Ocean Beach coffee haven Java Beach Café is spawning a new restaurant, Beachside, on Judah and 48th Avenue, a block away from their La Playa mother ship. They’re throwing a big opening block party on Saturday, August 27. In keeping with plantings we helped with a couple of years back, the owners, Buffy & Pat Maguire, picked colorful Cordylines (New Zealand cabbage trees) for their new street trees. Matti (Flora Grubb Gardens colleague, Far Out Flora blogger, and Java Beach neighbor) took photos back when the site was still under construction:

Love the movement of the photo. Nothing’s more characteristic of the site than ocean winds, which these plants will have the gumption to tolerate.

Here’s an article in the Ocean Beach Bulletin with the full report on the Maguires’ new restaurant.

Cordyline australis, one of the parent species of these Cordyline ‘Dark Star’, grows happily by the sea in its home range, New Zealand, a land whose ocean winds may be even more severe than San Francisco’s. Thriving alongside will be succulent Aeonium ‘Rubrum’ from the Canary Islands (where they’re nurtured by misty fogs and occasional winter rains), and jade-like soft-tipped Yucca elephantipes ‘Jewel’, a curiously adaptable tree yucca from Central America. It’s so satisfying to use tough-as-nails plants that provide a lush, colorful accent in a horticulturally stressful climate.

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