If the view from your front window is a hedge so maimed by years of buzzing that the only option is to buzz it some more, and if you have better things to do with your money than pay yard crews to torture shrubbery, it may be time to dig out that green wall and start over.

But before sharpening the pickax, dream. Dream aloud. There is no better time than February to view California's native lilac, lemonade berry, coffeeberry, gooseberry and barberry plants, most of which are in full flower at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.

A tour of Southern California's best native garden in midwinter reveals these shrubs dripping with gold, white, pink and blue flowers. Although the blossoms are admittedly fleeting accessories, they are succeeded by berries.

Apologies for language that sounds like red carpet commentary. It's unfair to the plants. Nothing draping the actresses at the Oscars can compare with the dusky elegance of the greens, mottled reds and purples of California's best native shrubs. The same goes for cut and form. Show me a gown with a stitch or flounce that can match the serration of a mahonia leaf, right.

These plants may seem formal because their leaves are stiff, but they perform workaday service in the garden. They deflect and diffuse sunlight to create a filtered understory fit for woodland flowers and picnics.

As beautiful as private landscapes can be, and they can be stunning, none can match the poetry, joy and solace of a public garden done right. As proof, look no further than Arlington Garden in Pasadena. Here, since breaking ground on the 3-acre site five years ago, neighbor Betty McKenney has seen just about every kind of human interaction.

"We have people who meditate and pray," said McKenney, left. "We have counselors and young people from a local clinic, some of whom are pretty troubled. Certainly there are schools and Scout programs. People bring their computers, or they read. They walk dogs. We see engaged couples getting photographed. Other photographers work on catalogs with their models. Last time it was a little bit risque. Some of those girls had really long legs. We see couples -- 70, 80 years old -- holding hands walking through the garden. I saw a mom one afternoon sitting with her little boy. He was eating a pomegranate and they were talking about birds. Then teenagers come in at night. We have it all."

And that's even before arriving at the plants, a mix of carefully selected, drought-tolerant California natives and Mediterranean climate zone imports, assembled in a public space that is first-class wildlife habitat and model of water conservation.

The people who did the most to make Arlington Garden are McKenney and her husband, Charles. After retiring from a computing job at Caltech (Betty) and practicing law (Charles), and quickly rethinking a brief move to Santa Barbara, these Pasadenans bought a condominium on Arlington Drive. Next door were 3 acres of mown weeds interspersed by a gaggle of palms and a few trees. This was the last remnant of Durand Mansion, a baronial monstrosity razed in the 1960s.

Caltrans bought the land during the construction of the 710 Freeway but never used it. By 2003, the city of Pasadena was holding public hearings to discuss alternative uses. "Everyone said no this, no that," Charles said. "No playing field. No parking lot. Nobody said what they did want."

Betty and Charles, himself a former Pasadena councilman, were tasked by the city to form a committee and canvass for ideas. "I thought maybe we should plant a few trees out here," Charles said. "Betty kind of patted me on the head."

The city parks department was supportive but bowed out of the design phase because its metier was playgrounds. After local colleges were enlisted to kick-start collective dreaming, Cal Poly Pomona drawings helped to visualize a public garden. By the time Betty had the idea to make it a Mediterranean climate demonstration garden, the project had backing from their councilman, parks department, Caltrans and Pasadena Water and Power.

On March 5, what has amounted to a year-long birthday party will conclude with a gala at Descanso Gardens. Everyone with $75 and a love of native plants is welcome to attend a shindig marking the 50th year of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers & Native Plants.

Celebrating the stoic glory of our native flora is a great cause, but this isn't just about the birthday of an organization affectionately called Teddy Payne by KPCC radio host John Rabe. It's not even about the English seedsman for whom the foundation is named. It's about the foundation's special projects coordinator, the homegrown horticulturist Lili Singer, who turns 61 on Saturday and whose nearly four decades of garden teaching in Southern California has much to do with the rise of not only the Theodore Payne Foundation, but also the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, the Southern California Horticultural Society, the city of Santa Monica's sustainable landscape program and many independent nurseries and private gardens.

Singer has done so much on so many fronts that she has more hats than a Stetson salesman, all western. Some will remember her as a 23-year-old who joined her father's Northridge succulent nursery, Singers’ Growing Things, in the early 1970s, or from the now-gone Merrihews nursery in Santa Monica, where she and a customer started the Southern California Gardener, a newsletter that ran from 1991 to 1999. It had thousands of subscribers and earned her a cabinet full of Quill and Trowel Awards.

For many it wasn't the newsletter that made Singer a familiar name but "The Garden Show," public radio broadcasts on KCRW between 1982 and 1996. That Friday program's heyday ended with the death of her father. At its most popular, Singer would simply chat live with gardeners. "It was live call-in, no producer, no computers," she said recently. "Sometimes I brought a Sunset book in, but it took too long to look things up so I did it all out my head."

She is so good at answering questions out of her head that when the city of Los Angeles launched its watering restrictions years ago and Angelenos were up at arms, insisting that their plants would die, public radio station KPCC asked Singer to field live calls alongside then-water chief H. David Nahai. Burbank and Pasadena water companies have since hired her to speak to their customers.

Planting season in Southern California is rarely busier than midwinter, when nursery lots crammed with Christmas trees give way to displays of fruit trees and roses. If you're haunting stores to select an apricot tree, a flowering bramble, a hedge or even a specimen tree, plant pathologist Jim Downer has a message for you: "Good gardening starts with good plant selection."

By which he means: If the stock you find is root-bound, walk away.

The advisor for the UC Cooperative Extension in Ventura County further warns that bad plants can look good in nurseries. Constant watering and pruning can conceal a multitude of problems. If you see, say, a Santa Rosa plum tree three times the size of the new bare-root stock, or a big ficus tree in a small pot with a low price, it is probably root-bound. Rather than throw it away, less scrupulous nurseries might leave it around to see if they can sucker you into buying it.

One way to check if a plant has outgrown its pot is to look down at the root ball and feel along the side of the pot to see if circularized roots are creeping up in search of space.

Another method is to ask staff to gently tilt the plant and briefly slide it from its can. A thin film of feeder roots lining the bottom can be acceptable. A coil of thick roots growing in a corkscrew around the side means that the plant is a dud.

Spare time being short and freeways being long, many of you may be tempted, as I was recently, to buy last year's bare-root trees because of their size. More plums! Faster!

As soon as I got them home and found most of them to be dramatically root-bound, I was reminded of the real bottom line: more problems, sooner.

The former librarian at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden doesn't remember exactly when the visitor wandered into her office and let drop that he was a descendant of George Engelmann. What Joan De Fato does remember is telling him that there was a grove of rare oaks on the site that had been named for his ancestor.

You don't have to be a descendant of one of the fathers of American botany to share in what De Fato recalls as his pleasure and amazement. The arboretum's grove of Quercus engelmannii, pictured above, is one of the last local stands of a native tree once so common to the foothills that an alternate common name is the Pasadena oak.

The first thing that strikes you upon reaching this group of roughly 200 trees is how much more animated it is by birds, butterflies and scampering lizards than the more cultivated parts of the garden.

The second is that it is drop-dead beautiful.

Better than beautiful. Engelmanns are the oak lover's oak. At least this is the case with Bart O'Brien, plantsman at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, who has long argued that the arboretum's stand deserves special status.

Although other Engelmann groves are in Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles counties, according to O'Brien, molecular studies have shown that the arboretum's Engelmanns are clearly distinct. The stand is their largest expression, with trees that were probably once part of the population also found at Santa Anita Park and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

The potential for gardeners here to conserve water while glorying in the California experience is as big as the state. Yet most of us don't seize it. According to local water managers, the problem is "capacity."

By capacity, they refer to the ability of chain home improvement stores to stock drought-tolerant native and Mediterranean-climate plants alongside water-hungry turf. Building native-plant capacity in big-box stores is tough. The inventory get watered to death by untrained staff, who don't know what the plants are much less what they need. So "capacity" tends to be code for "forget about it" when the subject of water conservation comes up.

Well, water managers, reality check. Nursery capacity for native plants is increasing, albeit slowly. A network of independent specialist nurseries is emerging. Most of these not only have trained staff to sell native plants but also offer courses on how to design gardens and how to tend those new Edens.

To see a fine example, glance west of the 101 freeway near the Telephone Road exit in Ventura County. There you'll see the year-old Nopalito Native Plant Nursery, above right.

Its owners, cousins Richard Sanchez, left, and Antonio Sanchez, right, joke that the idea for Nopalito came when they "got drunk one night and thought, 'What's the least profitable business we can get into?' "

Yet slightly more than a year after opening during the darkest days of a national recession, Nopalito is still there. The reason is the Sanchezes' cocktail of energy, vision and experience.

After studying sustainable agriculture at Santa Rosa Junior College, Antonio worked for the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants in Sun Valley. He emerged conversant with the habits and needs of dozens of cultivars of the region's best loved plants.

Saturday may mark the start of the 2011 calendar year, but the 2011 water year, the 12-month cycle used by hydrologists and water managers, began on Oct. 1.

Few Southern California water years have begun on such a dry note. Three months ago, a strengthening La Niña pattern in the Pacific suggested to climatologists that we were staring at a water year so potentially dry that it could make your voice rasp.

Then in December a weather system known as the Pineapple Express carried near-record rains through California. The upshot in Los Angeles County is that most places have already received half or more of the rain expected for the entire season. It's reasonable to expect that when the 2011 water year ends Sept. 30, we will have reached or surpassed the regional average of about 16 inches, with numbers that are higher in the foothills and lower in the basin.

If we all kept gardens stocked with native plants equipped to survive on local rain, and our properties were all designed to prevent rain from running off into storm drains, this would be manna. But we don't. As cheering as it was to see a new building ordinance passed in December calling for better water management in new construction, we in greater Los Angeles have a long way to go before local rainfall does much more than flow from the streets into the Pacific.

As a region that largely throws away that rainwater, we'd be in trouble if we didn't import water from elsewhere. Recently, elsewhere has been in crisis.

It's true, snow accumulation in two key places has been so good that the California Department of Water Resources recently increased promised deliveries to, among other places, Southern California.

But some may still wonder: Were the predictions of La Niña false? Is there still a drought? Should we still conserve? Should we go back to watering our lawns whenever we want, how much we want?

When the Valley Performing Arts Center opens to the public in February, others will convey the thrill of seeing a remarkable new building rise on the campus of Cal State Northridge. My admiration is reserved for the landscape architect who encircled the center with 173 native trees, then punctuated the courtyard with a Dr. Seuss-worthy assembly of succulents while achieving a tenfold reduction in the site's water use.

That landscape architect is Stephen Billings of the Santa Monica firm Pamela Burton & Co. Billings was in his 20s when the Northridge earthquake struck the campus in 1994. Now 43, he still seems young and amounts to a startling newcomer in a field where being entrusted with a public project of this scope is a career-crowning moment.

The air of precociousness about Billings only intensifies when you learn that landscape architecture wasn't his first career. That was architecture. As a graduate of Syracuse University's architecture program in 1990, he went on to work for some high-toned firms run by the likes of Dean Nota  and Richard Meier, but along the way he wearied of the paperwork and permitting of buildings and became enamored instead with what he calls the "fluidity" of landscaping. "You can test ideas and see the results really quickly," he said during a recent tour of the arts center site.

After Billings left "Uncle Dean" in the late 1990s, to his amazement, the Westside landscape architect Pamela Burton hired him. "I didn’t know anything," he recalled. "I didn't know what plants were. I didn't know Latin."

Burton's approach was trial by fire, he said. She gave him increasingly difficult work to see  if he could do it. He stuck around just long enough to make himself indispensable, then six years ago he told Burton that he was going to apply to UCLA to study for a degree in landscape architecture.

He worried that she would be upset. She was. "There was an 'Over my dead body' in there somewhere," he said with a laugh. "She said, 'You’re not going to UCLA. You're going to Harvard.' "  She then picked up the phone to help make that happen.

After completing Harvard's three-year course in two, Billings was on staff with the New York landscape firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates  when Burton called to ask what it would take to bring him back West. His first job on rejoining her firm four years ago was to design the gardens around the Valley Performing Arts Center.

The commission didn't fall from the sky but from Burton, whose work on the Cal State Northridge master plan went back three presidents, to right after the Northridge earthquake. It helps to look north of the new performing arts center -- to a memorial to the 6.7 temblor -- to understand what rebuilding the campus must have meant to any Angeleno with a soul. Burton, who has done a number of gardens and street plantings on campus since the quake, was involved early on to help the university rebound in a better, smarter form.

As Billings showed off the new center's garden last week, Colin Donahue, the associate vice president for facilities, was leading his own tour of the premises, where water consumption for irrigation has dropped from almost 9.5 million gallons a year to just shy of 900,000. Donahue's department did that while still providing lolling students and arts center visitors with a belt of Marathon turf near the new building.

The lawn was a compromise. Billings' personal choice was for wild and wavy grass, but it's not his campus, and college students do flop. This startling deep green field gives way to knolls encircling the western and northern perimeters. Billings created these knolls using soil excavated during the construction of the building.

Then came trees. Lots of them.

"It's always so hot," he said, "I thought, 'Why not create a forest?' Nobody said no, so I just kept going. I put in nearly 180 trees. All native. Sycamore, ash."

The trees serve another function. "They are a way of enclosing the space, of making it more intimate," he said.

The job of managing heat in a large courtyard next to the building included using light pavement and smaller trees and beds. However, here the dominant values aren't so much environmental as practical and aesthetic. Spiny plants such as spoon yucca and agave have been used near the building's metal siding to discourage traffic that might produce dents and graffiti. Trees, including palo verdes and Chinese pistaches, have been chosen for lacy foliage, summer flowers, striking bark and autumn color. 

A recurring theme is drought tolerance and ease of care. Succulents, grasses and flax that thrive on drip need little weeding and look swell against colored rock mulches. But what strikes you passing from bed to bed is the whimsy of the plant choices, the Flax in the Hat quality of a courtyard garden where a wacky Madagascar succulent with a periscope stalk and cabbage-like head can look you in the eye.

Even as a light rain intensified during the tour, Billings couldn't suppress his joy.

"You come out of these jobs so aware of what went wrong," he said, "but I am so happy."

So, it seems is Burton. Billings is hard at work on an even larger job, a 10-acre site around the UC San Diego Jacobs Medical Center, scheduled to open in 2015.

-- Emily Green

Green's column on sustainable gardening appears here every Friday. Bookmark the blog and check back for future installments.

Photos, from top: Aloe trees outside the new Valley Performing Arts Center at Cal State Northridge; landscape architect Stephen Billings; tall aloe growing over spiky agave, rush and grass; Seuss-like Kalanchoe beharensis growing in front of glass; wispy palo verde trees and an interesting palette of rock in the courtyard; lawn, deployed sparingly and paired with plenty of trees; a joyful Billings; spoon yucca enlisted for visual effect and to deter traffic near the building, photographed as crews readied the building for its opening. Credit: Emily Green / For The Times

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Saying goodbye to a garden

It takes a hard heart not to swoon when the liquidambars that line so many streets in greater Los Angeles conduct their flaming descent into dormancy. As if entire city blocks drawn together in a season finale weren't an eloquent enough elegy for a calendar year, the scarlet confetti of crape myrtle trees and the golden last gasp of ginkgos join the orchestra in a way that makes November and December the Southern Californian equivalent of fall back East.

There is, of course, a "but" coming, and it's a big one. We're not back East. Although the yearly curtain call of these exotic trees is undeniably glorious, they have a timing problem. It's barely fall. Winter solstice is just four days away. How bothered you are by this lag depends on how you feel about leaf blowers working on Christmas Day.

Should we cut liquidambars down? My vote is no. The old stands are mighty symbols of our past. Should we plant more of them? Not nearly as often as previous generations did. It's time to admit that attempting to replicate the East in California is like going to Hawaii for the cheese.

When using exotics for flashes of fall color in the landscape, a more elegant approach might be to see these trees as punctuation. A well-placed pomegranate or persimmon, right, flames gloriously at the end of the year without dominating the landscape or constituting a denial of place. It becomes a beautiful focal point and puts fruit on the holiday table.

The desire for wall-to-wall fall is understandable to anyone who comes from the East or who has even visited, but it's still wrong in California. Although the leaves of our native maples and grapes muster a show that can pass as Eastern autumnal brio, as a rule California native plants follow a different cycle. Their leaves are different, and so are their dormancy cycles. They're adapted to a climate in which the dormant season isn't winter, but summer.

We can't all be Virginia Paca, the gardener profiled on this blog in October who grows food and donates it to food banks. But this winter those of us with orange trees laden with fruit might take a page from the book of that Pasadenan. What more fitting holiday activity could there be than to glean our home orchards and donate fresh fruit to local pantries?

As winter closes in, that fruit very well may be oranges. It is pure serendipity that an activity that feeds people is also good for the orange trees.

Homeowners can figure out where to take harvests by going to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank's pantry locator. This column is about how best to pick and pack the fruit.

The citrus most likely to be hanging about in Southern California gardens include mandarins, early navels and late Valencias, said Mary Lu Arpaia, a UC Riverside Extension specialist. But she warns that color itself isn't necessarily a reliable indicator of ripeness.

Though navels and mandarins will probably be ready to pick, Valencias can fake out amateur orchardists. New fruit can turn orange with the onset of cool autumn weather, but it won't have achieved the delectable balance of sweetness and acidity until spring. When you find ripe Valencia oranges on a tree in December, they are last year's fruit. They will be utterly delicious and begging for harvest.

As it happens, it's good for the tree to remove these ultra-ripe oranges. Leaving old fruit on the tree saps energy that is best marshaled for next spring's bloom and successive crops.

Most of us know that the environmental toll of ornamental lawn in Southern California makes cigarettes look politically correct. Still, removing a long-tended home lawn takes a meeting of conviction and know-how. The steely inspiration will have to be yours. This column is intended only as a lawn killer's tip sheet.

There are three dominant schools of turf removal. One advocates removing the grass, another suggests poisoning it and a third calls for smothering or cooking it. Which one you choose will depend on your convictions about pesticide use, the amount of time you have and what's in the target lawn.

For many of the older homes, lawn is not one type of turf but a mix of plants, often dominated by warm season grasses such as Bermuda and St. Augustine, then studded with persistent weeds such as nutsedge and bindweed.

Warm season grasses get their name because they are dormant in the winter. What makes them such foes when it comes to removal is a formidable underground network of roots. Fragments of stems called stolons or rhizomes can quickly produce new lawn come spring and summer.

This regenerative power is why Nan Sterman, a lecturer on lawn substitutes at the Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College and an L.A. at Home contributor, warned: Whatever you do, don't rototill the soil, because that will chop up and spread those roots. "It will multiply your problems exponentially, Sterman said.

Pulling up a plant and ripping it in half at the roots is a violent way of showing affection, but for a school of groundcovers, including many grasses, bulbs and woodsy flowers, doing just that amounts to true love. So, if you have established giant rye, coral bells, irises or hummingbird sage, and you want more of the same, now is the moment to divide and separate the plants.

Short days and early showers are abetting this endeavor. If you can’t jump when the meteorologists say “rain,” do it when you have time, then give the transplants a steady, gentle watering.

How roughly or tenderly you handle division should depend on the plant. At the most painstaking end of the scale is native iris. Its relatively delicate, grass-like leaves and tuberous roots can trouble even experts such as Bob Sussman of Matilija Nursery in Moorpark.

“Non-natives you can divide at any time,” said Sussman, an iris specialist. Now, however, is the window to dig up native Pacificas. Plants moved too early -- say, in October heat -- can have a mortality rate as high as 50%. “It’s earliness that proves the killer.”

The telltale sign that the plant can be moved is new roots along the slender tuber. They are so important that the Society for Pacific Coast Native Iris advises on its website: “Consider taking only half the clump for division, leaving the other half in case the divisions do not survive.” The primer goes on to instruct: “After lifting and dividing, it is vital to keep the roots moist until they are back in the ground. Once replanted, they should be watered immediately and kept moist until they are well established.”

But when it comes to what technically falls under the unromantic heading of “asexual vegetative propagation,” suggestions go well beyond iris.

Say “divide” and Pete Veilleux of the East Bay Wilds garden design firm in Oakland will respond “ferns,” which take it with equanimity.

The first things that spring to the mind of author Barbara Eisenstein are grass and grass-like plants, including juncuses and sedges. A nice, round clump of deer grass will need time to regain its form, she warned. But it will.

The same applies to the beautiful alternative to New Zealand flax, the giant rye Canyon Prince, a California native that Eisenstein praises for its high survival rate.