Happy Couple Planted About 2 Dozen Native Wildflowers Outside Their Home; 3 Years Later, Their Garden Is Inspiring Their Neighbors
· Bright Side — Inspiration. Creativity. Wonder.A thriving home garden can do much more than make a backyard beautiful. For Los Angeles couple Phoebe Novack and Brian Aggrey, gardening has become a way to bring California nature closer to home. Over 3 years, they transformed their Del Rey property into a roughly 3,000-square-foot native garden, filling it with drought-tolerant grass, California native plants, flowering shrubs, a coast live oak and a seasonal meadow of two dozen native wildflowers. The result is a greener space designed around the local landscape, with plenty to offer birds, bees, and other garden visitors.
Their approach also reflects a bigger shift happening in gardening and landscaping across Southern California, where native plants, wildflower gardens, water-wise lawns and pollinator-friendly spaces are finding their way into more homes. According to the Los Angeles Times, Novack and Aggrey’s garden is already getting neighbors talking, inspiring friends and relatives to explore native gardening, and even producing wildflower seeds that the couple shares with others. What started at one Los Angeles home is now giving more people ideas for what they could grow in their own gardens.
They started transforming the garden piece by piece.
Novack and Aggrey bought their Del Rey home in 2021, but the landscape looked very different then. Much of the property consisted of concrete, invasive grasses, and succulents rather than the native greenery surrounding the house today.
The couple began installing their new garden in sections in 2022, with the project getting fully underway in early 2023. They removed much of the concrete, replaced it with permeable material and began swapping invasive plants for California natives. They eventually gave their growing garden its own name: Chateau Chaparral.
The changes weren’t purely decorative. Novack told the Los Angeles Times that the old concrete made the property louder and contributed to flooding around the garage. After they introduced permeable materials, she noticed that the space felt both quieter and cooler.
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Gardening was already part of Phoebe’s life.
For Novack, the interest in plants had much deeper roots. She grew up nearby and remembered gardening as an important part of her childhood, although her family grew nonnative plants such as gladiolus.
Later, she experimented with gardening in the small yard of a rental home. Her interest in native plants grew further when she volunteered with TreePeople and attended classes at the Theodore Payne Foundation, including a three-part garden design course. Those experiences helped inspire the garden she eventually wanted to create at home.
The Theodore Payne Foundation specializes in California native plants and operates a nursery, demonstration gardens and educational programs dedicated to native plant gardening. Its 22-acre site even includes plantings specifically designed for pollinators and birds.
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Their wedding helped the garden bloom.
When Novack and Aggrey married in 2023, their garden became part of the celebration.
Instead of creating a traditional wedding registry filled with household items, the couple asked their guests to sponsor native perennial plants for their new landscape. It gave friends and family a surprisingly personal connection to what was growing outside the couple’s home.
And apparently, people remember their plants.
Friends still visit and check how the trees and other plants they helped sponsor are doing. In total, the couple said their front- and backyard transformation cost about $20,000, excluding work on the house and other structures. Their native-plant wedding registry contributed around $11,000 toward the project.
Their wildflower garden keeps growing beyond their own home.
Today, the couple’s landscape includes several kinds of manzanita, a coast live oak, flowering California natives and a seasonal meadow featuring about two dozen native wildflowers. But some of those flowers are already finding their way beyond the garden. After blooms from plants including clarkias, gilias, and phacelias fade, Aggrey collects the seed pods, processes the seeds, and packages them to give to other people.
Their enthusiasm for native gardening has also caught on with friends and relatives, while neighbors regularly stop to ask about the plants growing outside their home. The garden itself continues to evolve, with some plants thriving, others failing, and a few growing much larger than the couple expected.
That ongoing experiment has attracted attention well beyond their street: Chateau Chaparral has appeared on the Theodore Payne Foundation’s Native Plant Garden Tour, bringing visitors from around Southern California to see how the couple has used native plants, wildflowers, and a drought-tolerant lawn at an ordinary Los Angeles home. 3 years into the project, their garden remains a work in progress, but its influence is already spreading one conversation, plant, and packet of wildflower seeds at a time.