Specialty Gardening: You Show Me Your Gardens - Part III, 0 by jkom51

jkom51 wrote:
Wow, I try to be as organic as possible, but that photo of Japanese Beetles is horrible! I think I'd freak out and get out the bug spray bigtime! No wonder you folks back East talk about them all the time. Isn't it so true that one picture is worth a thousand words?!?

We don't have a typical cottage garden, having gotten rid of all the lawn area. It doesn't rain in CA for 6 months straight, so we are accustomed to drought conditions and using plants that don't need huge amounts of water. Unfortunately many "classic" cottage plants are water hogs out here, so we use others that most regions would consider "exotics". Out here they grow great in the ground with minimal care.

In coastal Northern CA it's relatively frost-free: 3-7 days per year, although we broke that in February with a two-week frosty spell that killed quite a few plants and even young trees around here. Anyway, using evergreen plants is a real necessity because the garden must look good all year round.

Here's a bunch of photos taken a week ago:

Front yard