Low-water Landscape

Life after lawn advice: start with a plan

A year and half after Stacey Parker, GATEways horticulturist for the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, took out her front lawn via cardboard sheet mulching, her yard continues to thrive. Her advice to homeowners looking to do the same: start with a plan.

Mix and match plantings for interest and easy care

Created by GATEways Horticulturist Ryan Deering along with our campus landscape architects, Sustainable Horticulture Learning by Leading students, talented volunteers, and accomplished Grounds and Landscape Services staff, these landscapes demonstrate the craft of designing interesting landscapes from a relatively short list of ornamental plants combined in different ways to create dramatic displays.

Life After Lawn Plant List

Fill your lawn-free front yard with selections that not only have less-than-lawn water needs, they also perform well in our region, look great, and benefit our ever important pollinators!

Weathering the drought: on campus and at home

Over the past year the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden has managed to cut back water use across campus by over 30% from 2013 — that is already well above Governor Brown’s recent 25% water reduction mandate. Read more about how we accomplished this using targeted tree care, irrigation improvements, lawn conversions and using regionally-appropriate plants!

(Almost) 50 Greens for Shade

Here is a list of almost 50 plants–actually it’s 33–that Stacey Parker, horticulturist with the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, has included in her  shady “new front yard” to date.

Find low-water plants with updated WUCOLS database

Thanks to the UC Davis California Center for Urban Horticulture (CCUH), which secured funding from multiple industry partners as well as the California Department of Water Resources, there’s an online resource that is a quick way to learn more about water needs of plants sold by nurseries throughout the state of California. It’s called WUCOLS, which stands for Water Use Classification of Landscape Species