Juan's tip of the season: Add color to your winter landscape
By Juan Garcia
Winter has a bad rap for being drab. But you can have a vibrant, colorful landscape throughout the season. Many manzanitas (Arctostaphylos sp.) bloom in winter and early spring. Other native plants that bloom this time of year include gooseberries (Ribes sp.), lemonade berry (Rhus integrifolia) and Baja birdbush (Ornithostaphylos oppositifolia). Hummingbirds depend on these blooms in winter.
The Christmas berry (Heteromeles arbutifolia) is another beautiful evergreen shrub, providing a bounty of red berries that many species depend on during the colder months.
Juan Garcia is an IRWD Water Efficiency Specialist and a landscape guru. He's also the star of the IRWD web series "The Shed Show." Got a question for Juan? Go to IRWD.com/askjuan!
The tip of the season was originally published in the winter issue of The Dirt, an IRWD quarterly newsletter emailed to subscribers every season. To see the whole issue or subscribe, go to IRWD.com/thedirt.
