As 5-year-old Stella Penn and her sister, Maxine, 3, enthusiastically play hide-and-seek in the backyard of their Eagle Rock home, the girls are accompanied by a merry band of lizards, butterflies and birds drawn to the yard’s low-water California natives, abundant fruit trees and the fragrance of Cleveland sage and Champaca trees. Oblivious to the rainfall on an overcast morning in Los Angeles, the sisters move to a chunky wood stump in the front yard where, unprovoked, they assemble a “pizza” with a large sycamore leaf and locally sourced bits of gravel, California buckwheat and blue bush acacia as toppings. … Soon after the two bought the property, Claire’s father came and laid sod in the backyard so that his granddaughters would have a place to run around. Although his heart was in the right place, the couple felt that it was “ridiculous” to try to keep the lawn alive in the face of California’s ongoing drought and eventual water restrictions.