Coastal Plantain

It is unlikely you’ll see this plant in anyone else’s garden on the tour. And that is because they’re not very showy, they’re not very interesting and so they’re not grown in retail. I grew these from seed after deciding to rip out this section of my yard. What you see before you used to be Penstemons, but now it’s Plantains. The change happened because I discovered my site is about 800 feet from what used to be a Willow thicket and marsh with an always flowing natural spring. A century ago, we bulldozed the willows, drained the marsh and diverted the spring into the storm drains. Once I knew my site used to be marshy, I looked up some of the Herbarium records for my neighborhood to see what the native plants were before we drained the marsh. Plantago subnuda is one of the few verified remnant plants specific to my zipcode. So I ripped out my Penstemons, diverted my graywater to this area to create a high water zone, and planted Coastal Plantain as a reminder: what I have is not mine, I’m simply borrowing it from nature. These plants haven’t been in this section of Ingelwood for 100 years, most likely. But here they are in 2025, flourishing.

Calscape