Gardens and Outdoor Living

With guidance on design, renovation and staging, the work of Mike Kobeissi covers buying, selling, remodeling and building, and this index carries those subjects out of doors, to the gardens, pools and patios of a climate with dry summers.

Climate sets the terms. The Mathias Botanical Garden at UCLA explains that most of California has a Mediterranean climate of cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers, shared by only four other regions on earth. Those regions cover about 2.25 percent of the land surface yet hold about 16 percent of its plant species, and plants from the Mediterranean Basin, central Chile, the Cape of South Africa and southwestern Australia all grow well in Southern California.¹

The lawn sits awkwardly in that climate. The Los Angeles Times traced how the region’s water utilities began promoting Mediterranean gardening in its place, and reported a Santa Monica trial of two neighboring front yards in which a conventional garden of grass and bedding plants used 232 gallons of water a day in its first full month of records, against 47 gallons for a garden of natives and dry climate plants.² The outdoor room has a Californian author as well. Sunset credits Cliff May, the San Diego native who created the modern California ranch house in the 1930s, with houses that opened onto patios and interior courtyards and with the idea of a garden in every room, and notes that patio is a Spanish word carrying the Mexican custom of living and dining outdoors.³

For the garden itself, see California Native Plant Gardens, Replacing the Lawn and Mediterranean Gardens; for the pool and the patio, The Swimming Pool in Southern California and Indoor Outdoor Living.