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Archive of posts tagged native plant

Native Gardens Save Water and Offer Many Benefits

California just got some relieve from four year of drought with an almost normal rainy season. However we are not out of the woods yet. Water conservation is still on every body’s mind. Many people have told me that they use a bucket to catch the cold water from the shower instead of letting it []

Finding California Native Plants For Your Garden

I recently visited Botanical Garden at Berkeley with some friends from the East Coast. The Botanical Garden is a 34-acre research garden and a living museum. It is famous for its diverse collections of plants and many of them rare and endangered. There are nine major geographic regions with emphasis on plants from Mediterranean climates, []

Why A Native Garden Is Good

When I first heard about drought tolerant plants and native gardens some years ago, like many people, I was immediately picturing cacti in desert found in Arizona. But I was curious and started to go on the annual Native Garden Tour (see related blog about the tour this year). To my pleasant surprise, native gardens []

Saving Water With Native Gardens

It was a beautiful Sunday on May 5th for the ninth annual Bringing Back the Native Garden Tour organized by Kathy Kramer, a recent Jefferson Award winner for outstanding public and community service. There were 43 native gardens on tour this year. Two key qualifications for the native garden tour are 1) the garden contains []

An Introduction to Ecological Landscaping

As global warming and toxic pollution make the headlines, people are becoming more concerned about the effects human activities have on the natural world that supports us. Although the problems are massive in scale, each of us can have an influence on that part of the world that we are closest to – our gardens. []