Native Growers » I wish they all could be California girls…
Just about everyone in Los Angeles has a cause, but Rene Russo’s is a decidedly lonely mission. While many of her Hollywood peers use their celebrity to exalt the hybrid Prius or bash Republicans, she is championing plants that many homeowners are unfamiliar with or, worse, dismiss as weeds.
Russo has become an advocate for the use of California native plants, which she is trying to promote as a low-maintenance panacea for the region’s water supply uncertainties.
“People have equated natives with chaparral, with brush, with dead, and it’s erroneous,’’ she said with obvious frustration in an interview at her Brentwood home.
To prove her point, Russo offered a tour of her lush garden on a recent Sunday morning while off from “Yours, Mine and Ours,’’ a remake of the 1968 Lucille Ball-Henry Fonda comedy she is filming with Dennis Quaid.
Russo, 51, said her own schooling in natives came more than five years ago, after she and her husband, Dan Gilroy, a screenwriter, bought two houses on three acres. As the couple, who have an 11-year-old daughter, set out to remodel the bigger house, Russo hired a garden designer to help her identify the tangle of flora that grew around the houses and along a steep hillside.
There was lawn everywhere,” she said.Oaks were dying,’’ she added, from over-watering. She decided to discard two-thirds of what was there — invaders such as weeping willows, acacias, Brazilian pepper — and replace them with California buckeye, Coulter pine, pitcher sage and dozens of other native species. About three-fourths completed, the garden needs little pruning and watering — every three weeks in the summer and not at all in winter — and no fertilizing, she said.
Russo’s devotion — she has lent her name to fundraisers and public events promoting natives — shows in the design of the contemporary home she is renovating. It is almost all glass, and even the front door, studded with windows, offers a generous view of her California cypress, lilac and yellow-berry toyon.
“I love the garden more than the house,’’ Russo said as she walked down the rugged paths of her property.
Just had to cross-post this piece from my other blog, Native Growers. I love California native plants, and seeing someone with as much presence and exposure (yes, literally, see “Thomas Crown Affair!”) as Rene Russo promote native plants is truly wonderful. I can’t afford the house in Brentwood, but I grow a fair number of natives on my little plot of land in Poway ( a lovely little city next to San Diego), and would sure like to see her garden!
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