Be ready for weather whiplash; plant for resilience

Drought or deluge, record heat or freezing cold; our landscapes need to be ready for anything.

Weather whiplash pushes plants to extremes. When choosing new shrubs, perennials or trees, look for plants that are resilient when subjected to a wide range of conditions. Many of those choices are low-water, too.

Longtime landscape consultant, educator, and designer Cheryl Buckwalter of Landscape Liaisons has seen the impact of extreme weather conditions – weather whiplash – throughout Northern California.

“Some years and seasons have longer periods of dry, drought-like conditions and prolonged higher temperatures,” she says. “Then, we may have milder summers, as we experienced this year. And then one year, we’ll have a welcome number of inches of rain and then the next year or two the opposite. It can be challenging for home gardeners and landscape professionals as well to know what to plant.”

Plants need to be resilient to put up with these drastic swings.

“Especially for the past several years, I have been in observation mode,” Buckwalter notes. “Wherever I go, I'm observing plants and trees: How are local California native and other plants from Mediterranean-type climates weathering and adapting to all these various conditions, which ones seem to be thriving and which ones are not.”

Buckwalter combines her observations with those of researchers, urban foresters and other experts along with firsthand experience. Choosing varieties that can cope with weather extremes is important, but so are other River-Friendly Landscape Guidelines. With an eye towards sustaining the health of our watershed, these guidelines include planting native plants, supporting wildlife and nurturing soil health while conserving water and other resources.

“These principles are interconnected; they work as a team,” Buckwalter says. “Putting them into action will help us set up our landscapes for success.”

Buckwalter’s own garden is proof of plant resilience. Her home in Cool, El Dorado County, is at about 1,500 feet elevation. In recent years, she saw her water-wise native garden buried in snow, plants bending under the weight. Yet, those bushes and perennials bounced back stronger than ever.

Among the featured plants in her resilient garden: Western redbud (Cercis occidentalis); Dark Star California lilac (Ceanothus ‘Dark Star’); toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia); Harmony manzanita (Arctostaphylos densiflora ‘Harmony’) and deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens).

Focus on trees

Keystones to any landscape are trees. Vital for shade and cooling of our neighborhoods, trees take the longest time to mature and likely will face the most challenges.