's delicious and it's shade friendly. And I just I love eating it. It's in the mint family. So you can eat the leaves and the flowers. And it's it's delicious. It's shade friendly. It's a fantastic plant. Douglas iris can take a lot of shade and it comes in a bunch of different colors. The species is purple, but there are a bunch of other colors in the landscape. So if you just love, love, love iris because a lot of us do they're just beautiful. This is a drought tolerant iris that's going to do beautifully in a shady spot in your garden. Seaside Daisy is a wonderful plant. It can it can handle all kinds of different soils and it blooms for months. I put in some one gallons in January and they just stopped blooming. They bloomed January to August. It's astonishing. Long bloom, really friendly can deal with some shade as well as some sun. That's what I needed in that particular space. Fantastic plant. So we've got coyote bush, which is a really interesting plant. There's a version that is a ground cover as well as some versions that are shrubs. Very, very, very drought tolerant sage brush very drought tolerant very very friendly to all kinds of different soils. They both need full sun as does that golden aster, which is just a gorgeous drought tolerant. Very all of these need full sun, no kidding full sun. They want full sun, but they're drought tolerant, they're bulletproof, and they're pretty so it's wonderful to have in the garden. If you love succulents, we have three native succulents, all of which are adapted to rocky soil. They'll also deal with sandy soil if you've got a container garden and they'll definitely want sand for that. But they do love some rock and they are important to our ecosystem we've got the bait. I'm going to get the butterfly one. We have an endangered butterfly that uses the stone crap as it's as it's baby food plant and it is that is a long blooming plant. I have personally never grown succulents and they don't like clay soil. The library did have Kitman Michael who is a California native plant society succulent enthusiast give a succulent presentation so if you love love love succulents, you might want to take a look at that but we do have three native succulents which are particularly good for our butterflies. So, these are all sand plants, I can't grow them and haven't grown them but I have heard that they are easy ground covers there's beach primrose and beach knot weed and doon tansy. Seaside daisies are a little bit of a usually if it's got beach or doon in the name in the common name, it means it really likes sand. But our native plant websites like CalScape will help you make sure that that you look for your soil. I haven't grown these, I hear they're easy and they're definitely pretty. Seaside daisies a little bit of a misnomer because it will grow on so many different kinds of soil. These are only for sand, wind and fog and they love it. So one of the weird things about putting in a new garden is you can put in this little tiny thing that's the size of a banana split or if it's a four inch pot is the size of one scoop of ice cream. And it just looks really funny because you need to put it three feet away from the next plant that's going to be because someday it's going to be three feet wide. But right now it's the size of the scoop of ice cream. So what I do when it's just this weird little landscape with like weird little bits of salad coming up is I like to spread native annual seeds because while your perennials which means it that plant stays with you every year. While your perennial is working on its root system. You've got annuals that boy they live fast they die young they've got one year to be on soil, get some rain and grow and bloom and that's what California annuals do they are fine with dry summers. Some of them are even fine in shade that miners lettuce does really well in shade. So consider getting some some of our California native plant seeds that the annuals and just scatter those in between those little pumps of salad in your garden because those will eventually get bigger. And in the meantime you've got all the annuals out there being super happy. And so these are all pretty short annuals that are going to look great in between your other new baby plants. So let's talk shorter flowers quite tall enough to be a shrub so two feet are lower, but taller than a ground cover. Gumweed is gorgeous. It's got a terrible name and I'm so sorry but it's so pretty and it's so friendly to to butterflies California fuchsia is amazing it blooms for months it is blooming in my garden right now. So it blooms in the summer and the fall when nothing else is blooming. I've got hummingbirds out there using it for food right now. It's such a great plant it does need full sun all of these need full sun. But they're pretty and they're happy, and they look fantastic. And they're great with a bunch of different soil types. Those California poppy seeds by the way, those are edible. You do want to be careful if you're going to be taking a drug test for a job. California poppy seeds show up just like opium does or heroin so get make sure you don't need it for for a couple of weeks before but you can eat California poppy seeds raw or you can cook them in poppy seed muffins there are a lot of fun to have. We've got some great shorter flowers. We've got 70 different onions here in California. They are all all those little bulbs are about the size of a pearl and you know a little bit smaller. But they're gorgeous and they're entirely edible the entire onion family if it's got allium in the name in the first word and the Latin name, then it means that it's in the onion family it's entirely edible so the bulb is edible the leaves are edible the flowers are edible the seeds are edible the seeds and the flowers taste like onion and they're delicious so they're great salads. They're great on avocado toast, so much fun to have. I cannot make myself eat the bulbs because if you eat the bulb, you don't get the leaves and the flowers and the seeds the next year so I can't make myself eat the bulbs but the flowers and the seeds and the leaves are delicious. If you love mint, coyote mint is an extremely minty plant. It does want full sun, all of these want full sun. My coyote mint gets heart shade and hates life every year, but it is entirely edible it's in the mint family so those flowers are edible the seeds are edible and the leaves are edible. All edible raw although you can also cook with them if you want to use mint and cooking. Facilia is a fabulous plant. I've got a picture of it there with a butterfly because butterflies also like to nectar on it but the bees are nuts for it. In May, it is the bees favorite plants and I really love planting for bees so it's a great plant to have. Facilia californica is a particular, it is the perennial facilia we also have some annual facilias and california aster another great plant doesn't quite meet my three month minimum, but I put in some finally this year, and it bloom for two months like really fantastic and just just super bulletproof and fantastic easy for butterflies and bees and small insects to land on it and get a snack. If you've got more of a moon like garden where you want to plant a lot of white or light colored flowers and so that when you go because if you are only going to see your garden in the and at night. You might want lighter colored flowers. So for a moon like garden, cuddweed which is a much prettier plant than its name. And pearly everlasting are beautiful white flowers in the landscape. Milkweed is not native to San Francisco weirdly, and we do have a Western monarch butterfly population, and they all need to eat milk the caterpillars all need to eat milkweed leaves. As caterpillar food. It's a pretty famous story they are long blooming plants. You're not supposed to have it within five miles of the coast. I grow it anyway because I didn't know that back when I started growing it. So if you're looking for milkweed, please grow some of the California species. Those are available at a lot of different nurseries. You might also consider buying it from seed. I recently found out that the plants are required to have a particular kind of pesticide on them, because the plants could also support the invasive light brown apple moth caterpillar as kind of a whole bunch of other species that all are being sold with pesticide on the leaf so go those from seeds. I will say that the weed and milkweed is pretty accurate it grows great from seed and a lot of places I've seen the seeds are treated with with pesticide. It's a great plant to have in landscape it's blooming in my garden right now and I love plants that bloom late summer early fall so that we can continue to feed butterflies and bees and other insects during the dry season. These are gorgeous plants. So bee plant wants a lot of shade. Brodea can take shade, ethereal spear can take shade. Brodea and ethereal spear are both bulbs so great for containers and great for rock gardens you can just stick them someplace. And they both bloom in May I think ethereal spear blooms a couple weeks before Brodea does those both have edible flowers. The bulbs would be edible cooked but don't don't eat them just let the flowers come up every year and you can eat you can eat the flowers and it's so much fun. Bee plants fantastic tiny little red, red flowers that the bees just adore and it can take a lot of shade. So Yero is one of the easiest plants you can grow. I had a friend look at some Yero we were growing in a public space and she said if if Yero weren't native, we would consider it to be a weed. It's one of the few perennials I've ever grown from seed I got some in a seed mix and it's all come up and it is a really happy plant really easy to grow. It can take a lot of shade can take a lot of sun. It is one of those plants that if it gets a little bit of water it'll grow and then a weight a little bit more water it'll grow it away. I've got some that just it is a bulletproof plant that plant is just as easy and drought tolerant as it gets. And shorter plants for sand fog and wind, dune bush lupine again, dune. That means it needs sand and coast buckwheat. So the lupines are very important plants. Our federally endangered mission blue butterfly uses our lupine plants for the caterpillars and so please if you have sandy soil please grow some of our lupines. Our sandy soils are coast buckwheat and our federally endangered green coastal green hair street butterfly uses the coast buckwheat as a caterpillar plant. So a lot of people, better people than me like to grow grasses it's it's very zen looking. I'm sort of more of a chaos, a lot of flowers I want to see a lot of bees, or I start to count. I was told that I had to have a grass in my landscape by my landscape designer and so I have one grass. And because I have that grass I have the butterfly associated with it I get a number skipper every year. So not only will you have the opportunity to grow really bulletproof plants, but they're also going to bring butterflies into your landscape it's a wonderful thing. So these two shrubs, if you just do not want to care about sun and shade you're like now I just need something tall. Malvarosa's evergreen coffee berries evergreen coffee bears got little tiny flowers that the berries are actually a little bit more. You can you can see those a little bit better but the bees love the flowers. Those are not edible berries. Just, I remember planting it before I could figure out what was edible. But it is a great evergreen plant, get to 15 feet fairly fast. And you can trim it like a hedge it's fantastic Malvarosa you can trim like a hedge I have seen it in full sun. I've seen it in full shade. It's a nice big one down at the San Mateo Arboretum really nice plant and lung looming. So, we've got mugwort, which is, it's a shorter Artemisia, Artemisia is just, we had talked about it earlier with the sagebrush and the sagebrush family it's a sagebrush cousin, supposed to be just. This one is taller than the other shorter ones gets to eight feet. I went out to shop for the white pitcher sage once, and I brought home the Southern California version instead because that's what they had and I really wanted this plant. I don't see white pitcher sage enough in the landscape. It's a great plant, it can take a lot of shade, and it's long blooming, I mean long like nine months it's great. And then you've got sand and fog and wind. Chaperrill. The chaperrill current the ribies Malvasean is going to be great. The, the ribies sanguina glutinous glutinous and the pink flowering current wants a little bit more water. This one can take a lot less at least that's what I hear I haven't thrown it. And the ocean spray sand fog and wind. It's got a slight scent. The very showy flowers, the currents have showy flowers in the winter, and the ocean sprays got showy flowers as well so lots of fun to have in the landscape. That current is a really important plant to have it blooms in the winter so it blooms between December and February, when very very few things other things are blooming and again we're going to think like a plant. In the wintertime you don't really know how much water you're going to get. And so you don't know if you want to spend all of your resources working on your root system, or if you want to flower so the few few plants that we have that flower in the winter are really important for the wildlife that likes to stay in our landscape year around like those hummingbirds. And those currents are edible so lots of fun, long gluing, great for wildlife, edible for us that the berries are it's a great plant. These are plants that need full sun, well at some hours just very, very bright, it's shallow flowers great for lots of insects yellow bush bush loop line. This is actually good on clay, as well as on sand. So I've seen it in my neighborhood. Supports over 70 different butterflies and mods. Again, some of those are endangered butterflies, very long blooming, very drought tolerant. I'm only going to talk about two plants that are not local to San Francisco one was the milkweed and the other one is the bush mallow I grow it because it blooms. If it's been a terrible terrible rain year, like the one we just had it blooms for three months. If it blooms, if it gets a really good rain year, where we got 2024 inches of rain, it'll bloom for five months. So that's a great plant to have in the landscape. It just has a few butterflies that feed on the leaves but those are the American lady butterflies, and they look. Actually, I think it's an American lady that's on that Willie sunflower so really bright orange beautiful to have in the landscape and those bright pink, those pink flowers just just blooms for months. I think you can't grow anything you can grow a bush mallow. Oh, and it wants to be 16 feet. It's not going to. You can cut it back. It'll grow. You can cut it back it'll grow so make sure to put it in a space where it can get to be as big as it wants to be. I made that mistake. And that picture is my mother in laws, because I made that mistake twice. Anyway, she likes to get that thing back. It still grows. So here are another couple of those gray plants great in the landscape, really good about all kinds of sand and fog and wind for the state California stage brush is good on all kinds of soil does want full sun. This is a little bush blooms late summer early fall so it's blooming right now small yellow flowers shallow really good for insects. There is both the ground cover version in the shrub version stage brush we saw the ground cover version. Earlier this is the, the shrub version, and there's a doon stage brush that I hear actually does well and something other than dunes but I haven't seen it myself and I haven't tried to grow it myself, but I want to. But again it says dunes so it's going to be great for sand. All of these need full sun in a no kidding need full sun kind of way. Let's look at some of our vines. So if you've got a trellis or a fence and you want this thing covered. Most of our vines are drop talent. We've got a couple that aren't, but we've got a beautiful native P, not edible but it's really pretty and the flowers are really attractive they're showing great for wildlife. We've got native climates, only one of them is, we've got to actually one of them is much more drought tolerant than the other so be sure to get the chaperone climates it's it's more drought tolerant than our other one. And we've got that beautiful pink flower and honeysuckle and Pacific Morning Glory. All of those calystigias, if you think you can grow nothing if you need to cover a large space quickly. That plant will do really well. I do not grow it here because it grows so big so fast, but I did grow it Los Angeles and it covered everything I own the the the Morning Glory that's native down in LA it's very enthusiastic plant. And we do have some drought tolerant trees, our local oak, there are oaks all kinds across California, each one of them is adapted to different kinds of soil, all of them want full sun, they are all the keystone species for their ecosystem. The Northern California oak woodland the Southern California oak woodland, we've got all kinds of different oaks so if you are in even San Mateo County. If you're in the peninsula or East Bay or North Bay you've got more oak choices than we do in San Francisco in San Francisco, we just have the coast live oak, and it gets to 70 feet. It's a big boy. And it wants to go from an acorn acorns are available in October. So use if you want to go and an oak considered just buying just just go get an acorn off a tree. If you really feel you need to buy it from a nursery by the smallest one you can get. Dig a very deep hole because the first thing that acorn does is it creates a taproot and that taproot is going to be part of a very, very large root system that will help hold your hill and help feed the rest of your ecosystem when it gets big enough. It's going to grow, it actually grows fairly quickly, because it's, it's very enthusiastic, please water it in nature they, they were able to get access to a lot more water in the ground than they are now. So do please water that but it is, it is a very bulletproof drought tolerant plant. Once it just gets past its acorn babyhood. The acorn is a lot of fun. It would prefer full sun, the oak wants full sun, the toy on wants full sun, it can deal with a little bit of shade. It is evergreen, very showy red berries in the wintertime. The story is that Hollywood was named after this plant, because people were using this to to have sort of a holly equivalent at Christmas time. It does have a range all the way does down to Southern California as does that coast coast live oak. The coast silk tassel tree is gorgeous. It only wants to grow and so in sand and fog and wind. It looks like a Christmas tree got into that plate of cookies that you left for Santa so it's got, it's kind of wide at the bottom. Do you could trim it to look like a lollipop tree if you wanted to, but please don't. Please leave those leaves and those gorgeous tassels to be all the way down to the ground, because you can plant all of the other sand plants behind it, and it will help you wind break. So it's a wonderful plant, a wonderful windbreak. You've got to plant it within a mile of the coast. It's got to have fog and wind or it's not happy. Container gardening. So a lot of us gardening containers. And so here are some gorgeous sun friendly plants. The lupines that we talked about earlier. There are a variety of these gorgeous colorful lupines that are annuals. So they're going to have annuals have very short root systems they don't want to spend their roots is there are resources on their root systems. They want to live fast I on. They want to take whatever weather they got and just bloom. And so very shallow root systems means they're great in containers that she is ages actually not local here. This is the third plant I have that's not local. Local little south of here but if what you've got us is a container garden and you want to be able to grow a sage. This is the sage you can grow and entirely edible the flowers, the leaves the seeds. We talked about the onion earlier so fun to growing containers. Gold fields tidy tips we talked about them earlier fun to grow in containers. Dotsy planting. So it's not a very showy plant. It's a grassland plant. It is the only caterpillar plant for the federally endangered Bay checker spot butterflies so if you've got a little bit of a grassland if you've got full sun. And you've got room for just a little bit of a plant that it's not too showy but it's real important. Please consider putting that in your container garden. Or in your grassland garden. We do have shade plants. We really do. We do have shade plants that do well in containers we talked about the iris and the ethereal spear and the miters lettuce and the bread. Yeah, we've got another couple we've got farewell to spring. Which depending on how much water it gets can get anywhere from pretty short to three feet tall if you're irrigating it. I, I, it is in one of our parks this year that is getting some irrigation because it's got new plants in it and we have three feet tall farewell to spring. It'll bloom all summer if it gets water. It'll just bloom for a little while in the summer if it doesn't either way, easy plant. We talked about earlier and we talked about facility earlier we talked about the facility of californica as a perennial plant that wants full sun. This great valley facility for some reason can handle some shade, and it's an annual. So it's great for your shady containers really pretty color. So let's talk about some plant collections. You can create any soil try seaside daisy because it's going to start with that winter bloom and then bloom all the way to August spring bloom from a thrill spear. You can get the year that blooms in the summer, just a fantastic set of plants and they look great together. So you could try putting the Malvarosa with the Doug Iris and the farewell to spring. Something that I have finally gotten better at is putting my taller plants in the back so Malvarosa in the back with Douglas Iris in front of it, and farewell to spring around it, because you will get the Malvarosa growing and being tall, and the Douglas Iris in the farewell to spring giving a ton of color in the spring and summer. So for those of you who are experienced native plant people and if you are experienced native plant people and I have missed any of your favorite bulletproof plants. Please put that in the Q&A so that we can all see your recommendations. These are slow growing so if you're a brand new gardener maybe don't try these the first year try them the second year they're slow growing. I want to make sure that you get some good feedback from your garden saying yes, yes, plant more of me plant more of my friends plant community woohoo you're great. I want your plants to tell you that these plants are a little slower growing, but they're fantastic in the garden and they will be bulletproof once they get through their first summer. Any of our manzanitas and or California lilacs the other thing about them is they're all very very soil specific. So they want sand, nothing but sand clay, nothing but clay, a particular kind of rock and nothing but that rock. So that's true of our manzanitas and of our California lilacs that also want full sun and a no kidding want full sun kind of way. If you're fairly new to California, those manzanitas have got that beautiful twisting red limbs and the peeling bark it's absolutely gorgeous. And the California lilac has got those eye poppingly beautiful blue flowers so so so pretty. Each one of these plants but the manzanitas and the lilacs are available as shrubs as ground covers and as tree form so be sure to know what kind of size and space you've got before you buy. Before you buy them because regardless of which one you get, they will be gorgeous. So, the water use classification landscape systems and I almost always agree, except on these three plants, these three plants are called recalls medium so if you decide to put them in your garden, your water district is not going to pay back for those, but I have found them to be drought tolerant in my garden, and there are a couple of different kinds of strawberries that which can take quite a bit of shade. I wear the Fagaria Vesca because that does better on clay, the chillensis is the one, the beach strawberry, it does better on sand, and some of the beach strawberry genetics here are actually in our supermarket strawberries. These are much smaller strawberries than our than a supermarket strawberry. And if you're thinking to yourself, oh no I've gone strawberries before and they require a lot of water. Our native strawberries don't. Those are smaller fruit and so they, they just, they don't need as much water. This is a really interesting plant. It's got gorgeous pink. So if you love pink flowers in your garden. That's fantastic. I don't know why it's what calls meeting I've got a underground cover. It is summer deciduous if it doesn't get enough water during the winter it just the leaves dry up, but the root system is fine below. And as soon as the rain start again, it'll put out new fresh green leaves and then you'll get pink flowers and the spring it's just gorgeous. What I love about this plant Mary is to me a bulletproof plant. I've got one of my neighbors garden, and one in a public garden. It does full sun to full shade. It does want to get to be 30 feet Mary Beth and I both have this plant. Mine is 12 years old it's 22 feet tall and it's not stopped growing. It's got showy white flowers, very shallow flowers so great for all kinds of insects. Delicious edible berries. And so it's like a bird feeder it's got the leaves feeding insects that the birds can eat it's got the flowers feeding insects that the birds can eat and the birds like the berries. Great, great plant. It doesn't want to be 30 feet. It doesn't want to be cut back. And this is a plant collection for sand and fog it's the beach primrose the dune the dune bush lupine and the California poppy and look at those colors together. It's spectacular. You just you're not going to find an English garden that's going to look this gorgeous. This is what native plants do they just look pretty together on this poppies I bought away any soil. So you're sitting through this you're like, oh no, I need a garden I can put in water once walk away and never ever think about it needs to be able to take care of itself. So other than weeds because an urban and suburban areas we do have a lot of weeds. These plants do well with no assistance. The miners lettuce ethereal spear that farewell to spring Yaro and the onion. If you think you can plant nothing. If you have no time to spend on it. All of these things you can buy the seeds and the bulbs and those hero seeds on the internet. You can just have the internet send you the seeds and the bulbs, and you don't even have to go to a nursery. The easiest set of plants. I know, again, experienced gardeners are online. Add your favorite easy plants. So let's look at it from the point of a buffet, because as you can tell I am obsessed with food. So we're going to talk about edible native plant buffets for people for butter for adult butterflies because all of our native plants are going to feed our butterfly caterpillars will talk about hummingbirds and the buffets. Look at all the different plants you can grow that are edible. Go see my edible presentation for more information. And all of the the adult butterflies, they tend to like to land on something flat ish. I don't know if that just gives them more opportunity to show their wings or what, but that's what they tend to like to do. Hummingbirds are what's called a generalist feeder caterpillars, very specific, very specific feeders but hummingbirds are generalist feeders humans are generalist feeders. So you could have, in fact, you probably do have non native plants introduced plants that are in your landscape that are feeding your hummingbirds. But the nice thing about growing hummingbird plants with native plants is that it's not only feeding your hummingbird. It will also feed your caterpillars. And we've got those great later season blooming plants like the California fuchsia that the hummingbird says we adore. And our bees, our bees help pollinate our fruits and vegetables and our gardens and so when we want to really help our ecosystem. If you could be okay with planting with bees that would be wonderful bees are my favorite. And there are specialists bees that really depend on our native plant pollen for their baby bees. So these are all bees can eat pollen and nectar from anywhere, but they really do love the native plants and they need that native plant pollen for those babies. Let's talk about resources. Plant lists, plant selection tools, sources for plants, bloom periods and using iNaturalist to explore and identify local plants in wildlife. We're here at the California native plant society in Yerba Buena chapter so our local chapter San Francisco plus the northern part of San Mateo County. We have a bunch of plant lists. We've got edible plants and butterflies and having birds and bees and long blooming and shade and color communities and sidewalks and containers and landscape design soft, soft scape which is a fancy landscaper phrase for you can tell the ground covers from the shrubs from the trees so pretty helpful. We just redid the butterfly handout to include more butterfly information. It's all free you can print out a plant list of anything you care about and take it with you to a native nursery and go, Okay, this is my stuff, help me with butterflies or help me with edibles. California native plant society at the state level has got a plant selection tool we call Calpscape. It does have a 10 mile radius. So, remember we're seven miles by seven miles with six different kinds of soil. It will tell you what the soil is, but it won't select for you. It doesn't let you do that. Not yet anyway we've, we've given them feedback. It will help you with ground covers it will help you with butterflies the butterfly information is fantastic to be able to go back and forth if you want that gorgeous coastal Greenhairstreet butterfly, it will tell you what the buckwheat is and the deer wheat is that feed it. It will also tell you for any particular plant that you're interested in what native plant nursery or nurseries carry that and a map of where those nurseries are located. So, lots of fun to use. Cal flora is another great tool, both Cal scape and Cal flora can show you what the range is for a plant. So again as we think about planting for for climate change, we want to plant what's local and native here in San Francisco. But if it's got a range that takes us down to Santa to Los Angeles or San Diego, that's good it means it can handle a lot less less rain. I feel like Cal flora's bloom period tool, it's just very helpful. I love my naturalist. It is a fantastic free application, both a web based version and a mobile version. You can go find the butterflies that are near you if you want to go take a look at what that oak tree looks like or a mature toy on. You can go find out what those plants look like, and go see them in our parks and other landscapes. And this way you can find out what it is that you like if you look at it you go. Hmm. Yeah, that looks nice online but I think I really want to see this in real life. That that'll take you and I naturalist is hugely helpful. This is part of an ongoing gardening series with the Cal with the San Francisco Public Library and the next presentation will be just butterflies on Saturday, January 29, 2022. Thank you so much to all the people naturalist whose photos are used and all the professionals or organizations whose photos and data I used so much thanks to San Francisco Asturian Institute for both they're making nature city project and their hidden nature project. And to Tim Wyatt and that fantastic butterfly cartoon. Thank you to all the people who have reviewed my presentations. We have California native plant society we have free lectures and free hikes, and we do restoration and we do advocacy. And all of this is free. And we want to join you in planting native plants to feed our families and our ecosystem with respect to California's limited water. So, thank you for planting native plants. Let's take some questions. I have a few people that have their hand raised three now and there's, you know, the questions in the Q amp a which have been being answered rapidly which is great. So if our three folks that have their hand raised would like to speak, Nikki. And actually really, it's really best is to put your questions in the Q amp a the hand raising, not the best way but we will see. Nikki. Okay, Nikki is left. Edgar, would you like to speak. I will allow you to talk. Hi. Hi, can you hear me. Yes. Sorry, I'm on my bicycle right now but my question was in regards to potted plants, not necessarily container but like, I don't know, maybe at most five gallons I live in apartment with only concrete so just curious if I'm dooming my native plants by keeping them in pots only. I have a California Bay right now which I'm trying to grow. Dude. That Bay tree wants to be much bigger. You're, you're right, it really does want to be big. Let's get back to containers. So you're not doing it but you might want to find a public space where you can plant that California base are wonderful. I don't have it in this presentation. I'm not really sure how drought tolerant it is. Those leaves are delicious. I had a drink at some fancy place that was orange juice cranberry juice and they took a California Bay leaf and they crushed it. And so it adds these green floral flavors and I absolutely adore it. I would recommend for containers that you use bulbs, annuals, rhizomes, those are just easier that we do have a container plant list on the website on our California native plant society ever went a website. And I welcome you to go look at that but if you, if you want to move your, your Bay tree to a public site. I will say that Department of Public Works here in San Francisco does not care. If you plant in their green spaces, as long as you don't plant anything invasive. So you could consider in the rainy season, moving your Bay tree there. On the other hand, you can just keep it, keep it on your porch for as long as you want to but by containers I meant pots, window boxes, any container it can be a takeout container with holes in the bottom. So is that does that answer your question. We're going to say yes. I'm going to ask you a question from our YouTube viewer. Do the vines need a lot of sun. How are they in the wind. So, all of the vines. All of these vines needs sun. We do have one vine that does not need sun in fact it does not want sun, and it will, in fact, get cranky to get sun. This is California Dutchman's pipe fine. It is not on this list. I can't remember if it's because it's wu calls medium or if it just genuinely needs a lot of water that that first couple years it's drought tolerant once it's established, but it does need a lot of water. It is a plant that goes back and forth between the riparian area and being an under it's understory in the riparian creek side area and it's understory in the oak woodland. So I've got to, and just put some in some public spaces this year. It's got to have. So if you're looking for for a shade friendly vine. It's Dutchman's pipe fine and it'll do fine on sand as well as on clay. All of these are going to need support they need a trellis they need a tree to grow up. So in terms of when they they want something to hold on to they don't have suckers like Ivy so they they genuinely need something they can wrap around they're not going to kill anything that they wrap around because that would not have worked for them. As they evolved, but they're not going to be as great when they will be fine. These four fine and son and Dutchman's pipe buying this fine and shade. Nope, I think we should move to the Q&A function because there's about 21 they're growing 21 and growing. So what we can get to there and we know we not maybe get to all of the questions, but we can always refer our friends to the California Native Plant Society website. We can so definitely, please check out the California Native Plant Society website and the CalScape website. So, let's see, start the beginning. So Sue you're interested in plants that do well in the Foggy Richmond District. So everything I talked about here that does well in sand and fog is going to do beautifully in the Richmond District they are evolved for that. We also have both on the California Native Plant Society you ever bring a website, we have got a biodiversity resources page. Let's see, I'll show you this one. You can see that, and this has got all of those lists, including the plant communities list so if you are in the Richmond, look at the doom list, and the doom scrub list and those are what you're going to find that do that does well in fogging sand. Someone's asking about native trees that we can plant on our street through Friends of the Urban Forest. I believe Fuff is actually on the line here. I saw Fuff put in a question. So, yes, all of these trees do well. I would, it's going to be a little easier to do a toy on than a. So as far as I'm concerned all of them do well as street trees and you can use I naturals to go take a look at that combination of what are our native trees and what does well on the street San Francisco Department of Environment has an approved San Francisco tree list. And take a look at that it's got 12 different native plants on it 10 and a native plant section. For some reason the oak and the California lilac, which comes in a tree version are both often a different section but we do have 12 that are approved. They all do great it's really a question of what your, your soil and exposure isn't and how big it gets that coast live oak wants to get 70 feet by 70 feet, possibly not going to be right for your area. The toy on is a lot more compact and easier to cut back. Coffee Berry can be turned like a tree blue elderberries is it basically a tree it's a bush. It grows fast like a shrub, but you turn it like a tree and it's great. Let me give those work for you. Jennifer's got the same question. Yes. So, Jennifer the other thing that you can do is go take a look on our naturalist and see what grows in your area that is also a native plant. And Fuff keeps raising their hand. Can we go ahead and get Fuff on the line because both his friends of the urban forest they are the group that plants, most of San Francisco street trees. And he said, yep. Okay. Fuff you may now unmute and talk. Okay, I'm going to keep talking Fuff when you get a chance and meet yourself and we'll stop and we'll we will transfer you because Fuff knows more about plantings sidewalk trees in the city than anyone else. We've got someone saying that they live on the coast in El Granada between Pacifica and half Moon Bay. Is this information transferable. Yes, absolutely. So, the best place to get information about what is specific to you is CalScape, because to make it into this presentation. Everything had to have sort of a north south range that was pretty big. Anything that I'm talking about here is going to be fine for you on the coast. Do check your soil you may be sandy windy foggy. In which case stick to those plants. We have so few native plants that are are there in our sandy windy foggy areas that's why we have that's why so many of the butterflies that are native to that area are endangered. So it makes a big difference if you plant lupines and buckwheats and deer weed. And those are the plants that are going to support so many of our beautiful coastal butterflies. Laura's talking about nasturtiums please don't plant those please pull them when you see them pull them take them home, wash them and eat them there they are completely edible but fennel is edible to please don't grow an invasive plant. No matter how pretty it is. I've got a ton of colorful plants that will do fine in the outer Richmond. Please please don't grow an invasive. So, make a really good question about the buffets. No, make that's such a good question these are the months to when to plant it always plant in the rainy season. These are the plants when you can eat it. So the sage the Yerba Buena the miners lettuce the miners lettuce really just grows during the rainy season. Yerba Buena and sage have got leaves that are available year round and so that's why that's something that you could eat at that time. So that's either when something is edible, or when it's blooming. Please please always always plant in the rainy season. So I got a question about a good place to find a professional gardener to help you. I don't know where you are located, but we're very lucky that. So professionals. California Native Plant Society the Santa Clara Valley chapter has got a whole section on their website about native plant professionals. We haven't done that yet with our chapter Yerba Buena so we know we need to. But going so if you don't live in sort of the Santa Clara Valley Peninsula area. You might want to just reach out to your California Native Plant Society chapter and send them an email and say hey this is the information that I'm looking for. So what are the spring and summer plants in the combo with the seaside daisy so pretty. It's ethereal sphere, you could also substitute the Brody area if you just got a very small space. seaside daisy is a very compact plant, it's two or three feet wide and that's about it. It's really compact and the ethereal sphere and the pretty air just their their bulbs with short will flower so if you've got a tiny garden and just want a lot of color for a long time. This is just a great combination. Laura you've got a question about a landscape gardener. I refer you to the California Native Plant Society Santa Clara Valley find a professional section. Kathleen what's the best variety you've seen of this for fog and wind and sand. We have a fog wind and sand gardener out there that would be great. I believe, Thrysa floris, which is the native one to San Francisco, can deal with fog wind and sand, but definitely check calscape, because I, I plant on clay. And garden designers for California native drought tolerant plants. Yes, please see the California Native Plant Society, Santa Clara Valley, find a native professional they've got wonderful gardeners garden designers. Do we have resources to suggest people be able to come and give your mother advice on her garden. Yes, please come see the California Native Plant Society Santa Clara Valley find a professional section. Martha questions about planting under a native live live oak dry shade needs to be dear resistant something low but it's not a shrub. Oh, Mary Beth is wonderful. And also, Las Politas nursery that I referred to. They have got a whole section on what to plant underneath an oak. Oh, we're hearing that fuff only does underserved neighborhoods now. Thank you for reminding me somebody just told me that. Yeah. Unfortunately, all of our neighbors are neighborhoods are underserved for insects. Can Coffeeberry elderberry or toy on the hard pruned for a small yard. Yes, Coffeeberry and toy on can elderberry will laugh at you. It'll be fine. It'll be hard pruned for a few months. And then once the rain start again, it will get big, but Coffeeberry and toy on three hard pruned and there are some manzanitas and some and some, you know that some California lilacs that can be hard pruned as well. I did a presentation for the library called shrubberies. And that's got a whole section on which plants, you can prune into a hedge. And that means you can hard prune it so I would go take a look at that if you don't mind. So for Western Redbud is slow growing how to help it. Western Redbud is not native San Francisco it's native to north of here and it wants a little bit more water. It is a beautiful plant but it is very slow growing. Because we just had a terrible rain year if you have a native plant that just isn't you put it in that it isn't doing very well. It's because we had a terrible rain year, it would appreciate some more water. It's like now, once a week, water it once a week, until the rain start, and that'll help it. Can I show the slide with the sun. Yeah, I'm sorry yeah all of these. I think this is any shade any so I love this is it. Yep, rose Nisertium, it's invasive, please remove it. Okay, please remove it, wash it and eat it. Please remove it. It is invasive. The California invasive plant council has got more information on invasive plants but Nisertium is absolutely positively invasive. Please, please don't, please don't grow it. If you see it, the city isn't going to use Roundup on it. The only plant that the city of San Francisco is authorized to use Roundup on is the Himalayan Blackberry. And all of the other plants do not have pesticide on them. So you can go pick Nisertium out of any green space you see that isn't privately owned. But if it's a public green space, go pick some Nisertiums, you're helping remove invasive plants, take that home and wash it and have it in salad it is delicious. What should you plant under a bay laurel. Interesting, my bay laurel doesn't lose its leaves. Oh okay I don't have one but I've got a public space that does. If you usually lose its leaves it could be that it's not getting enough water. You can plant anything in the oak woodland will be fine so you can plant seaside daisy, you can plant yarrow. Go take a look at the biodiversity resources page and pull the oak woodland plant list and all of those things do well. Huckleberry would also do well it wants a little bit more water. Thimbleberry does well, wants a little bit more water to fruit, that's going to be fine. So when you save the transcript it's only the QA Paula has got a question about saving the transcript. And he said maybe you could help us understand what to do. I'll answer her in text. Okay that sounds great. Justine you're planting in a public open space. Yes. So I'm my garden is fall. I mean at this point all I can do is add the occasional bulb. I'm planting in public spaces too. And that is what this presentation was for for experienced partners who need to plant in a public open space that doesn't have that doesn't necessarily have irrigation. I cannot believe how very happy yarrow is. So yarrow minors last is California poppies. That's what I would do in a public open space. And that that is what I'm doing in public open spaces. I am hauling water to a public open space where I've got seaside daisy, but the year is just it's it's so bulletproof. And I think once you know something drought tolerant that would work well under a redwood tree. So my recommendation for that is to go to both calscape and lost to let us and look at the redwood ecosystem and I'm assuming you're talking about the coast redwood ecosystem is completely different than the in the ecosystem. Either way, choose the redwood ecosystem. Calscape will have companion plants for redwoods. And this has got an entire plant list for both of those redwood ecosystems, go find those plants and double check them with that water use classification of landscape systems that the will calls or you can check it on calscape it'll tell you if it's low or very very low water use. And that's what you plant underneath the redwood redwoods by the way, they are having some some drought issues so your redwood is going to maybe need some water. I hear that water spritzers sort of missed on it will help keep your redwoods alive. If you're, if your coast redwood, even if your coast redwood is on the coast, it may not have gotten enough water this year. Rose, are there some euro that are native and some that are hybrids to do as well. Oh, Mary that's answering you. And yes, that's true. Although, I find that all the hybrids of our year of the accoladean melifolium seem to be doing fine in gardens. There are European euros that don't seem to do as well. And for some reason, Slote is carrying an Egyptian Euro. Yeah, don't plant that. And Francis you want a picture of my garden. Yay, thank you. Where do I have it. I've got a few pictures of my garden. That's my garden. And that looks yay. And that's also my garden. And that's, so that's the, the damp section of my garden weirdly there's a underground stream so there's a corner of my garden. Yeah, if we don't, if native drought landscape designers for for San Francisco. And some are are on that California native plant society, Santa Clara Valley list. Alexandra Harker donated some design services for the Petrero eco patch, and that thing is gorgeous and that is on serpentine so she's really good. The red flowers by the benches. So that's not a flower that is a great. So we don't have native grapes to San Francisco but we do to the rest of California and that particular native grape is called Rogers red. And it is. It's beyond beautiful. That's, that's gorgeous. It is a 40 foot plant, and it wants to be 40 feet every year. So I wouldn't put in a grapevine unless you really want a ton of compost or you have a 40 foot chain link fence that you want to have covered every year. Someone. Oh yes, I will show you the rainy season. The rainy season has also become more compressed just to make things more terrifying. We use the rainy season used to start in September, and then it used to start in October, and then it used to start in November. And yay climate change now it starts in December. So that's our rainy season. It's depressing. Really, new gardeners just plant in the rainy season. What do I do for water. Oh, I'm so glad you asked. So converting water machines to washing machines to gray water, absolutely. Strongly recommend that you go to California native plant societies, the states YouTube channel, they just did a presentation on draft tolerance. It is completely different. We just talked about, and there is a third of it that talks about converting to gray water there are a couple of good books on this art love wig and it's Brad Lancaster, probably getting that wrong. I know it's not Bert Lancaster, that's the actor, but I would recommend going to California native plant society states YouTube channel, and they will give you all that information. It's so great. I use cooking water that isn't pasta water to do a lot of my irrigation, and then I've got cisterns as well. Fantastic. Oh, nature in the city has services like garden maintenance. You're right. Thank you for reminding me nature in the city's got garden maintenance and they've got garden designers. And let's see. Meg likes the idea of leaving leaves on the ground. You're concerned about the fire hazard, and you live in Oakland on flatlands. What our fire departments are asking us to do is have defensible space around our, around our areas. And so that would be permeable landscaping something that you keep watered and suddenly you're going to use gray water on. You're right, you don't want to have dead leaves on the ground right next to your house. I do, but you don't want to. If you've got a little bit more space, at least five or six feet away from the walls of your house is where you can start leaving the dead leaves on the ground. Thank you for mentioning that appreciate that. Let's see. All the Q&A. Did we get them all let's do that. I have one more on YouTube. Okay. Let's see what plants are recommended for East side of Twin Peaks where it's foggy and windy. No sun. Apartment deck. Yes. Okay. Congratulations. That would be difficult for anything other than a native plant. And I'm strongly recommending. You are going to do containers that you do. The thing about fog and wind is that shorter is better. So, the Cyrus is going to be great. Miders lettuce is going to be amazing. Farewell to spring will be fine. It's going to do fine in the wind. It's going to give you a lot of color. It'll be fine in fog and wind. And you could add year out of that. And they will be great in containers. What else do we have? Oh, thank you for putting that nature head gardening gardening in a drought. It's in the chat as a resource. And just a reminder, we'll remind folks here it comes again. Lots and lots of what Susan has said is here in this one document for your easy to go to location. As well as the YouTube a version of this recording. You'll all be getting an email that has the same links. And yeah, it's a lot of resources. And of course, Susan's. Massive resource list is also included in here. And yeah, you can watch all of these, this one, and all of the past CNPS events on our YouTube channel. Let's see. Lisa's got a question about what to plant under Monterey Cyprus. Again, I do that combination of Las Bolitas plus Calsgate. Go find the Monterey Cyprus. Plant community. And it will tell you what will live underneath it. I have not personally planted underneath Monterey Cyprus. Monterey Cyprus is not native to San Francisco. It was planted here. They were planted here back in the 1880s. And they are failing now. So that's, that's not much fun. But if you have a healthier money or Monterey Cyprus, that will be. You'll be able to. To find that in some combination of Las Bolitas and Calsgate. The other thing you can do because Monterey Cyprus is native to Monterey, go to Calsgate. Just pretend you live in Monterey. It's not, you get it. There's a test. Most of the things that will come up for Monterey are going, are going to live underneath that Cyprus. And it's a really good question. We do have a lot of those in the city. I see Paula, I just want to confirm that I will send you an email of the transcript. I got you. It's going to do it right now. Right as soon as this ends. Thank you, Paula. Let's see. Are native plants wild and not meant to be. Put in a pot. Um, So. Native plants in wild spaces like our national parks are wild. But to be able to bring our insets back. For instance, I live. East of Venice. And San Francisco. And all of that burned in the 1906 earthquake and fire. All of it. So everything. East of Venice. Straight has been planted. So nothing is wild. East of Venice, just nothing, even the native plants. What's important that we learned from San Francisco, as to where he instituted. Is that we. Um, is that we plant. Uh, is that we plant our natives to bring back our insects and our wildlife. So it doesn't. It doesn't have to be wild to be native. To be useful to our ecosystem. We can, and in fact. We need to replace all that Ivy. All those communities. All those nasturtiums with native plants so that we can feed. Our, our insects and our wildlife. So we're going to have a native plant. If what you have are tiny little root systems because you're an annual or a bulb or a rhizome because you're an iris or an onion, you're going to be fine in a pot. They will be fine. They are not going in a pot or a container or a window box. You're not going to have the advantage of a native plant that would be in the rest of an ecosystem with, say, a big oak tree or bay leaf tree. They're not going to have the advantage of a native plant. They're not going to have the advantage of our willows. So you would have to water them a little bit more often, but you will still have advantages to your ecosystem because you're feeding insects and bees and birds. Let's see. Has Fuff been able to talk? I see that you made them. No, I asked them several times. I think we should have Fuff out. That sounds like a great program. I think we should have Fuff out. Friends of the urban forest. I got that. Finally. Yes. I think we may have with the amazing thanks and help of Mary Beth. We have answered. Oh, 85 questions. So amazing. I think we did really well, friends. And for those who just emailed or texted and chatted, I think we did really well. I think we saved. And I think we'll call it. How about that? Susan, are we good? Wonderful. And Susan mentioned she will be back in February. 29th all about butterflies. Mary Beth, thank you so much for all your amazing. Amazing. Behind the scenes help and Fuff, I see you say there, you can't unmute. You can't do that. You can't connect with you. Maybe Susan can do that. Connect us if you know somebody. Otherwise my email will be in the. Follow-up email you all get. Fuff, let's do a program. Susan will see you soon. Mary Beth, big thank you to you. And library community. Have a good one. Thanks everyone for planting natives.