Richard and Maxine VrMeer’s garden
Brentwood
Garden Lot size: 14,000 sq. ft. lot, 40% native
Years gardened at this location (Gardening Experience): Garden was installed in 2005.
Years on the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour: New this year!
Showcase feature: If you’d like to see how natives can be interspersed with Mediterranean-climate plants to good effect, this pesticide-free garden, designed to be bright and colorful, and to attract birds and insects, is the garden for you! The reduced lawn (note the wide-scalloped edged garden beds) is mowed with a push-mower (there are no lawn-mower air emissions coming from this garden) and clippings are grass-cycled (left on the lawn).
Other garden attractions:
- Ask Maxine, a Master Gardener familiar with Integrated Pest Management, how and why to reduce pesticide use in your garden.
- Check out the two hand-crank compost bins in the back garden.
- Weeds are pulled by hand.
Gardening for Wildlife: Bird feeders and saucers of water attract quail, black birds and hummingbirds, and finches. Birds eat berries from the Oregon and California grapes. A small raptor can be seen watching them with interest from overhead. Jack rabbits roam the back garden.
Garden Talks: 11:00 and 2:00 “Relationships between native plants and wildlife” by Maxine VrMeer