Garden like nature with plant communities

What is a plant community?

In nature, a group of plants that typically grows together in similar environmental conditions is known as a "plant community." These communities often support certain types of wildlife species that have adapted to or with them over time – sometimes over thousands of years.

Authorities define plant communities either broadly or narrowly. For Calscape, we use the broader definitions for common plant communities in California. They are chaparral, coastal scrub, grassland, woodland, forest, alpine, desert scrub, and desert woodland.

Chaparral

The plant community that is perhaps the most closely identified with our Mediterranean climate is chaparral. It is the primary source of California's bounty of garden shrubs, including mountain mahogany, toyon, summer holly, sugar bush, and the majority of manzanitas and ceanothus.

Many chaparral plants are characterized by thick, small, evergreen leaves and rigidly interwoven branches. They often form tall, dense stands of impenetrable vegetation. These drought adapted plants typically thrive in steep, hot, dry areas with shallow, well-drained, rocky soil and can be challenging to grow in gardens with heavy soils and frequent summer watering.

Coastal scrub

Coastal scrub is dominated by showy, garden-worthy plants, such as sages, sagebrushes, and buckwheats. These plants often produce lush, larger leaves in the winter and tiny, gray-green leaves in the summer. Many species in this community are referred to as “subshrubs” since they are intermediate between woody shrubs and herbaceous perennials.

Natural stands of these brittle plants are relatively low and are often easy to walk among. Coastal scrub is typically found in flatter, cooler coastal areas on soils that are either deeper or retain slightly less moisture than those that support chaparral.

Grassland

Native grassland communities in California are composed primarily of perennial bunchgrasses and sedges, liberally sprinkled with an array of annual and perennial wildflowers and numerous bulbs. Although no longer abundant, native grasslands, which include prairies and meadows, were once found from coastal bluffs to mountain valleys.

Deer grass, checkerbloom, blue-eyed grass, white mariposa lily, needlegrasses, sedges, lupines, and poppies are well-known grassland plants that provide stunning textures and colors in home gardens. However, gardeners wishing to model these attractive meadow-like settings will need to have a well-thought-out strategy for controlling weeds.

Calscape editor's note: In California, some botanists use the term "meadow" to describe high-elevation plant communities that stay fairly moist during the summer growing season. Throughout this website, meadow is used (rather than grassland) to describe communities dominated by grasses, sedges, and wildflowers.

Woodland

California is rich in woodland plant communities that are usually dominated by one or more species of oak or pine. In particular, the park-like oak woodlands of our foothills and mesas are among the most beloved natural plant communities in the state.

Woodlands have a discontinuous overstory and are therefore distinguished from forests by numerous gaps in the canopy. As a result of these openings, woodlands have a varied pattern of sunlight and shade that creates a range of microhabitats for many plant and animal species.

Their spatial diversity and rich plant palette are readily translated into beautiful gardens. Coast live oak, valley oak, California buckeye, coffeeberry, fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, hummingbird sage, creeping snowberry, western meadow rue, and currants are just a few of the many garden-friendly plants found in California’s woodlands.

Forests

Forests have a nearly continuous canopy created by one or more types of trees. California’s forest communities are divided into various categories, but for the purposes of this book, we have simply split them into two broad classes: mixed-evergreen forest and coniferous forest.

Mixed-evergreen forest contains both coniferous and broad-leaved evergreen trees that retain leaves year-round, such as madrone and California bay, along with deciduous species, such as big-leaf maple and black oak. Coast redwood, incense cedar, various pines, and other cone-bearing trees dominate the canopy of coniferous forests. Plants inhabiting the understory of California’s forests typically thrive where temperatures are cooler and moisture is more abundant.

Forest plants are well adapted to deeper soils that often contain more organic material than those of chaparral or woodlands. California’s forests offer a wealth of plants for shady gardens such as western mock orange, longleaf barberry, wild ginger, western sword fern, and redwood sorrel.

Calscape editor's note: Throughout this website, forest is used to describe both mixed-evergreen and coniferous forests.

Alpine

Alpine plant communities are found at and above tree line in California’s higher mountain ranges. Alpine plants are notable for both their diminutive size and large showy flowers. Cliff-maids, alum roots, and penstemons are some of the genera represented in California’s alpine flora. Many of these plants can be difficult to cultivate in low-elevation gardens, but some grow successfully in rock gardens or containers.

Adaptable species from alpine plant communities combine well in rock gardens with other small-scale plants, such as dudleyas, coyote mints, or irises.

Desert scrub and desert woodland

Although the deserts do not share California’s Mediterranean climate and lie east and south of the California Floristic Province, they are the source of some excellent garden plants, especially for warm valleys and foothills. Desert scrub and desert woodland are two broad plant communities that occur in or along the edge of California’s deserts.

Desert scrub supports such distinctive species as Great Basin sagebrush, desert beargrass, apricot mallow, chuparosa, and Mojave yucca. Desert woodlands are home to desert willow, singleleaf pinyon, palo verde, and desert lavender.

Wetlands

California also has dozens of water-dependent plant communities, and they typically occur within one or more of the other communities described here. They range from those where moisture is relatively ephemeral, such as vernal pools, seasonal streams, and seeps, to ones where it can be abundant, such as freshwater marshes, riparian woodlands, and desert oases.

The complexity of these communities is difficult to neatly summarize, but the plants within them require the reliable presence of water at or near the surface-- at least seasonally. In our gardens, plants from these moist habitats need ongoing access to water, as they rarely tolerate drought. California sycamore, white alder, Fremont cottonwood, creek dogwood, and giant chain fern are among the popular landscape plants that naturally grow in California's wetland environments.

The plant community text here is from California Native Plants for the Garden (Bornstein, Fross, O'Brien, 2005) and used with permission of the copyright holders.

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