Water-Saving Modern Gardens with Native Plants

For an A. Quincy Jones house in Los Angeles, architect Cory Buckner took on the restoration, while landscape designer Jay Griffith honored the architecture with understated, low-water landscaping.

Lockyer added native desert plants to a courtyard near the garage.

Midwest: Hoerr Schaudt Knitting the designed spaces into the greater wilderness beyond was paramount for the ten-acre landscape Douglas Hoerr devised in northern Michigan. “The idea is once you’re there, you can’t tell what we did,” he says. Instead of building formal gardens right to the property line, Hoerr added a meadow planted with mature trees and indigenous grasses to buffer the yard. Naturalistic plantings ebb and flow around the 110-foot-long saltwater lap pool.

For a Los Angeles home, Aoyagi used an IdealMow lawn of native grasses, and Dymondia, Juncus, and Hummingbird Sage.

For a project in Menlo Park, California, landscape architect Brennan Cox flanked pavers with drought-resistant Phormium ‘Rainbow Warrior.'