Agenda & Welcome to our 2022 Virtual Events
Coming soon!
Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour
and our new companion event
the Green Home Tour
A tour of Alameda and Contra Costa county gardens and green homes
Online, instead of in-person.
Four days of garden tours, instead of one.
Two days of green home tours.
Free.
These programs will be hosted on Zoom, and livestreamed on YouTube.
Please join us any or all of these events, which will be held on the following Sundays:
| Garden Tour – register here
10:00-3:00
|
The Green Home Tour – register here
10:00-2:00
|
Registration is required
Register for the 2021 Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour
Your confirmation email will contain links to join the live events.
If you don’t receive an immediate registration success e-mail, check your spam box.
If you can’t find your confirmation e-mail for the garden tour, on the mornings of Tour days check the garden tour website for the links.
No one will answer the phone, and there will be no computer support, on event days.
Donations requested!
Please help support the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour by making a donation here on the Tour’s website; contributing to our Go Fund Me campaign here; or mailing a check to: Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour, 1718 Hillcrest Road, San Pablo CA. 94806
Overview of the 2021 Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour
In a series of live garden visits passionate garden owners and the talented designers of the Bay Area’s most beautiful and inspiring landscapes will show us what’s happening in the garden now, feature their favorite natives, describe their great native plant gardening resources, and more.
Keynote by Doug Tallamy!
Renowned ecologist and best-selling author Doug Tallamy will open this event on Sunday, April 25, at 10:00.
2021 Live Schedule (Subject to change! Check back for updates.)
Sunday, April 25, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
Gardening for Wildlife
10:00 – 10:10 Welcome
10:10 – 11:10 “Nature’s best hope” by renowned ecologist Douglas Tallamy, author of “Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens” and the New York Times bestseller “Nature’s Best Hope”
Recent headlines about global insect declines and three billion fewer birds in North America are a bleak reality check about how ineffective our current landscape designs have been at sustaining the plants and animals that sustain us. Such losses are not an option if we wish to continue our current standard of living on Planet Earth. The good news is that none of this is inevitable. Tallamy will discuss simple steps that each of us can—and must—take to reverse declining biodiversity and will explain why we, ourselves, are nature’s best hope.
11:10 – 11:30 ” Garden as if life depended on it: top Bay Area native plants for wildlife” by Stefanie Pruegel
11:30 – 1200 “Ask the Experts” Q and A with Doug Tallamy and local native plant experts Bob Sorenson, Glen Schneider, Kelly Marshall
12:00 -12:30 Bob Sorenson’s garden, Orinda: “Bringing nature home” by Bob Sorenson
12:30 – 1:00 Nancy Wenninger, Walnut Creek: “Gardening for birds” by Nancy Wenninger
1:00 -1:30 Jen Hurley and Dan Gaff, Alameda: “Gardening for wildlife in a small garden” by Jen Hurley and Dan Gaff
1:30 -2:00 Tour of the Native Here Native Plant Nursery, located in Tilden Regional Park: Gardening with our own, local keystone plants”
2:00 – 2:30 “Bridgeview Pollinator Garden: our own, local ‘Tiny World,'” Oakland: created by May Chen and narrated by Clytia Curley
2:30 – 3:00 Pat Rudebusch’s garden, Orinda: “Gardening for birds and bees” by Pat Rudebusch
Sunday, May 2, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
Native Plant Garden Design and Plant Selection
10:00 – 10:10 Welcome with Tour Coordinator Kathy Kramer. Details on the day’s schedule
10:10 – 10:40 Nancy Niemeyer’s garden, Clayton: “Practical tips for gardening with California native plants” by Nancy Niemeyer
10:40 – 11:00 Kathy Kramer and Mike May’s garden, San Pablo: “How to use CalScape to select native plants for your own garden” by Ann-Marie Benz, California Native Plant Society
11:00 – 11:30 Kelly Marshall’s garden, Clayton: “How to design a native plant meadow” by Kelly Marshall, Kelly Marshall Garden Design
11:30 – 12:00 Al Kyte’s garden, Moraga: “Designing for beauty” by Al Kyte
12:00 – 12:30 Robin Heyden’s garden, Alameda: “Redesigning a small garden with native plants” by Robin Heyden
12:30 – 1:00 “Ground cover manzanitas: Beautiful, evergreen, low maintenance and water-conserving” by Pete Veilleux, East Bay Wilds
1:00 – 1:30 Richmond Museum’ of History’s Cultural Garden, Richmond: “Cultural uses of California native plants” by Melinda McCrary, Richmond Museum of History
1:30 – 2:00 Lauren Webster’s garden, Oakland: “A permaculture approach to California native plants and hillside erosion: retaining rainwater on site, creating a wetland and dry creek bed, and plant selection” by Lois Simonds, Gardening by Nature’s Design
2:00 – 2:30 Donna Bodine’s garden, El Cerrito: “Combining natives and edibles” by Donna Bodine, BeeLand Farms
2:30 – 3:00 Susan Billings’ garden, El Cerrito: “From weeds to wildlife: getting started with a native plant garden” by Susan Billings and Sallie Bryan, 4B Garden Design
Sunday, May 16, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
A Potpourri of Inspirational Native Plant Gardens
10:00 – 10:10 Welcome with Tour Coordinator Kathy Kramer. Details on the day’s schedule.
10:10 – 10:40 Al Kyte’s garden, Moraga: “The dry beauty at summer’s end” by Al Kyte
10:40 – 11:00 “Kathy Kramer and Mike May’s garden, San Pablo: “Selecting keystone plants for sunny areas in your own garden”
11:00 – 11:30 Wendy Tokuda’s garden, Oakland
11:30 – 12:00 Eugene Shabelyanau and Danny Galindo’s garden, Castro Valley: “Showcasing the early bloomer: California lilacs and manzanitas, currants, wildflowers” by Eugene Shabelyanau and Danny Galindo
12:00 – 12:30 “Upright manzanitas: Beautiful, evergreen, low maintenance and water-conserving” by Pete Veilleux, East Bay Wilds
12:30 – 1:00 Edible native plants for the home garden” by Rick Flores, U.C. Santa Cruz Arboretum
1:00 – 1:30 Ed Ellebracht’s garden, Fremont ”Lessons learned from my native meadow” and “From unused shared side strip to working watershed: Keeping rainwater on-site”
1:30 – 2:00 Susan and Bill Teefy’s garden, Castro Valley
2:00 – 2:30 Jamie Marantz’ garden, Oakland: ” Flatlands makeover: conquering concrete, and creating places for pollinators, people and Paloma (the dog)” by Jamie Marantz
2:30 – 3:00 Mardi Sicular-Mertens’ garden, Berkeley: “Gardening for Wildlife” by Mardi Mertens
Sunday, May 23, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
A Potpourri of Inspirational Native Plant Gardens
10:00 – 10:10 Welcome with Tour Coordinator Kathy Kramer. Details on the day’s schedule.
10:10 – 10:40 – Al Kyte’s garden, Moraga: “Beauty beyond the bloom” by Al Kyte
10:40 – 11:10 Dan Wanket’s garden, Concord
11:10 – 11:40 Susan Friedman’s garden, San Ramon: “Native plant garden design” by Susan Friedman, Susan Friedman Landscape Architecture
11:40 – 12:10 Melissa Feudi’s garden, El Cerrito
12:10 – 1:00 “Making Nature’s City: using historical ecology and urban ecology to bring biodiversity back to our cities” by Robin Grossinger from the San Francisco Estuary Institute
1:00 – 1:30 Cindy Simons’ garden, Castro Valley
1:30 – 2:00 Kat Weiss’ garden, Livermore: “Transitioning from non-native ornamentals to natives” by Kat Weiss of Kat Weiss Landscape Design
2:00 – 2:05 An Ode to Native Plants: The Bindweed Sisters perform in Stefanie Pruegel’s garden, San Leandro
2:00 – 2:30 – Carol Hardesty’s garden, Livermore: “Still have that 80’s lawn surrounded by mature non-native plantings? Time to re-envision and sheet mulch to a new native garden” by Kat Weiss
2:30 – 3:00 Bridgeview Pollinator Garden, Oakland: “Life and Death on Milkweed” created by May Chen and narrated by Clytia Curley
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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 2020 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 42 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 2020 Gardens. You will be able to meet the homeowners and view about half of these gardens live online through Sundays in the Gardens.
The gardens on the Tour contain at least 60% native plants, are pesticide-free, water-conserving, and provide habitat for wildlife.
Do You Have a Garden to Offer for the 2022 Tour?
If you have a garden to offer for the 2022 Tour, the application is here, and now is the time to submit it. Garden visits will begin when the shelter-in-place restrictions have been lifted, and they will end in July..
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, agencies, and non-profits and individuals.
Thanks to Theodore Payne Foundation
A very special thank you! to the fearless staff of the Theodore Payne Foundation, who were the first to host an online, live, virtual garden tour as the virus loomed in 2020! Without their great example and advice, the initial 2020 “Sundays in the Gardens with the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour” would not have happened, and neither would this event. Margaret, you are an amazing moderator with a successful career before you as an on-screen personality, should you choose to accept it; Philip, your fabulous artistic design and tech skills did not go unnoticed, and Evan, you have shown yourself to be a stalwart, supportive, and flexible Executive Director in these difficult times.