WaterSmart makeover: Painting color and charm in broad strokes in Oceanside

For The Union-Tribune

Oceanside homeowner and gardener Julie Igel got the surprise of her life when she learned that she had won the city’s 2025 WaterSmart Landscape Contest. That’s because she hadn’t entered it. Her husband Helmut had on her behalf.

Igel is a lifelong gardener, and you can see her skills in the front yard for which she won the award. The home is literally across the street from Interstate 5. It’s a cozy oasis from the traffic below. Mexican feather grass sways elegantly close to the sidewalk, and going up the slight slope there are plants of all different sizes, textures and colors, from lantana, blue salvia, Mexican sage and creeping fig to tall, round cushion bushes, just-spent birds of paradise and pride of Madeira, and a vigorous pink bougainvillea that helps hide a fenced-off secret garden by the house that is home to a few raised beds that Igel has filled with flowers. She tried vegetables but concluded that the water costs of raising them wasn’t worth it.

“Mostly I love flowers,” she said. “Flowers are my friends.”

Igel, a certified classical homeopath, has also planted an assortment of succulents, including Mexican hens and chicks, tree aeonium, blue echeveria and some magnificent variegated spiky, century plants. One particularly large one in the garden’s center throws off drama that the surrounding cape marguerite and its daisylike flowers can’t compete with.

Interspersed among the plants are a couple of apricot trees, a very young Meyer lemon tree and, across the driveway, a cassia tree, still in bloom with yellow flowers. Below are bachelor buttons growing in profusion.

Igel grew up in Long Beach with a mother who was an avid gardener.

“She was a big propagator and taught me how to do it,” she recalled. “And after she died, I took a lot of cuttings from her house.”

Her brother was a master gardener and gave her a lot of assistance as she was starting to choose plants.

“He knew all the Latin names, where they came from, and how they’d grow and perform together, so I’d pick his brain a lot,” she said.

Her surprise contest win didn’t just come with bragging rights. The city of Oceanside gave her a $250 gift card to use at a nursery of her choice. She chose Briggs Nursery & Tree in Vista.

The inspiration

The Igels had lived in Leucadia for years, raising their family, before deciding to downsize. Julie Igel found their Oceanside house during an online search.

“I came here and got out of the car and thought ‘I can’t live here’ since it’s on the freeway. But I grew up in a classic Craftsman-style bungalow like this in Long Beach and walked into the house and thought, ‘I have to have it,’ ” she explained.

The house has a large front porch, complete with a swing, that looks onto the garden. The space is Igel’s wild and low-water version of a cottage garden. The goal was to create a water efficient garden with plants that would thrive in the environment but also be lush and colorful year-round.

“I like a wilder garden, but ultimately a cottage/English-style garden is my favorite, so I do whatever I can to try to duplicate that here in our warm San Diego climate.”

While many of her plants have come from Briggs Nursery, Igel loves to collect seeds and plants from friends’ and family’s gardens.

“I even have some things from my childhood home,” she said. “My parents moved down to San Diego in the early 2000s, and my mom brought a few things with her. I have her geraniums and a few other things from her and my childhood home. At our last home I had the most impressive morning glories, but decided not to plant them at my current home because they do tend to take over.

“When all these things are in bloom I can remember my mom, who passed away just a few years ago,” she added. “Last year I took a ton of seeds from my sister while visiting her up in Santa Rosa and have had great luck with that. I had the most beautiful poppies and calendula this year. I have a really dear friend in Leucadia who I share with, and we love to walk together and take snippets from other people’s gardens.”

Igel tries to use whatever she thinks will give her the most bang for her buck, so she has chosen a lot of perennials that are also fuss-free.

The details

When the couple moved into their house, Igel started work immediately on both their back and front yards. They put in a raised planter and trees to block what was then a vacant lot in the back.

“I would go out in the front with my dog and one of my daughters and just walk it to figure out what we wanted,” she recalled. “I drew a little sketch to work off of.”

With a western exposure, she needed plants that could take hot, sunny summer afternoons. She said she found the nursery team at Briggs helpful when it came to choosing some of the larger plants and trees. She was drawn to plants that would spread and reproduce new plants she could move around. As a former interior designer and a painter, she has an eye for placement and getting the most out of color and texture.

The couple planted hedges by property fences and around the house to ground them. Below the front porch is a bed lined with Indian hawthorn. Iceberg roses, Mexican sage, white and purple cosmos, and geraniums are planted in front. Helmut Igel built a fence surrounding the little secret garden. The gate sports a little sign with an illustration of a woman in a long white dress gardening and the words: “Gardening. Because murder is wrong”

There were a few sprinklers front and back that needed repairs, and they added some more, as well as adding a modest drip system for the raised beds that her gardener installed. Some of the sprinklers needed to be turned since they were watering the Mexican feather grass, which didn’t respond well to that much moisture. Iger runs the sprinklers more frequently, of course, during the summer.

Some of Igel’s plants were surprises. She has borage that she speculated birds may have dropped. And she noted that the people who they bought the house from just plowed the whole front yard to make it look clean and then put topsoil on top. Her theory is that plants that had been plowed under returned through the topsoil once she started caring for the property.

Igel said she has a pretty simple style of gardening.

“I spend every morning in the garden for about an hour and a half, deadheading, picking weeds, moving things around if need be, but mostly sipping my coffee and visualizing what’s to come next,” she said.

One of her most important tasks has been to spread Forrest Fines mulch across the yard. She does it twice a year and has it delivered by Agri Service’s El Corazon compost facility in Oceanside.

Igel intends to add some rocks and more structured features, perhaps create a path with decomposed granite. Maybe a low stacked rock wall. A gardener friend suggested she put up a big wall to block the freeway view and noise, but Igel’s not keen on the idea.

“When my neighbors walk by, they like to look at my garden,” she said. “I’m always out there in the morning in my robe. When I first moved here, a neighbor invited me to a ladies’ little get-together for the neighborhood she holds annually. I was sitting across from this lady, and we kept looking at each other and finally agreed we each looked familiar. And then halfway through the lunch and she yells out, ‘I know who you are. You’re that lady in the robe!’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, you walk your dogs by every morning.’ We cracked up.”

“People who walk by tell me all the time how much they love to look at my garden,” Igel said. “And I love it and the act of gardening. It’s so tranquil and meditative. It gives me such satisfaction.”

Costs

Igel said they’ve spent between $4,000 and $5,000 over the past 10 years, including building a fence, changing out and adding some irrigation.

Water saved

The grounds around the house were essentially bare of any plants so Igel can’t boast of saving money on water bills, although their monthly water bills state that the they tend to be certain percentages below their neighbors. The plants and trees needed more water to establish but as they’ve matured Igel said she is able to water judiciously and with some plants very little.

A closer look: Julie Igel

Plants used: California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), calendula (Calendula officinalis), purple sage (Salvia leucophylla), pride of Madeira (Echium candicans), sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima), coleus (Coleus scutellarioides) Jupiter’s beard (Valeriana rubra) a variety of geraniums (Pelargonium), lantana (Lantana camara), iceberg roses (Rosa ‘KORbin’), blue salvia (Salvia azurea), lace cap elms (Ulmus parvifolia), zinnia (Zinnia), catmint (Nepeta), bougainvillea (Bougainvillea glabra), strawflower (Xerochrysum bracteatum), Mexican hens and chicks (Echeveria shaviana), boxwood (Buxus sempervirens), desert cassia tree (Senna polyphylla), butterfly bush (Votaniki Buddleia), hosta, creeping fig (Ficus pumila), lobelia (Lobelia erinus), cushion bush (Leucophyta brownii), Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima), borage (Borago officinalis), nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus), bachelor’s button (Centaurea cyanus), penstemon (Penstemon digitalis), African daisy (Osteosporum), pittosporum (Pittosporum illicioides), ice plant (Carpobrutus edulis), Indian hawthorn (Rhaphiolepis indica), and cosmos (Cosmos)

Estimated costs and any rebates you got: Having started with a bare landscape, the Igels didn’t get any rebates, and Julie Igel estimates that over the years they’ve spent between $4,000 and $5,000.

Who did the work: Julie Igel has done all the work with help on big projects from her husband Helmut and their gardener, who comes once a month.

How long it took: It’s been a 10-year project that launched when they moved into the house.

Water savings: Since they started with a totally barren landscape, they have nothing to compare their current bills with.

Advice:

• Look for inspiration for your garden in pictures — what do you like, what is the feel, is it color — and then do some research to find out if the plants will grow in your environment.

• Ask for recommendations from people who work in your neighborhood nursery. Get tips from shows on HGTV or YouTube. I watch “Garden Answer” on YouTube.

• Opt for selecting plants that are either native to our area or will grow well in our area.

• When watering, try to do deeper but less frequent waterings. Also, water in the morning.

• Mulch is really important. It keeps the moisture in, weeds down and really cultivates the soil so it’s not so rock-hard. Replenish it twice a year.

• Recycle the water you use in your home. I sometimes use water I’ve rinsed food with and put that in my potted plants.

About the series

This is the first this year in an occasional series on 2025 winners of the annual WaterSmart Landscape Contest, conducted in partnership with the San Diego County Water Authority. To learn about entering the next contest, visit landscapecontest.com.

For details on classes and resources through the WaterSmart Landscape Makeover Program, visit watersmartsd.org. Landscape rebates are available through the Socal WaterSmart Turf Replacement Program at socalwatersmart.com.