Going Native Is the Only Way to Grow

Hardly any customers come to Chris Van Schaack’s nursery. Those who do behold the aimless gray leaves and dry stems and tend to lose their nerve.

But the truth is, Van Schaack is less concerned about business these days than he used to be. The passion that drove him to start the nursery has taken on a life of its own, seeding and spreading much like his unruly plants.

His business, the Tarweed Native Plant Nursery in Chatsworth, sells only native plants. Very native. So native, that plants growing within a two-hour drive are Van Schaack’s idea of exotic. His plants are all from the small area around his home and business, a micro-ecosystem that embraces the Santa Monica and Santa Susana Mountains.

“People call me a purist,” he said. “But if you want to landscape as a hobby, fine. I don’t grow plants as a hobby. I’m trying to apologize” for harm done to the environment, he said.

In Van Schaack’s yard one finds plants that have survived in the western San Fernando Valley for thousands of years; plants that remain dormant as seeds for a human lifetime; plants that grow only with the inscrutable ebbs and flows of ground water.

One finds the Santa Susana tarweed itself, a dark, spicy-smelling shrub with yellow flowers.

It requires an environment so distinct, no Southern Californian could fail to recognize it: a desert-like place with rolling banks of fog that soak into sandstone boulders. Not surprisingly, the tarweed grows mostly--perhaps only--on the Chico formation of the Santa Susanas and Santa Monicas, drawing moisture from the tawny rocks.

“The plants here are special,” Van Schaack said. “They have adapted to live in a very strange place.”

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In jeans and stocking cap against the cold, he has taken precious time out from a day of projects to give a nursery tour. Normally, his days are filled with building and landscaping schemes, experiments in germinating this or that, combing roadsides for seeds. This week’s enterprise: collecting coyote scat and dissecting it for seeds.

As he walks among the rows of unkempt curiosities, Van Schaack pauses here and there--”Oh, my goodness,” he exclaims at a plant that has shot out unexpected blooms. “This is very hard to grow,” he says, pointing to another, the same thing he has said about the last three plants he’s passed.

A slight, blondish man of 38, Van Schaack looks so young he could pass for mid-20s. He appears fit in the way that suggests real physical work, not gym workouts. He laughs often and easily, despite what he calls his “intense” personality, and displays a dry sense of humor over his nursery’s lack of commercial success. “Ugly little plants,” is how he jokingly refers to his wares.

But there is gloom behind the humor. Learning too much about the environment can be unbearable, he suggests. Such knowledge can devour you. Many people would rather block it out. That way, they don’t see the losses.

Learn the names of plants, and you see how they are being crowded out by invader weeds. Learn their life cycles, and you see how a bulldozer strips away seed banks a century old. Learn the conditions they require, and you see a bottle of herbicide obliterates genetic traits that took thousands of years to evolve.

“It can be hard to be alive,” Van Schaack said, although, “I’m over my hump of depression.”

At least, he said, he’s no longer living in a dream world. Seeing the place you live for what it is roots you more firmly in the universe, he said. Native plants “bring you closer to the reality of what the world is about.”

There is something sad, he said, about people missing this; duped into thinking they live in a world of orange trees and tropical shrubs, when a much more complex world exists just out of sight. The spectacle of such plants in a Southern California yard is, to Van Schaack, “perverse . . . ludicrous.”

Van Schaack grew up in Tarzana, riding his motorcycle through the Santa Monica Mountains--a thought that now makes him cringe in dismay. “How could I not have been aware of how special this place is?” he asked.

He studied international finance at Cal State Northridge and became a general contractor. He and his wife, an artist and computer programmer, bought the Chatsworth property in 1993.

One day, Van Schaack planted an ornamental shrub in the yard. It would be a hassle to water, his wife observed.

Van Schaack began seeking drought-tolerant plants. Then native California plants. Then Santa Susana plants. Then he formed the idea of a nursery.

The sheer volume of knowledge that native plants required proved a full-time job. There are more than 600 native species in the Santa Monicas alone, each with its own idiosyncrasies.

The plants of the L.A. Basin share common characteristics. They can tolerate huge volumes of water in winter, and use it frugally through the long hot season. Some are fuzzy. Some are sticky. Some, like local bunch grasses, dry up and look dead in summertime.

The successful nurseryman adjusts inventory to people’s tastes; Van Schaack wants people to adjust their tastes to his plants. “I hate flowers,” he said. “If I got paid a dollar for every time someone said to me, ‘Does this plant flower? How big is the flower?’ ”

Few of the plants have what most people consider pretty flowers, or pretty leaves for that matter.

But if humans gauged the world through their noses, and not their eyes, these would be the most beautiful plants anywhere. From the gray leaves and tangled branches waft scents like rosemary, sage, licorice--oily, dark smells that say “California” as unmistakably as golden sunsets.

Then there are the sounds: Van Schaack’s shrubs and thickets rustle with life never found in ornamental backyards: Whiptail lizards, horned lizards, California quail. The yard used to attract native rabbits, he said, adding wryly, “but the native bobcats ate the native rabbits.”

Cultivating these plants requires an adjustment in practice as well. Gardening maxims are turned upside down. Plant in fall or winter. Don’t fertilize. Don’t water when it’s hot. Do water when it’s cool.

Native plants force the grower to become more in tune with this region’s subtly shifting climate, with the difference between the hot summer and the cool summer, between dormancy and death, Van Schaack said.

They require humility, surrender.

“Plants move around, die. People want these permanent gardens. . . . I’m trying to get them to think of their garden as a place they have less control of. I want to let go and let the plants do what they do.