4 Mediterranean Landscape Ideas for Escondido, CA | Zone 10a

Most cities import the Mediterranean style. Escondido already lives in it. The valley sits squarely in the hot-summer Mediterranean climate band (Koppen Csa) — the same classification as Seville, Palermo and the hills behind Athens — with roughly 15 inches of rain a year, all of it between November and March, and a completely dry June through September. Olives, citrus, rosemary, lavender, bougainvillea and cypress are not exotics being coaxed along here; they are plants finally growing in the rainfall pattern they evolved for. That is why a Mediterranean garden in Escondido, done properly, is the cheapest garden in town to run: once established, an Olea europaea 'Swan Hill' or a stand of Lavandula x intermedia 'Grosso' wants a deep soak every ten to fourteen days in high summer and nothing at all from December to March.

The architecture backs it up. Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival stucco with clay barrel-tile roofs run right through Escondido's building stock — the 1920s and 1930s houses around Old Escondido and Grand Avenue, the courtyard-plan homes of Rancho San Pasqual and The Vineyard, the tile-roofed hillside builds in Hidden Meadows and Emerald Heights. There is agricultural history underneath it too. The city's Grape Day heritage comes from Muscat of Alexandria vines, and the citrus and avocado groves that replaced them still terrace the San Pasqual Valley slopes. A courtyard of Citrus sinensis 'Washington' navels in terracotta, a fountain, and a wall of Bougainvillea 'Barbara Karst' is a local vernacular, not a theme.

The details that separate a good Escondido Mediterranean garden from a struggling one are all about soil, salt and cold-air drainage. The ground is decomposed granite off the Peninsular Ranges batholith — Fallbrook and Vista coarse sandy loams, fast-draining, low in organic matter and running pH 7.0 to 8.0, which olives, cistus, phlomis and rosemary are perfectly happy with and citrus is not. Citrus in alkaline granite needs chelated iron and a zinc-and-manganese foliar feed or the new growth comes in pale between the veins. Then there is the water: imported Colorado River supply is hard and high in dissolved solids, which means one long leaching irrigation a month to keep salts moving below the root zone, and a white scale crust on any fountain that is not dosed with a scale inhibitor and drained twice a year. And Escondido means "hidden" — cold air pools on the valley floor on still January nights, so the flats near Escondido Creek can dip to the upper 20s while lots up on the ridge stay ten degrees warmer. The old grove-planting rule still holds: put the tender citrus on the slope, not the bottom.

Two regulations shape the plant list. All of San Diego County is inside the Asian citrus psyllid and huanglongbing quarantine area, so citrus must be bought from a licensed California nursery that grows under protective structures, and trees may not be moved out of the quarantine zone — buy locally and do not accept budwood or a gift tree from out of the region. Second, fire. Much of the city and its surrounding hills is mapped Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, state law requires 100 feet of defensible space, and California is phasing in an ember-resistant 'Zone 0' standard for the first five feet around a house. That is bad news for one signature Mediterranean plant in particular: Cupressus sempervirens burns like a torch. Use it as a distant punctuation mark down the drive, keep it well clear of the walls, and let gravel, tile and terracotta pots occupy the ground right against the house — which happens to be exactly what the style wants anyway.