"Sorry to break the bad news to you." Assuming the shaded counties are the ones with Bermuda, I'm in a Bermuda free zone. "You know one of my pet peeves is when people take offense to large font size." I don't object to the large fonts so much as the blinking. Blinking fonts give me headaches in a matter of seconds (maybe I have some mild form of epilepsy or something, but I won't shop at a site with blinking text). I know you like to use blinking fonts, but I find them really annoying because of the headache inducing factor. I shouldn't have objected to the size and bold text. "Yes and I said this only to the person that originally claimed to have 1 foot bermuda growing near their yard thinking they would go take a picture, post it here and it would turn out to be a different type of grass because bermuda doesn't grow that tall except special forage types that are "well managed"." Maybe I misunderstood you from the start. I thought you were saying that Bermuda could never reach that height. "I didn't yell at you (I was just emphasizing text that was overlooked multiple times) but lets make up and be friends, ok? " You did yell at me (typing in all caps is considered yelling), but if you stop with the blinking, I'll let it pass. I didn't overlook the stock photo comments, I just never saw anything that supported them. We've disagreed on this thread, but I think we've agreed more often than not and even if we never agreed, that's no reason we can't be friends.

You could try checking out Las Pilitas Nursery ( http://www.laspilitas.com/ ); it has quite an extensive database for native plants--including a native plant "finder" that will find something that suits your situation (though planting in proximity to the lawn might pose some issues from competition for nutrients). My personal favorites for California native plants are (as my ID indicates) Manzanitas (which aren't quite suitable to be placed nearby the lawn), California Fuchsias (these can be planted closer to the lawn if you want), Monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus can live nearby the lawn, being that it lives in riparian habitats in the wild), and Sages (there's so many aromatic sages in California, with some species capable of tolerating more water). California has quite diverse climate that produces various natives suitable for a multitude of environments; there's probably something that can work for you. This post was edited by CAManzanita on Mon, Sep 2, 13 at 19:21

Thanks for sharing this BP. I have been looking into a way to replace my tired, worn out, and crappy looking KBG with something much more suited to our climate. It seems work surrounding the native grass lawns focuses on buffalo and blue grama. Fine grasses (I use a lot of blue grama in my landscaping) but I have always thought that there had to be others. This whole area, as you said, was prairie with a seemingly endless array of choices. The first one the came to mind was western wheat, which grows extensively across the Front Range. The reason it came to mind is because it is a sod forming grass. But it's also very tall and coarse, regular mowing may help make it more "flat," but I have trouble imagining walking across a lawn of western wheat barefoot. Recently we seeded a lot of Canada rye at work, so I started looking into that, too. It's a bunchgrass though, and I'm unsure if consistent mowing forces tillering like it does with blue grama. It's also extremely tall and coarse. The absentee neighbor's lawn has been taken over by smooth brome. It looks gorgeous right now, but when it gets cut, its very "stemmy" rather than leafy. I am also not a huge fan of the fact smooth brome has overtaken most of what's left of the native xeric tallgrass prairie that we have here, forcing out the community of big and little bluestem, switch and Indian grass and turning it into a monoculture. USDA calls Indian grass a "rhizomatus bunchgrass" so mowing might encourage tillering with that. but once again, my main concern is the coarseness and that cutting taller grasses will lead to "stemminess", although, if done regularly, it might not. It's also warm-season however. Another thing is that some grasses don't respond as well to cutting as others. For example, not that it would otherwise make a good turfgrass, but you could not repeatedly mow down little bluestem through the growing season without killing it. I will be looking into the fesuces that you mentioned, they sound promising. Do you know how all these stand up to traffic?

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. :)