Michèle Bryant
My Los Angeles Garden

I began gardening in June 1989. Knowing nothing about gardening, I read all the magazines and books I could find. This way, I learned a lot but despite all this academic knowledge, I made lots of mistakes and it seems to me that all my plants have been transplanted four or five times before finding their "right" place.

From the start, I knew I wanted to dramatically change the front yard: a typical lawn with green foundation bushes. I replaced it with a ground cover and lots of flowers. Being from France, I chose a symmetrical design and not an English cottage garden style.

The back yard received the same drastic changes: I put in lots of drought resistant plants, which require minimum care in our dry California weather. The sloping area of the garden was filled with succulents (I tried different kinds of plants but after years of trials and errors, I settled on succulents and this looks like the right choice: nice looking plants that provide color all year round and require minimum care).

My pride is my fruit trees: I have more than 50 trees mainly semi dwarf. They provide me with luscious fruit all year round: in winter: citrus (oranges, lemons, grapefruit, mandarins, kumquats, blood oranges) and also tropical guavas, passion fruit (growing on a fence). In summer, stone fruit (peaches and plums) and figs (Black Mission, Celeste and Brown Turkey). In fall: apples (Anna, Fuji, Gordon) strawberry guavas, pineapple guavas and Hachiya persimmon. In spring, loquats and cherimoyas. My two 65 years old avocado trees are still giving all they can (which is hundreds and hundreds of avocadoes). Seven varieties of bananas will soon give me too many bananas, I am sure!!!

My garden was thriving and growing so fast that I was forced to dispose of good plants. I decided to form a group of avid gardeners to exchange excess plants.Thanks to the Garden Web, I was able to reach other gardeners with the same goal and P.E.G. (Plant Exchange Group) was founded. It now has more than fifty members; We meet regularly in our gardens to exchange plants. What fun!

For ten years, I spent more than ten hours a week in my garden, doing nearly everything by myself. It gave me so much pleasure and satisfaction that I don't regret donating so much time to it, while foregoing other pleasures. I cannot imagine a life without a garden.

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