These gardens have healthy living soil and are filled with climate-appropriate plants. The combination of these elements allows you to reduce or eliminate supplemental irrigation, even in the heat of the summer. This book is intended to help you evaluate, plant, build, and maintain your garden using this watershed approach to landscaping. The watershed approach imagines every garden as though it were a mini-watershed, holding on to or cleaning all the water that falls on it and nurturing a diverse habitat of plants and insects. Each mini-watershed can be controlled by the people who steward it. The result is that our collective actions restore our greater watersheds and cities. In the pages that follow, we’ll show you how to continue enjoying our amazing climate and outdoor lifestyle, while reducing outdoor water use, and spending less time and money taking care of your garden. We’ll show you that a climate-appropriate landscape doesn’t have to look like a desert; it can be beautiful, lush, and evergreen.

Each section provides different resources to help you achieve a watershed wise landscape.