Native Flowering Plants for Your SoCal Garden

Written by Kelsey W.

Gardening experts often recommend using native plants because they’re beneficial for the local environment, but some of Southern California’s most beautiful plants are also native to the area, so it just makes sense to choose these convenient flowers, bushes, and trees for your yard.

Not only will the local pollinators love your yard, but you might not need to worry so much about keeping your plants alive because you’re planting a garden that’s already amenable to the local environment. If you’re a certified plant-killer, native plants just might be the answer to ensuring you can keep your next garden alive.

Furthermore, choosing local plants is almost always the best choice for saving water, which is a common topic for most residents of Southern California. What’s the best way to have a beautiful flowering garden without the hefty water bills that might come along with it? Native plants that just sip a little bit of water are the answer.

Let’s explore some of the beautiful flowering plants that call Southern California home and how you can make them part of your gorgeous natural landscape.

Welcome the Beautiful Brittlebush to Your Home

One of the most magnificent native plants you can bring to your garden is the brittlebush, which might sound like it would look like a bunch of toothpicks on a branch, but actually grows tons of beautiful yellow flowers on its big bushy self each year.

Brittlebush, also known as Encelia farinose or Incienso, grows naturally throughout much of the Southwestern United States and enjoys a variety of growing conditions, especially drought-ridden areas like the desert. However, the plant is quite amenable to living in places that are naturally wetter, too, like the Mediterranean climate close to the California coast.

If you’re in pursuit of xeriscaping for your yard, the Brittlebush is an excellent option because it’s very drought-tolerant and thrives with a small drip-line for hydration or just the very occasional watering. In most cases, your Brittlebush doesn’t even need any external water and will grow naturally without any effort on your part once it’s established in the ground.

Each winter (late winter usually), the bush will grow beautiful yellow flowers that sort of look like daisies, and these flowers will last all the way through the spring. When the plant isn’t blooming, it will grow beautiful silvery green leaves. You can get it to grow about five feet tall, but it’s easy to keep it trimmed to a bushy height of two or three feet.

Showy Penstemons Love SoCal Gardens

The penstemon flowering plant is found across the United States in various forms, and several species are native to Southern California. Like Brittlebush, penstemon offers beautiful flowers without requiring loads of water, with some species needing zero additional water other than what they get from the sky.

Species you can plant that will thrive whether you remember to water them or not include Cleveland penstemon, also known as Penstemon clevelandii, and San Bernardino Beardtongue, also known as Penstemon caesius.

Cleveland penstemon grows natively throughout Southern California, and the Baja peninsula, and you’ll find San Bernardino Beardtongue throughout San Bernardino, as well as the San Gabriel mountains, so both of these beautiful flowering plants will feel right at home when you plant them in your SoCal garden.

You’ll get to enjoy lovely pink flowers from these delicate plants by giving them a little extra water when you first plant them, but then you can pretty much leave them alone to do their own thing. An excellent choice when you don’t always remember to water your plants, but also a great option when you’re trying to enjoy flowers in your yard without using a lot of water.

Crack Some “Fried Egg” Matilija Poppies in Your Garden

Growing all the way from Baja California northward into Santa Barbara County, the beautiful Matilija Poppy, which some call the “fried egg flower” for the way its big, beautiful, white blooms appear when they open, is a natural addition to your native Southern California garden.

These flowering plants are a wonderful addition to gardens where you want flowers but don’t want anything too colorful. The white flowers grow at the top of long green stalks and almost look majestic. With their ability to thrive all up and down the SoCal coast, they’re an easy addition to any garden.

One of the neat features of this plant is that it’ll often naturally appear in areas that were recently burned, so it’s a sign of regrowth. Another neat fact is that they produce the largest flowers of any native California flowering plant.

Matilda poppies are much the same in their watering requirements as the other plants we’ve learned about here so far. The poppies require some extra water in their first year of life – a good, deep watering every three or four weeks – but they’re quite self-sufficient once they’re established.

Enjoy Perennial Beauty with Soaproot Flowers

The soaproot plant, or Chlorogalum pomeridianum, is a bulb plant that grows natively throughout the California coast. You’ll actually see these flowers growing wild all the way up to Oregon, but you’ll also see their cheerful white flowers growing natively in SoCal, too.

Interestingly, soaproot is in the agave family of plants, but it’s not a true desert plant like where you’d find many agaves. The plant grows a bushel of long green leaves and then sends out long stalks upon which delicate white flowers with long petals grow.

You’ll normally see soaproot flowers growing from May to August, but the plant will remain green the rest of the year. One of the cool things about this plant is that the pollinators it attracts actually come at night, so the flowers tend to open in the evening. And yes, it’s possible to make soap from the bulbs of the soaproot plant.

As far as keeping your soaproot plants happy goes, the plant is like many California natives. You should give it a little extra water in its first year of life, but it will easily rely on natural rainfall once it’s established. You can forget to water it for the entire summer, and it’ll survive without much effort.

Grow Woolly Blue Curls at Your Coastal Home

If you live within 50 miles of the coast, you may want to bring home a woolly blue curls plant to your home to enjoy its beautiful light purple flowers. The plant is native all along the coastline from Mexico to Southern California, but is most comfortable at lower elevations.

Like other California natives, woolly blue curls, or Trichostema lanatum, just need some tender loving care when they’re young, and then they will grow without any external help, relying on natural rainfall with their drought-tolerant nature.

They can grow up to five feet tall if you allow them to grow without trimming them, so they’re a wonderful bush to plant as a set piece in front of your home, but you can also keep them nicely trimmed to about three feet if you’d like them to maintain a tidier bushy state. They’re also quite happy to live on a slope, if you happen to have one somewhere in your yard.

One of the reasons you may want to welcome this plant into your yard is the unique way its flowers look when they bloom. When you take a close look at them, they look fuzzy, which is how they got their common name.

Replace Your Non-Native Plants, One By One

If you have happy plants that are thriving in your yard, but most of those plants aren’t native, you don’t necessarily need to do anything drastic to change all of them out for native plants.

However, whenever one of your non-native plants starts to get tired and looks like it might benefit from retirement, selecting a native plant to replace it is a wonderful way to eventually migrate your entire yard into a vibrant and drought-tolerant garden.

Come to Green Thumb Nursery to Create a California Garden

Not sure where to start in planning your native SoCal garden? Green Thumb Nursery has all the information you need to bring your garden to life with vibrant, local species that will bring your yard beauty and joy for years to come. Drop by a Southern California Green Thumb Nursery location today to get started on creating your beautiful place.

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