The Fifth Annual “Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour” was held Sunday May 3 in Alameda and Contra Costa County gardens. This is a free self-guided tour of private and public gardens using minimum 50% native California plants. http://www.bringingbackthenatives.net
The five gardens that I visited are simple in concept but exacting in quality and arrangement of plant material. There are only a few different kinds of gardens in the world, as suggested by Moore et al in The Poetics of Gardens MIT 1988 – collections of things is one of these forms and many of the native plant gardens on the tour are second to none as collections, though they are mostly new gardens. The gardeners who create and maintain these gardens, and especially those who open their private gardens to the public, are unsung heroes. Native plant gardeners create a demand for native plants as garden material, and they are also “thought leaders” bringing inspiration and encouragement to many aspiring gardeners.
A magnificent native plant garden was begun by a couple named Jenny and Scott Fleming in Berkeley fifty years ago. Jenny, who passed away a year ago, worked on her garden every day. It shows. The garden is about a half-acre in extent but consists of a steep slope that was cut back beyond the angle of repose to create a building site for the home. So Jenny and Scott imported a lot of stone from Shasta Mountain and built retaining walls and structures. The stone is lava rock, full of air holes, much of it red, the color of brick. And in fact I thought some of it was clinker from a brick plant. The relatively narrow space between the slope and the house has a barbecue terrace, with newer paving, not Shasta stone. There is also a hot tub pool – and one of the tour docents recounted enjoying that pool thirty years ago while living at the house as a student while Jenny and Scott were on sabbatical in Oregon!
The central feature in the planting area is a watercourse with circulating water. The water was turned on for the day of the tour. The falling water animates the planting composition. The plants are mounded and layered beautifully, and the overall appearance is one of a studied naturalness, a just slightly surreal-natural condition. When visitors would comment on the beautiful and naturalesque placement of plants Jenny’s response had been that it was a lot of fortuitous accidents. Many of the plants in the garden were collected by Jenny and Scott although many came from the native plant garden in Tilden Park. For example the garden has a low shrub variety of Arctostaphylos, native to San Francisco. This plant is now extirpated anywhere in the wild, it exists only in gardens around the Bay Area. There is a sprawling variety of Ceanothus thyrsiflorus, called C.t. repens. Apparently C.t. hybridizes in the wild easily. This one has large soft leaves, about 1” long by 1/2” wide, whereas the shrub form has leaves barely 3/8” long and quite brittle.
Jenny and Scott were charter members of the California Native Plant Society. http://www.cnps.org While their house was being completed they used to take walks in Tilden Park and became inspired to use native plants in their garden from the native plant garden there and its eccentric gardener. When that garden was threatened with closure Jenny and Scott organized some like-minded friends to lobby for its preservation. They succeeded and the garden is there to this day. After that battle was won, what to do with their meetings? So they started the CNPS. CNPS is today a multifacted, strong organization for native plants and habitat restoration, etc.
