Restating the obvious, there are few plants that can actually survive without any oxygen to the roots for months at a time, short of riparian species that actually grow in water, or species from around the world that are accustomed to winter seasonal flooding. It looks like you have a horrendously bad drainage situation that doesn't allow for drainage at all.

I'd suggest you stick with the stuff that will survive such poor drainage such as various native Juncus species, Cyperus species, aquatic Mimulus species, bog plants such as Acorus gramineus or Tulbaghia violacea and other marsh/pond marginals. On the other hand, if you aren't watering pond marginal plants in the long dry season, you can't expect them to be happy in summer either. Expecting much else to grow under such conditions is asking for miracles.

The alternative is mounding your topography so that less water tolerant plants could actually keep their roots above constantly saturated soil, or growing things in raised planters/pots.

I prefer to plant new gardens in winter to take advantage of the winter rains and reduce the need to supplemental irrigate, and expect the plants to look better/larger each spring because they get off to a good start. I don't expect them to survive months of being water logged, but could come up with a much more varied list of plants capable of growing in your conditions if I were being paid to do so...

You don't list what you are growing in this particular post, so I can't address whether your plants stand much of a chance of surviving another wet winter with no drainage.

Your problems are of biblical proportions. Get your plants into an 'ark', big pot. Take as much of the heavy clay soil off their roots as possible and use soil less mix. Suburbia is not a natural environment to native California plants. Your gardening style does not fit your present environment but you can practice now in pots. Probably the only plants native to the valley floor are grasses that brown in the summer. The only plants native to swimming pool dumps live in a gully. You can save your plants for a kinder garden environment in the future. We use to live in Sacramento. I have a Japanese maple and a cumquat that were 5 years old when we moved here twenty years ago. In Sacramento you have to water in the summer in order to have anything grow. Dogs are also tough on gardens but have a right to enjoy the outside. I don't have any disaster pictures to share but of course have had many disasters as a gardener. Good luck.

I have mounded the soil in some areas, and I have dug out areas for the water to drain into. I cannot get much of the water to drain all the way out of the back yard, because the grading goes against that so strongly, but you can see in the picture that the yard is no longer flat like it was in 2008. I have also been trying to choose the natives that grow in bogs and riparian areas.

The following plants have already survived at least one full winter in the back yard (which has much worse drainage issues than the front yard). Asterisked plants are ones that I've only planted in the somewhat less waterlogged areas. Double-asterisked plants are ones that have died when located in wetter areas but have survived in the somewhat less waterlogged areas:

*Achillea millefolium - yarrow
Artemisia douglasiana - mugwort
Asclepias fascicularis - narrowleaf milkweed
Carex barbarae - Santa Barbara sedge
*Cercis occidentalis - Western redbud
*Chlorogalum pomeridianum - soap lily
**Clarkia unguiculata - elegant clarkia
**Collinsia heterophylla - Chinese Houses
*Erysimum capitatum - sand-dune wallflower
**Eschscholzia californica - California golden poppy
Fragaria vesca - wood strawberry
**Frangula californica ssp. tomentella - hoary coffeeberry
**Gilia capitata - globe gilia
**Gilia tricolor - bird's eye gilia
Grindelia hirsutula - hairy gumweed
Juncus balticus - Baltic rush
Juncus effusus - common rush
Juncus tenuis - poverty rush
**Lasthenia californica - common goldfields
**Layia platyglossa - Fremont's tidy tips
**Linum lewisii - blue flax
**Lupinus bicolor - miniature lupine
**Lupinus succulentus arroyo lupine
*Mimulus aurantiacus - sticky monkeyflower
**Nemophila menziesii - baby blue eyes
*Penstemon heterophyllus 'Blue Springs' - foothill beardtongue
*Philadelphus lewisii - wild mock orange
**Ratibida columnifera - prairie coneflower
Ribes aureum - golden currant
**Rudbeckia hirta - black-eyed Susan
Sambucus mexicana - blue elderberry
*Sisyrinchium bellum - blue-eyed grass
*Styrax redivivus - California snowdrop
Symphyotrichum chilense - California aster

The following plants are ones that I added to the back yard last spring or late last winter, so they have already survived one full summer but not a full winter. (Note that this past summer was wetter than most, because our next-door neighbors thoroughly flooded our yard repeatedly.) Asterisked plants are located in the drier areas, though the buttercup has not emerged from dormancy and may not actually be alive anymore:

Carex praegracilis - clustered field sedge
Cephalanthus occidentalis - buttonbush
Cucurbita pepo - pumpkin
Helenium puberulum - rosilla
Mimulus cardinalis - scarlet monkeyflower
*Ranunculus californicus - California buttercup
*Sidalcea malviflora - California checker mallow
*Sporobolus airoides - alkali sacaton
Tellima grandiflora - bigflower fringecups
*Thymus citriodorus - variegated lemon thyme
*Thymus praecox 'Elfin' - elfin thyme
Trifolium wormskioldii - springbank clover

The following plants are ones that I added to the back yard this summer or fall, so they have not yet survived a full summer or a full winter. Asterisked plants are located in the somewhat less waterlogged areas. Double-asterisked plants are seeded throughout the whole yard:

*Adiantum aleuticum - five-finger fern
**Castilleja exserta - owl's clover
*Chamerion angustifolium - fireweed
*Clematis ligusticifolia - Western creek clematis
Cornus sericea - redstem dogwood
*Erigeron foliosus - leafy fleabane
**Heliotropium curassavicum - seaside heliotrope
*Holodiscus discolor - ocean spray
*Iris macrosiphon - ground iris
Limnanthes douglasii - meadowfoam
*Lonicera hispidula ssp. vacillans - pink honeysuckle
*Lotus scoparius - common deerweed
Mimulus guttatus - seep monkeyflower
*Nassella pulchra - purple needlegrass
**Oenothera elata ssp. hookeri - Hooker's evening-primrose
Phyla nodiflora - turkey-tangle fogfruit
*Polypodium californicum - California polypody
Potentilla glandulosa - sticky cinquefoil
*Scrophularia californica - California figwort
*Solidago californica - California goldenrod
*Vitis californica x vinifera 'Roger's Red' - California grape

Queerbychoice, if I had your situation, I would purchase an electric sump pump. Mine was a hundred bucks. You dig out a square in the center of your ditch, drop in a black square plastic tub, and when your ditch starts to fill up with water, you drop in your sump pump connected to a garden hose and drain the water into the gutter at the front of the house. If you want to improve the appearance you can bring in rocks to line your ditch and gravel for the bottom.

I'd use more of the same plants too. That would produce some uniformity in design.

It's coming along, and it looks like you are having a lot of fun doing your research.

Renee

ITA with Renee in using more of the same that already do good.

The solution is to drain the yard. With a 3 or 4 inch plastic drain dug out to the street with a bubbler to let the water out. We had a rental with the problem, made worse by the roof gutters draining in the yard. Al

Worth mentioning that a lot of your native choices are coastal/ sand dune community species, and can't be expected to deal with interior valley conditions combined with lack of winter sun/high water table/no winter drainage conditions. From the photos, your concept of mounding to raise above the saturated soils is totally inadequate to the task, and from what I can see in the photos, is too low to work. You probably would need to amend the clay soil and mound up so that you are at least 12 to 18 inches higher than your standing water to get any benefit. Also, in my experience with gardens for clients with large dogs that aren't trained to stay off the plants, you need to fence off or otherwise protect things from being trampled and/or dug up, or accept that the dogs are more important than the plant's survival and revert to plants that work with your dogs. My other suggestion about dog proofing a garden is to start with much bigger plants that they will go around rather than step on, but that doesn't work as well in a rental property and low budgets. I suspect it might have been cheaper to go that route, however, than the expense of all those smaller plants that couldn't take the abuse.

I'd second the suggestions to get a sump pump and use more repetition of the plants that are working. I suspect that you are working more on desires for your plant choices than science and observation, but why keep repeating actions and choices that aren't working for you?

Frankly, if you're going to be living in terror, it should be because of your home foundation, not because of your plants. If you have so much water in that little yard that your plants are drowning, it's got to be going under your house. I'm not a foundation expert, but it surely couldn't hurt to put a large french drain with gravel on top under all the drip line of your eaves, it would save both your house and your yard.

Just sayin'!

Carla in Sac

I would be living in terror over the foundation if we owned this place. We don't, and the owner doesn't want to fix it. The landlady's son says he has experience fixing foundations, so I guess he'll fix this one up eventually. Right now, though, he and his mother are aware that it's been flooded every winter for years, and they choose not to do anything about it.

I find it difficult to imagine that any sort of permanent drainage solution would be within my installation abilities and budget. A sump pump, however, sounds like something I could probably handle.

The soil is not more mounded because the water tends to erode everything flat very quickly. There are no rocks lining the drainage ditch because, again, the water tends to erode everything flat very quickly - I have to constantly re-dig it, and I can't dig through rocks. Also, the more I mound the soil, the more I put the existing plants at risk of getting buried when the mounded soil moves around and flattens out.

I'm not concerned about dog proofing at the moment, because the dogs don't kill anywhere near the percentage of plants that the bad conditions do. When the dogs do occasionally kill plants, it's usually because the bad conditions prevented the plants from rooting properly.

Bahia, which of my native choices are coastal/sand dune community species that can't be expected to deal with interior valley conditions? Nearly every plant in the yard is native to the Sacramento Valley according to Calflora and CaprICE and is supposed to grow in both Foothill Woodland and Valley Grassland (my area being Yuba County Foothill Woodland, but my individual yard's flooded conditions being more like Sutter County Valley Grassland). They may also grow in coastal/sand dune communities, but all the information I've found leads me to believe they should be able to grow here as well - believe me, I've compiled a huge spreadsheet of research on them to try to make sure I'm picking the right plants!

I can understand your being a tenant, an unwillingness to spend your money to solve the properties problem. Other than your labor to dig, it would cost less than $50 to install a drain for the yard. It is a sorry fact that some property owners are unwilling to improve the property they own. Al

"I've compiled a huge spreadsheet of research on them to try to make sure I'm picking the right plants!"

Unfortunately plants don't know about spreadsheets. If they are being killed off by your conditions then they are by definition not the right plants. So you either need to change the conditions or the plants. I'm with the people who say get more of the plants which have worked for you and garden by observation as well as research.

Your dirt looks like cement, dude. Try mixing in some organic materials, you probably would have to do this monthly.

Another choice would be temporary raised beds filled with potting soil that you could take with you when you leave. I have to grow this way because of gophers. It works great for me.

I'd probably second buying a sump pump if you've engineered most of the yard to flow into the ditch. If you have more time than cash, get a 75' or 100' hose and just use gravity flow to drain the backyard to the street (fill hose with water from bib, quickly move the hose's female end to the drainage ditch, male end should be located at a lower altitude than drainage ditch).

I absolutely do intend to buy a sump pump. I tried to buy one today, in fact, but the store was out of the model I wanted. I will probably buy one this weekend at a different store.

Dicot, unfortunately gravity doesn't work in my favor. Everything in the whole neighborhood is located higher than my drainage ditch, which is why I've never been able to get the drainage ditch to actually drain. The sump pump should take care of that, though!

Al, could you recommend a website with instructions for installing a more permanent drainage solution? I would be more than happy to spend $50 on it; I'm just not confident of my ability to install it successfully.

Flora, my spreadsheet also shows which plants have died in my garden, so that I can stop planting them. I have been adding more and more clustered field sedge, because it seems to do well and I like it. I also added a second golden currant earlier this year, for the same reasons. But I also like to experiment with new plants when my research suggests they should work. Even if the plants die, I'll probably learn something about them that I can use when we eventually buy a place and I start a whole new garden.

Kris, I have been adding coarse woodchip mulch, steer manure, and homemade compost about 8 to 12 times per year since August 2008. The soil just swallows it right up at the next rainstorm. It does have some lasting effect - when I dig down in the lowest-lying areas of the yard (along the fence shown in the left 2/3 of my photos), the top four or five inches of soil have large woodchips all through them, even though the top surface just looks like mud. The foreground of my photos shows the slightly higher portion of the yard, though, and nothing I've added has seemed to have much effect there. I think a lot of the mulch and compost just washes down to the lower spots. I probably should dig more of it in.

Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions - especially the suggestion of a sump pump!

Every building site is higher than the street and will drain by gravity if given the opportunity. Go to any home improvement store such as Home Depot, Lowes, or Tractor Supply and look at the flexible drain tubing in either 3 or 4 inch diameter. Pick the tubing with the slots to except water into it. Dig a trench a foot or more deep across your yard and under any fence being sure the trench is sloping out to the street. Your first picture looks like the water supply from the water meter to the house crosses your yard, it should be deep enough to not be a problem, check before starting. Just before the sidewalk install a bubbler with a grate on top. These are made out of fiberglass and sized either 3 or 4 inch inlet available wherever you bought the drain tubing. All it takes is digging, a degree in engineering is not required. Al