He replaced his lawn with drought-tolerant plants to withstand the heat.

Water-hungry lawns are symbols of Los Angeles's past. These seriesWe highlight courtyards with alternative landscaping and low water consumption built for the future.

The temperature was in the 90s in West Hills, but that didn't deter an astonishing number of monarch butterflies, hummingbirds and bees from feeding on the California-friendly plants (salvias, flowering milkweeds) in Eric Augusztiny's front yard.

Pollinators aren’t the only ones who call the front yard home, though. “This is our friend, Lizzy,” Augusztiny said with a smile as he and his wife, Lise Ransdell, greeted a large lizard emerging from beneath a large Desperado salvia plant.

“It's just a suburban yard the size of a postage stamp, but there's a lot going on here,” Ransdell said of the yard's abundant wildlife, which counts rabbits, skunks, raccoons and opossums among its visitors.

It wasn't always like this. When Augusztiny bought the house in 1996, the traditional garden looked like many others on the street, with Bermuda grass lawns, various shrubs and an apricot tree.

Milkweed, a favorite of monarch butterflies, on the left. Cleveland Sage, Salvia clevelandii. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Foothill penstemon grows in Eric Augusztiny's drought-tolerant front yard.

Yes, Augusztiny acknowledges, gardens have appeal — but not in his West Valley neighborhood, where “cement is the equivalent of a frying pan” and keeping a lawn dry in triple-digit temperatures is impossible. “Even if I wanted a garden (and I don’t), you can’t keep it alive here,” he said, pointing to the brown lawns that line his tree-lined street.

“The garden goes dormant during the summer, but it doesn’t die. Drought-tolerant plants are the ones that survive. Sugarbush, toyon, manzanita, coffee, ceanothus, and hummingbird sage maintain their deep green color year-round. California fuchsia blooms into the fall, and although the spikes of salvias above the foliage die back after flowering, the structure and leaves remain vital.”

Other than mowing the lawn, Augusztiny wasn’t much of a gardener before he bought his home. “I knew how to re-seed the lawn over and over again,” he said with a laugh. So he decided to learn everything he could about removing grass, building healthy soil and replacing it with a drought-resistant alternative.

She began by attending a demonstration on how to apply lasagna mulch by artist-in-residence and horticulturist Leigh Adams at the Los Angeles County Arboretum’s Crescent Farm. The class inspired Augusztiny, who then checked out books on California native plants from the Los Angeles Public Library and attended a hands-on workshop at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Field Office.

When the couple remodeled their home in 2018, they decided it was a good time to remove the grass. The LADWP’s lawn conversion program, which currently pays $5 per square foot to remove grass and replace it with low-water landscaping, was an incentive, but not the primary driving force. “I didn’t do it for the money,” Augusztiny said of the $2,000 rebate they received then, “but it helped me cover the cost.”

Eric Augusztiny's front yard in West Hills before removing the turf and replacing it with a drought-tolerant alternative.

(Eric Augusztiny)

Eric Augusztiny's front lawn is covered in cardboard during the mulching process.

(Eric Augusztiny)

Augusztiny, who had already received the proper training, decided to rip out the grass and plant a low-water substitute himself. But don’t call him a designer. “It was a process of coming up with a simple design, installing the drip system and laying down the cardboard,” Augusztiny said of the process known as sheet mulching, in which cardboard is moistened and covered with 3 inches of mulch.

When he covered the lawn with cardboard, his neighbors often asked him what he was doing. “I told them I was getting rid of Bermuda grass,” he recalls. “They all said, ‘Good luck with that.’”

The classes offered Augusztiny some revelations as he planned his garden. He followed Adams' suggestion to “paint with wildflowers” and scattered wildflower seeds over established plants. He planted hummingbird sage after reading that it grows well in the shade of oak trees. Concerned about the decline of western monarch butterflies due to habitat loss, he felt it was important to plant narrow-leaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis). “They have since appeared en masse,” he said.

Along the avenue, a coastal oak, a Catherine cherry and a silk tree provide shade. Augusztiny collects water using a rain barrel and rain chains. He also installed drip irrigation.

As for plants, Augusztiny toured native plant nurseries throughout Los Angeles, including the California Botanical Garden in Claremont, the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sunland and Pierce College in Woodland Hills. “Now I have to stop because I’m generating my plants from collecting seeds and taking cuttings,” she said. “You can generate and regenerate the garden.” She even collected free animal waste from the Los Angeles Zoo (known as “zoo doo”) at the Griffith Park composting facility.

He admits that he initially killed some native plants by watering them too much in the summer. That ended when he took a three-month hands-on course on native garden maintenance with Antonio Sanchez of the Santa Monica Mountains Fund in 2022. “I learned that drought-tolerant plants get stronger during the rainy season to withstand the dry season,” he said. He stopped drowning plants in the summer because he thought they were thirsty.

A Matilija poppy grows in Eric Augusztiny's drought-tolerant front yard.

After six years, Augusztiny believes Adams’ mantra of “sleep, creep, jump” has finally come to fruition. “He told us the plants would sleep the first year, creep the second, then jump the third,” he explained. “Ah, but with only 29.5 centimetres between 2020 and 2022, the garden didn’t budge.”

Two years later, after two years of record rainfall in Los Angeles, the native California habitat has invaded the front yard.

“I don’t like to steal a title from a Hollywood movie,” the actor said, “but suddenly it was everything, everywhere, at once.”

Narrow-leaf sunflower grows in the garden.

The garden is wild and colorful with a heavenly fragrance attributed to the explosive salvias. — Cleveland (Salvia clevelandii), hummingbird (Salvia spathacea) and white (Salvia apiana) — along with colorful wildflowers like the fire-resistant California fuchsia (Epilobium canum) and purple Foothill penstemon (Penstemon heterophyllus).

Although many of the larger, drought-tolerant plants are planted away from the street, some, such as manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca), are dwarfed by the California horse chestnut (Aesculus californica), the coffee berry (Frangula californica) and the sugar bush (Rhus ovata).

Rain chains capture rainwater from the roof.

Augusztiny's front yard and parking area are filled with drought-tolerant plants.

No longer a gardening novice, the Seattle native passionately advocates for “the need to do our small part to help slow climate change.” He believes creating native habitat in his front yard and installing rain barrels and a permeable driveway in the face of record-breaking heat waves is a good place to start.

“I enjoy nature, and Los Angeles has it all,” he said. “I’m not a purist when it comes to plants. I like to refer to them as climate-appropriate. But the more asphalt we can remove and the less stormwater runoff there is, the better the quality of the water and our lives will be.”

Now, when neighbors walk their children to school, they don’t ask what he’s doing in the front yard. “They complement the garden,” said Augusztiny, who waters twice a month. “The garden is not just for me. It’s for everyone.”