Begin by asking yourself: What kind of a gardener are you?

Decide on the level of maintenance you want to invest in the garden. Try to be as honest with yourself as you can, and avoid wishful thinking.

Even with best estimates, however, people often find that they are not in fact the kind of gardener that they thought they were. This can go both ways - those who think they will want to invest a lot into their garden may find that they don’t spend as much time as they expected on maintenance. Also, gardeners who thought they would want a maintenance-free yard may find that they enjoy spending time in the space, and wouldn’t mind having more maintenance tasks to tend. You may learn something about yourself that you didn’t know before ;)

Don’t underestimate the importance of who does the work in the garden, both in terms of installation and maintenance. "Mow and Blow" type services are generally not prepared to deal with native plants, which are often best left unpruned or pruned very gently or infrequently. Most native gardens will look best pruned as few as 4 times a year! Also, eradicating all leaves removes valuable natural mulch which is important to maintain/create healthy soil. If you decide to pay someone to maintain your garden, consider hiring someone who specializes in maintaining natives, and redirect your annual expenditure toward four larger payments instead of 52 or 26 smaller ones.

All of this will dictate the choices you can make when choosing plants for your garden. If you are a low-maintenance gardener, consider how this will restrict your plant choices; conversely, if you want to spend a lot of time in the garden, consider how this will expand them.

Make a scaled (based on measurements) or rough sketch of the yard. This will be the basis for your bubble-diagram. Note locations of:

Look at existing plants. Which will you keep? Remember that the moisture level required to maintain a plant you keep will dictate which natives can be planted nearby.

What is your soil type? When houses are built, rich topsoil is often removed to make for a more solid foundation. You may need to replace or regenerate soil that has been removed. If there are piles of soil in the yard, these can be molded into mounds which add interest and will increase drainage for any plants planted there. For these reasons, you may wish to create mounds even if you don’t already have excess soil that needs to be used.

Screening. Is there an unsightly old car rusting across the street from your front bay window? Is there a view that you want to keep? Know where you will want sreening in the design. Instead of using a hedge for screening, consider an alternative such as using layered natural clusters of shrubs/trees. This is often a far more attractive alternative, and integrates well with a native design.

Hardscape. Paths that meander and narrow/widen can make a garden feel more natural and pleasant. If you create mounds, consider a path that weaves between the mounds, as if in a little valley.

Mass or repeat plants. Planting in masses or repeated patterns rather than single specimens gives each plant you use more impact in the design.

Place elements to rest or lead the eye. Besides paths, dry creek beds, rocks, mounds and green expanses of groundcover make a design more visually appealing.

Spacing. Everyone makes this mistake, even experienced designers! Make sure that you allow enough space for each plant to reach its mature size. It is far easier to add plants later to fill in gaps than to rip plants out or prune heavily later because plants were placed too closely in the design. And cheaper too! Make sure to allow ample room for plants to grow in your design.

Texture and Foliage Contrast. Mix swaths of green or grey plants among those of particular interest or contrasting foliage to both balance the garden, and to provide the eye places to rest throughout.

In general, drip irrigation is best. Even with the most well-intentioned gardener, hand-watering can be inconsistent. Most natives don’t respond to over-head spray well, either. Drip irrigation tends to work best.

How much how often? There is no magic formula that will tell you how much to water. In general, as plants are getting established (the first 1-2 years), use a moisture meter to determine when the soil is getting dry, and use this data to schedule your watering regimen. For most native plants, let soil get almost completely dry before watering. Once plants are established, you may not need to water at all if you have chosen plants well-adapted to your site’s natural conditions.

Amendment. If amending the soil with organic matter such as compost, mix amendment directly into soil in planting holes. Dig generous holes twice as wide as the plant, and use the excess soil to make a nice gradient of soil texture from the pot’s highly organic planting mix, to your underlying soil. Spreading compost over all of soil surface or rototilling will encourage weeds to take advantage of the fertile open space - don’t feed your weeds! (…unless you want to. ;)

Weeding. Hand-weeding is best, complimented with mulching (more is better!), and planting plants that will be able to crowd out and compete with your weeds. Other methods of weed control include Solarization (heating soil to high temperatures for long enough to kill weeds and their seeds by covering with black plastic for several weeks or months in spring/summer), and at a very last resort, an organic pre-emergent such as Supressa, which is a less toxic chemical alternative for weed control than other commercial products such as Roundup.

To Lawn or Not To Lawn? To be blunt, the evergreen, perfectly trimmed, watered lawn is a poor match for a dry native garden, being neither native, nor dry (some would say it's a poor match for any native garden). If you choose to include a traditional lawn in your design, keep in mind that any native that likes it very dry (Manzanita for instance) would prefer to not be within 10 feet of the lawn; also, any nearby area should be considered a relatively moist hydrozone. Arguments against having a traditional lawn include: high water usage; could be replaced by plants more friendly to local insects and other wildlife; creation of wet hydrozone in surrounding areas prevents use of other plants native to that specific locality; etc.

For aesthetic or other reasons, however, you may wish to approximate a native, drought tolerant version of this idea of an open, continuous grassy space. Of course, the key word here is "approximate." If this is of interest to you, following are some ideas on how to accomplish this.

In their natural state, native grasses have the following characteristics: they are usually bunchgrasses (grow in clumps rather than a spreading carpet); they go through an annual cycle which includes a dry, somewhat dormant stage, as well as a wet, green/growing stage; and they are better left growing some height off the ground, rather than trimmed to within just a few inches of the soil surface.

We have heard talk about how you can have a lush, green, lawn-like carpet of native grasses in front of your house, all year long; but when we ask under what conditions this has been done, the secret ingredient is that generally you have to add lots of compost to the soil, and water heavily -- much like a regular lawn. With this treatment, native grasses such as Festuca rubra may look great the first year, but as they mature, they will begin to fade as they are prevented from entering into their natural cycle of wetness followed by drought.

A good alternative to this lawn-replicating notion is a mass of plants that stay green all year with less water naturally; or, for the owner to be okay with the "lawn" going through annual cycles of partial dormancy, when the grass will be partially brown (but still alive and healthy!). Options for a continuously green space include several grass and groundcover options such as: groundcover manzanita (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi and others species); or groundcover Wild Lilac (Ceanothus sp.). For a more silvery option, try masses of Blue Fescue (Festuca ‘Siskiyou Blue’), or a close grass relative (see below for a more comprehensive list of options). For the lawn that goes partially dormant, try Carex pansa, Festuca rubra, Festuca idahoensis, or Deschampsia caespitosa. These native grasses will make a wild-looking, somewhat bumpy but soft surface that looks great with wildflowers added to the mix. And generally it's better not to mow -- these grasses will look best with a simple haircut once or twice a year.

For those who decide to remove their lawn, it should be said that there is no well-known sure-fire method for doing this. Discussion and experimentation on this topic are ongoing, and new ideas or stories of success or failure are always of interest. The techniques are largely the same as those for weed removal, but in the case of such a large expanse of vigorous "weeds", there are some additional issues to consider. Here are some techniques reputed to work with varying degrees of success, and some tips on what to be aware of when attempting them: