Crescent Farm growing into proving ground for drought-defying strategies

It’s a warm and suy afteoon, and interpretive horticulturist Leigh Adams is in the Crescent Farm at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden solving the riddle of whether it’s wetter or drier undeeath a log.

“Shall we tu it over and see?” she asks.

And with a push, Adams rolls the pine log onto its side to reveal a patch of evenly moist soil.

Crescent Farm, whose big unveiling is April 16, is a living laboratory where experiments in water harvesting, organic soil building and climate-adapted plant selection have transformed this little acre north of Baldwin Lake into an oasis during the worst drought in Califoia history.

Other than spot watering young trees and plants to help them establish, it gets no irrigation — yet, it’s flourishing.

“There is a positive way forward in the midst of this environmental challenge, and there are things that each one of us can do to help address those issues, make our community stronger and make the ecosystem we live in a much healthier places,” says the arboretum’s CEO, Richard Schulhof.

That’s the lesson of Crescent Farm, which will celebrate its grand opening with children’s activities, Piece by Piece mosaic artists, live music, plant giveaways and a presentation by Ron Finley, known as the Gangsta Gardener for transforming abandoned lots, medians and parksides into vegetable gardens in his South L.A. community.

It’s also a chance for visitors to get a guided tour of the garden by the staff that helped build it from the ground up.

Across the soft rolling landscape of swales and mounds bloom thousands of saffron-colored Califoia poppies, as well as blue-violet arroyo lupine spires, yellow and red snapdragonlike toadflax and purple-tipped five spots to name just some.

Clusters of sunflowers (effective at removing toxins from soil) have sprung up in the meadow.

In other areas of the garden, visitors encounter an arid-climate orchard filled with a variety of trees: goji berry, loquat, pomegranate, jujube, strawberry guavas, mulberries and mandarin orange. And still elsewhere are clumps of mower-friendly lawn alteatives to inspire homeowners.

“I had to have grasses represented that looked like lawns and felt like lawns,” says Jill Morganelli, arboretum horticultural supervisor, pointing to the Carex praegracilis (slender sedge), Bouteloua gracilis (blue grama) and Helictotrichon sempervirens (blue oat grass) still filling in.

Some areas were being seeded to offer visitors more affordable solutions to a green patch.

There are also drought-tolerant lawn alteatives that are not bladelike, including Achillea millefolium (common yarrow) and the flowering ground cover Lippia nodiflora (kurapia).

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“As lawn alteatives, a lot of people are also doing mulch and shrubs, which can be really beautiful and interesting so we’ve got a couple of Australians mixed in,” says Morganelli, pointing to the Maireana sedifolia (pearl bluebush) and the grevilleas just starting to bloom. “Everything else in here is a Califoia native. And it will be beautiful and green and flourishing pretty much all year-round.”

Crescent Farm started going in at the end of Wildflowering L.A., an initiative launched in October 2013 by artist Fritz Haeg and LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) to sow Califoia native wildflower seeds at 50 publicly visible lots.

For its installation, the arboretum added the water harvesting concept of hugelkultur, a no-irrigation raised bed of stacked logs mounded over with soil that acts like a giant sponge. It also built swales, a dug-out trench filled with layers of logs or rock used to capture runoff.

The concepts were brought to the garden by Adams as a way to recycle the more than 1,000 trees destroyed and damaged at the arboretum during the catastrophic windstorm that whipped through the San Gabriel Valley in 2011. In fact, leftovers are still being used in today’s garden.

“What I am doing here is using those trees to rebuild habitat that is sane and healthy and sustainable,” Adams says.

Mulched beds are edged with trunk half-slices and sections of smaller logs. Branches from injured trees that took time to die are scattered throughout.

The berms and swales are still in place.

“If you notice, the hugel is not as tall as it was when we first put it in. It’s collapsing, but it’s also acting like a giant sponge,” Adams says, tuing over another log to check on the moisture level. “Oh my! Look at that mycelium.”

Under the log is a formation of fungal mycelium, whose white threadlike branches will spread and grow into an underground web, linking the roots of different plants and trees to help them access water and nutrients and protect them against pathogens. In exchange, the plants and trees provide the fungus with carbohydrates.

That symbiotic relationship is called mycorrhiza, and it’s another of the big takeaways from Crescent Farm.

“So many landscapes go in as insta-landscapes and they may or may not flourish,” Morganelli says. “Here, it was all about delayed gratification, and we’re just starting to bloom, and we’re just starting to get in the caterpillars and the things that are really going to draw wildlife — so much more interesting than a crescent of lawn where nothing happens.”