Hi Mrs. McConnell's Algebra 1!

I'm guessing that you are in inland California, judging by the all the palm trees and the blank sky. If so, your summers are really hot and dry. Check out yews, with their bright red berries and euonymous. Both are evergreen bush/hedges that can work in shade and still handle a certain amount of sun. There are many varieties available and your local nurseries will carry the varieties that work best for your location. You can plant them under the windows on the garage and add some texture, color, and dimension to that area.

If you plant a hedge there, try planting an olive or manzanita tree near the point of your wall. If it lines up with the brick accent line closest to the garage door, that would look good. Both those trees are drought tolerant once established and evergreeen. You can find fruitless olives so you don't have to deal with the mess. Alternatively, use a pepper tree--fast-growing and soft looking so that you would soften all the hard surfaces at the front of your house.

Here is a link for you

We're also in SoCal. How much sun hits that spot? Lots of options for you under those windows. You might take your photo to a good local nursery and ask them for suggestions. There's always boxwood which I love having around. It will provide year round green but no bright colors.

Thank you!

Hs Harrington - I’m actually SoCal coastal. About 2 miles inland. I’m going to check ou the yews. Are they native plants?

Chloebud - our foudation of the garage juts out a bit so we will have to plant away from the wall about a foot. This may allow for more sun. We are thinking of creating a small, narrow path of gravel or sand to plant a native in.

Emmarene - I will check out the link.

Manzanita and pepper trees are native to the southwest. There are very few hedge type plants that are native to our naturally dry and hot areas, but if you've got a coastal onshore breeze in the afternoons or evenings, then you can plant things that are naturally able to take advantage of the moisture those winds contain. Sunset Magazine's site or their Western Garden Book can give you lots of recommendations specific to your location.

Neither the yew nor the euonymus are CA natives :-) At least not in SoCal.

Ribes viburnifolium is a nice choice. Fully evergreen and very shade tolerant, it can grow about 3-4' high and makes a great low hedge. Native to Catalina Island, it has clusters of bright pink flowers in late winter to mid spring and is extremely drought tolerant.

Fuchsia, Gardenia (although you would need a drip line to keep these on the damp side. since this is in the shade most of the day, it won't dry out as quickly). these plants fill out nicely and will lend a bit of color to the front of that space.

you could also do a shade loving green tree like the Umbrella Tree. they are tall, fill out and is a nice green. I have two of these. (also in the same area as you)

if you really want low maintenance and little water,,,do a xeriscape.

The OP expressly asked for a CA native plant....somehow that request seems to have been ignored for the most part :-) At least Emmarene provided a listing of CA native plants for shade........

We can't suggest others? oh well gosh, let's get those native plants then.

shade loving calif plants that are drought tolerant and flower,,,

The Bush Anemone is a nice shrub. can handle dry but does like regular water

Monkey Flower

Giant Rye Grass

calif honeysuckle,,,a few varieties and they do like shade

Douglas Iris

personally, I think the manzanita is ugly.

there are plenty of non native plants that do just fine here. maybe OP didn't realize that.

Thank you, everyone! I have some awesome ideas now! The reason I requested the CA natives is because my son is in an environmental/sustainability program at HS and he has made us more aware that we need to become more eco-friendly. Now if I could just my husband to get rid of the grass :)

Manzanita is not only native, but supports honey bees and birds, provides habitat for lizards and other small animals, is evergreen, grows quickly without being invasive, tolerates awful soils, and needs no supplemental water. It has a wide variety of sizes--everything from small ground cover to large trees that have beautiful form.

If you are keeping the lawn then stick to ones that can tolerant some summer water. At Thomas Payne the nursery man thought my plan to add sticky monkeyflower and bush anemone was okay and the buckwheat and california fuchsia are beyond water spray for my main garden area.

Put Mahonia, Oregon Grape, Deergrass and Catalina Snapdragon on your list of plants to look at. Mahonia is very sculptural and you just cut out stems that grow too tall. Deergrass is managed by cutting down every couple years in the spring and Catalina Snapdragon can be a trimmed hedge if you like.

There is no particular virtue in using natives in a spot where they don't belong next to a lawn. The non natives mentioned by others would work well as they are also very drought tolerant. I've got lots of non natives in the unwatered shade garden. There's a couple of Indian Hawthorn, lamb's ear, Cotoneaster, fennel in there and the area that never gets any water although it is supposed to in the main border has Mexican Bush Sage, Jerusalem Sage, rosemary and pink flowering jasmine [on a post] in there. Expand your search to Mediterranean and south African ones as well.

I think a field trip or two would be fun for you. Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and Channel Island Visitor Center in Ventura Harbor are regular spots I like to visit. If you look around you will find more.

Hope you can talk your husband into losing the lawn. Around here there are wonderful lawn free front yards. Find a few around you and point them out to him!

Manzanita, though beautiful, will not grow near the coast. Pepper, though elegant, is considered a problem tree and is disappearing in the California landscape. It is native to the Peruvian Andes. I'm not sure where these recommendations are coming from.

If your desire is to be eco-conscious, consider Australian plants which are well-adapted to our Southern California climate and very low rainfall.

In my San Diego garden, I use Kangaroo Paws (Anigozanthos flavida). There are many sizes to choose from. I think the very tall rusty-red would look fantastic below your garage widows. For more color you can mix with the tall mustard yellow ones and throw in some low-growing Limonium perezii. EDT: Oops, these might need more sun than you are getting on the north side. Back to the drawing board!

There is no need to hide your garage wall with a hedge or large evergreens. Kind of a dated concept IMO.

?? CA native manzanitas consist of some 50 different species and countless hybrids and cultivars and many DO grow naturally along the coast!! In fact, they are often recommended for coastal gardens because of a high tolerance for sea spray and wind. I realize your SoCal coast is not the same as my more northerly coast but I have used them for years in coastal gardens and they do perfectly fine!!

I still think boxwood would work...and again recommend checking with a local nursery.

Honestly, GG, Manzanita don't grow along the So-Cal coast. You can go inland 20 miles and they are all over the hills, but not at the coast. The OP is 2 miles from the coast in SoCal. I visit lots of gardens, private and botanical, and nature reserves, and you never see them in coastal (or near coastal) gardens. NorCal climate must be very different, considerably more precipitation, considerably cooler.

There are listed manzanita species for coastal SoCal here.

Definitely no pepper trees. I adore them and probably would fight to keep an existing one in any garden I owned but they are huge messy trees.

I will have to keep my eye out for Manzanita on my next coastal hikes. Maybe I have overlooked them. There is a restoration project for returning a large park area on Sunset Cliffs, a seashore park, to plants native to the region. the Eucalyptus trees were hauled out (upsetting some people greatly, but not me). If manzanita are part of the native scrub and will grow there, surely some will be planted. I am now very curious!

There are a number of species that are native to coastal SoCal - A. glauca, glandulosa, pungens, catalinae. But how common they are currently in the wild is up for discussion :-) They are being seriously threatened by urban sprawl.

But it is important to consider that these are tough, hardy native plants and will grow very well in coastal regions.

I think most things look better with a little water, but I am no expert. In our Monterey County yard, the most beautiful blooms are the ceanothus, the bush anemone, and the ribes. The suggestion of going to a local garden or arboretum in your area is a really good one...just walk and dream...

https://www.watersmartsd.org/content/nifty-50-plants-watersmart-landscapes

This is a fabulous site for CA natives: https://calscape.org/ They list 116 manzanitas native to California. You can choose a category, view the plants and lots of cultural information, and even view a map of where in the state the plant is found in nature, keeping in mind that the conditions in nature are without supplemental irrigation.

I realize this is an old thread, but for anyone searching for similar info...Tree of Life Nursery is an awesome resource. It's great to visit, too, (in San Juan Capistrano) but the website has a ton of detailed guidance on Calif. native plants.

And re manzanita, I don't know what's happening in San Diego, but up here in coastal OC, it grows all over the place (almost down to the ocean). Big Berry Manzanita is my favorite but there are hundreds of others. Calscape is the best source for info.

@Mrs.McConnell’s Algebra I, I'd love to know what you ended up planting and how it worked out! p.s. I'm also doing a native plant garden, front and back, partly because of an environmentally-oriented son. Killed our lawn 10-12 years ago after he (then age 9) was hounding us about it. :)