Catherine and David Roth’s garden

While this garden can be viewed from the street, this garden is accessed via a flight of stairs. Please watch your step. This garden is not for those with balance issues.

Showcase Feature
This beautiful garden, with its potpourri of native plant textures, forms, and colors, is an inspiration. The garden was designed and installed and is maintained by the artistic and knowledgeable Pete Veilleux, owner of East Bay Wilds. It’s hard to believe that this garden has only a few inches of soil over bedrock.

The lush, densely planted garden contains a delightful and rambunctious mixture of native plants. In sunny areas a variety of pink and cream-colored buckwheat (rosy, graceful St. Catherine’s lace, Santa Cruz Island, Coastal and Conejo), mingle with purple-flowering Cleveland and white sages, lavender asters, bright red fuchsia, hot pink checkerbloom, golden aster and our native blue flax, which grow into and tumble about each other with abandon. Eight types of manzanitas, including the rare Mount Diablo manzanita, and three varieties of California lilac provide structure and stability throughout the year. These lovely evergreens all complement the bold brick-red color of the house.

Shady spots brim with coffeeberry, and fragrant pink-flowering currant pitcher sage, oceanspray, and yerba buena. Visual depth was achieved by blending the deeper, darker colors of plants that flourish in shady areas with the lighter-colored leaves of plants that do well in the hot sun.

Catherine reports, “This garden gives us so much joy.”

Other Garden Attractions
• The dense plantings help outcompete weeds: those that get through are hand-pulled.
• The parking strip and plants in front of the retaining wall are home to soft, low-growing natives that can tolerate the narrow space, and hot dry conditions.
• Designer Pete Veilleux will be at this garden from 11:00-2:00.

Gardening for Wildlife
Native bees and butterflies adore the highly aromatic white sage, as do finches, which gather seeds from its arching, six-foot long flower stalks.

Keystone species (watch this talk by Doug Tallamy!)
Keystone species—our own, local ecological powerhouse plants — in this garden include pink flowering currant, California lilac, aster, lupine, hazelnut, manzanitas, sages, buckwheat, oceanspray, and penstemon.

At least partially wheelchair accessible? No