Extreme Mediterranean

Our climate is categorized as Mediterranean. What that means is we get almost all our rain in the winter with little to no freeze and none in the summer. I call it Extreme Mediterranean because we get so intensely hot in the summer with hardly a cloud in the sky for months and no cooling ocean breezes. Our land lies in an immense valley cut off from the Pacific Ocean by a large mountain range. It takes a special kind of plant to live here with absolutely no assistance whatsoever. Of course the native plants of the area will do this. But as I have mentioned the only native perennial plants we have on our land are Blue Oaks, some bunching grasses and some native "weeds." The rest are annuals. Don't get me wrong. Thank goodness for the annuals. If they weren't around the soil might be bare by now. And then we might get soil erosion and maybe even desertification and that would be far worse.

Our plans for zone 5 entail planting almost all perennial native plants as a wildlife corridor. And I will post on these in another entry.

Mediterranean gardening is quite popular today. Many people travel to Spain, Italy, Australia, Chile or South Africa and want to use plants from these Mediterranean climates in their own gardens. I come from a slightly different perspective. Although my climate matches the ideal mostly, I don't aspire to create park-like gardens that don't serve a larger function than beauty. I want to take the plants and the layout and tweak them to suit my permaculture plans. Some good reference books on Mediterranean plants and gardens are:

Plant Life In The World's Mediterranean Climates by Peter R. Dallman
Mediterranean Gardening A Waterwise Approach by Heidi Gildemeister
Gardening the Mediterranean Way by Heidi Gildemeister
Plants for Dry Climates by Duffield and Jones
Sunset Western Garden Book

When reading these kinds of books, I look for plants that can be used as nursery plants for other more desirable plants that are either edible for me or edible for other domestic animals. A nursery plant is one that shades and helps another plant grow and then is removed when the more desirable plant gets strong enough to stand alone. Sometimes the nursery plant can remain and become part of a guild. It just depends. These books are also great resources for plants that attract bees and birds but don't need a lot of coddling. And occasionally one plant will be listed and I will find that it has a relative that is just as tough but also more useful to me. When using the new edition of the Sunset book you can ascertain how much water it needs right from the initial description. This saves a lot of time.

Mediterranean gardens often highlight the use of evergreen plants. This is important because in the summer when the sun's glare is so intense, the cool evergreen plants give a needed respite without being water hogs. Sure you can grow a maple forest here but you will have water greedy trees whose leaves get sunburned and become tattered and broken. They just can't take it. But the tougher Mediterranean evergreen trees and shrubs are made to withstand heat, wind and drought. And they are able to withstand the heavy rain of winter as well.

Some people have suggested I just plant desert plants. I don't live in the desert no matter how hot it gets. We get lots of rain most winters and these same rains would drown many desert plants unless their drainage was perfect. Have I mentioned that our soil didn't pass the percolation test for our septic and so we had to dig pits instead of leach lines? Drown they would indeed. When I look at Plants for Dry Climates I keep this in mind.

I have also been researching dryland farming techniques which were practiced in many of these Mediterranean countries prior to pumped irrigation. More on that in a future post.