Agenda 2024 Online Tour
It’s our Twentieth Anniversary!
Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour and Green Home Features Showcase
A tour of sixty Alameda and Contra Costa county native plant gardens and thirty green homes
Four days of inspiration-both online and inperson.
Two days of online garden tours and talks.
Two days of inperson garden tours and green home visits.
Free.
Please join us for any or all of these events, which will be held on the following dates:
Free to attend – but not free to run!
If you appreciate this online tour, and also the opportunity to see beautiful native plant gardens and green homes in-person, please join your fellow Tour-goers in providing the funds needed to keep these events going. You can:
• Donate with your credit card or PayPal here
• Venmo @BringingBackTheNatives, or
• Mail a check to:
Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour
1718 Hillcrest Road
San Pablo CA 94806
Overview of the online 2024 Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour
Doug Tallamy will kick off this event by describing what you can do in your own garden to restore nature. Kathy Kramer will provide a retrospective on the Tour’s first 20 years. In a series of garden visits passionate garden owners and the talented designers of the Bay Area’s most beautiful and inspiring landscapes will take us on private tours of their gardens. Come learn how you can attract birds and garden for pollinators, plant milkweed for monarchs, garden for color and interest throughout the year, electrify your home, and more.
Keynote by Doug Tallamy!
Renowned ecologist and best-selling author Doug Tallamy will open this event on Saturday, April 6, at 10:00.
2024 Live Schedule (Subject to change; check back for updates. Talk times may vary slightly during this live event.)
Saturday, April 6, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
10:00-10:10 Welcome, Kathy Kramer, Tour Coordinator
10:10-11:00 “What’s the Rush” by renowned ecologist Doug Tallamy, author of “Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens” and the New York Times bestseller “Nature’s Best Hope”
Doug says: About 50% of California is privately owned. If we planted natives on 50% of this private land we would restore biodiversity – and we can do it starting NOW. Right NOW, each of us can take an ACTION that would help the environment. Here’s what you can do!
1) Shrink the lawn (here is a video on how to sheet mulch)
2) Remove invasive species (Mexican feather grass, for example)
3) Plant keystone species
4) Be generous with your plantings (plant trees at the same density they would be in a forest)
5) Reduce your nighttime light pollution
6) Network with your neighbors (be a role model)
7) Install a small water feature: the sound of gurgling water is irresistible to birds
8) Protect your caterpillars! As most caterpillars spend the winter on leaf litter or in the ground as pupa, leave the leaves
9) Do not use pesticides or fertilizers
10) Educate and help your neighbors to start their own HomeGrown National Park
11:00 “Celebrating the Tour’s 20th anniversary: 2005 to today – the Tour through the Years” by Kathy Kramer
11:45 “Native Plant Resource Teams: Come join us!” by Jennifer Dirking
12:00 “A Landscape Designer’s Garden for Birds” Valerie Matzger’s Piedmont garden – video by Ellyce Morgan. Visit this garden on Sat., May 4, 2024
12:30 “How to Create the Ultimate Butterfly Garden” by Jennifer Dirking
Join me to learn how you can create a beautiful low-water consuming paradise for butterflies and other pollinators in your garden by incorporating keystone species into your garden.
1:00 “How to Plant Milkweed for Monarchs From Seeds or Starts” by Pete Veilleux and Kelly May, video by Carol Bray, script by Jennifer Dirking
1:30 “From Neglected to Native: Transforming a Hillside Garden” by JD Bergeron, CEO, International Bird Rescue
2:00 “Birds, Bugs, Burrowers, and Bambi: Tips for Gardening for Wildlife” by Lainie Johnson Visit Lainie’s garden on Sunday, May 5, 2024
2:30 End
Sunday, April 7, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
10:00-10:10 Welcome, Kathy Kramer, Tour Coordinator
10:10 “Stefanie Pruegel’s Native Plant Garden and Fully-electrified Home” by Stefanie Pruegel Visit Stefanie’s garden and green home on Saturday, May 4, 2024
11:00 “Gardening for Color and Interest Throughout the Year” by Jennifer Dirking
11:30 “Gardening for Birds” by Glenn Phillips, Executive Director of the Golden Gate Bird Alliance
12:00 “How You Can Make Your Windows Bird-Safe” by Erin Diehm
It is estimated that one billion birds die as a result of window collisions every year in the United States alone. Here is what you can do.
Why do birds fly into glass?
Because the outside of glass reflects the environment around it, birds do not recognize it as a barrier. The birds see the reflected environment, such as trees and sky, and collide with the glass assuming it is a clear flight path. Any window, large or small can be a killer. CollidEscape is applied to the outside of a window so as to disrupt the reflection off the outside surface that birds perceive as a continuation of their environment.
Birds are frequently killed in these collisions or are stunned, only to die of internal injuries later.
12:30 “Native Street Trees” by Pete Veilleux
1:00 “An HOA Success Story: From Lawn to Native Plant Garden at an HOA Managed Landscape” by Stephanie Falzone
1:30 “Delia and John Taylor’s Berkeley Garden” by Delia Taylor
1:50 “Electrifying My House—and Hoping to Make it Easier for You!” by Kathy Simon visit Kathy Simon’s native plant garden and fully-electrified home on Saturday, May 4, 2024
2:30 end
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Two Ways to View the Program (and a Third, to Learn More)
1) Join via Zoom
We are using the webinar function of Zoom to host the events. You will need to download the free Zoom software to your device to be able to join the event using Zoom. For a seamless experience, we recommend that you download Zoom in advance.
Having trouble? Zoom has amazing support to help you learn how to use it, quite quickly. Here is a great help page, where you can choose getting started either from a desktop (e.g. home computer), or mobile device, and follow the instructions for downloading the software and sign-up.
Here is another very helpful section of the website to troubleshoot and learn more about Zoom:
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us
2) Join via YouTube
To view the events on YouTube, all you need is your web browser.
3) See garden photos, read garden descriptions and print plant lists of Tour gardens
Leading up to the tour and during the live events, check out the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour’s View the Gardens page to see beautiful photographs of each garden, read garden descriptions, and view the plant lists for each of the Tour gardens. (Both the gardens featured on the virtual tours and another twenty gardens are available on the Tour’s website.)
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More on the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour!
Since 2005, the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour, together with passionate native plant gardeners located throughout Alameda and Contra Costa counties, has set the standard for sustainable landscaping in Northern California. The Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour shows that native gardens are beautiful, can be designed on any budget—and conveys the idea that each of us plays a critical role in supporting biodiversity.
The exemplary landscapes on the Tour hope to inform, inspire and motivate you to incorporate native plants into your own gardens.
Since the Tour’s inception more than 200,000 garden visits have been made to native plant gardens showcased on the Tour. This year’s Tour features 60 gardens, which can be seen on the Tour’s website. You can view photos of each of these gardens, read a description of the garden and print out its plant list at View the Gardens. This year 20 of these homeowners are sharing their green home features; ask these hosts about their solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, induction ranges, insulation, and more!
The gardens on the Tour contain at least 70% native plants, are pesticide-free, water-conserving, and provide habitat for wildlife.
Do You Have a Garden to Offer to the Tour?
If you have a garden to offer, the application is here, and now is the time to submit it. Garden visits will begin in late spring, and they will end in June.
Thank you
We are grateful for the community of people that make this event possible. A very special thank you to the garden hosts and designers for opening their wonderful gardens to the public, and to our volunteers for sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with visitors.
We are deeply grateful for the support of our sponsors—including local businesses, government agencies, and non-profits and individuals.