Wednesday in the Water-Wise Garden

In the second installment of a tour through some of my favorite draught-tolerant, native plants in our garden, we feature the mimulus brevipes.  As a child I was delighted by snapdragons, the way you could snap open the petals like a jaw.  This monkeyflower reminds me of the snapdragon, so it became an instant favorite of mine when I first encountered it in Southern California.  We used to have mimulus cardinales in our front yard, the red variety which is harder to find, but it was taken over by the ornamental grasses awhile ago. So now we have the more common yellow variety in our back yard.

Mimulus in our yard