La Canada Valley Beautiful and FormLA Landscaping worked in partnership to provide La Canada/Flintridge with robust, diverse and beautiful choices for water-wise landscaping as the recent drought approached. The La Canada Public Library Gardens of the World is designed to highlight planting options from the five California climate compatible regions of the world: California, of course, the Mediterranean basin, Australia, Chile, and South Africa.

For years, La Canada Valley Beautiful, a non-profit citizen organization dedicated to landscape beautification and conservation of public venues in La Canada/Flintridge, wanted to improve the main garden of the La Canada Public Library. Despite passionate volunteer efforts and plant donations, the garden did not meet their vision.

Then President Linda Fults invited her landscape designer, Cassy Aoyagi of FormLA Landscaping, to provide ideas for the garden. After looking at the 5 distinct planting areas at the Library, Cassy suggested creating a demonstration garden to illustrate the five California-compatible climate regions of the world: California, the Mediterranean, South Africa, Chile and Australia. She knew replacement of even a few thirsty plants with these water wise choices would save families maintenance, time and money. They would also reduce the gardens’ need for pesticides and fertilizers, making them cleaner, healthier, safer places overall.

With the vision of providing an educational, water-saving resource for the community, La Cañada Valley beautiful was able to secure grants from both the City of La Cañada and the Municipal Water District.

The front garden emerged as the top priority for several reasons.Only slightly removed from high-traffic shopping centers, an eye-catching main garden had the potential of drawing visitors to the Library. FormLA Landscaping determined California natives to be the best fit for the front garden space. Not only did they find it apropos to celebrate the profound beauty of natives first, pollution from heavy vehicular traffic made it critical that plants in this area be hearty. With concerns of drought growing, the native garden took hold, using much less water, fertilizer and pesticide than had been used to maintain the rat-infested ivy it replaced.

 

The California native garden is designed to attract attention, with extraordinary focal points positioned to inspire people to come out of their way and get a closer look. Within the garden, each colorful, fragrant plant selection is labeled, so visitors can easily identify and recreate striking pairings of plants with similar needs.

 

Once the front, California-native garden was complete, La Cañada Valley Beautiful and FormLA Landscaping turned their attention to beautification of the long, lean side of the Library with foliage native to the Mediterranean. Positioned between parking and the Library entrances, great consideration was given to the encouragement of appropriate traffic flow through the space dedicated to Mediterranean basin natives. Because visitors approach the garden from many vantage points, focal points needed to evoke delight from every angle.

La Cañada Public Library now has the beginnings of a noteworthy and distinct set of demonstration gardens that takes residents and visitors halfway round the world!

 

The California-native and Mediterranean basin gardens, and supporting educational materials inside the library, teach residents to save money, time and scarce water used in landscaping. The lushness and radiance of the main garden brings on-lookers, and both gardens evoke appreciative calls to both the Library and La Cañada Valley Beautiful.

 

La Cañada Valley Beautiful has opted to host its annual Spring Event, usually a tour of La Canada’s gardens, at the Library. Along with the planted California-native and Mediterranean basin gardens, foliage in the designs for the Australian, Chilean, and South African demonstration gardens will be shown.

 

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