Shonduel and Don Duel’s Garden
Hayward
Gardening experience: Lifetime
Years gardened at this location: 4 years
Size: 5,100 square feet
Showcase feature: Over the course of four years, this garden has been transformed from a rock-covered front yard and an Astro-turf covered backyard, into a haven for native plants, insects, birds, and animals. The gardeners, who are extremely knowledgeable about insects, native plants, and the various uses of plants, designed the garden so that that nature would do most of the work, and provide entertainment and wonder on a daily basis.
Other garden attractions:
- Coast live oak, coyote bush, pink flowering currant, and California grape are volunteers.
- ACQ wood (an alternative to arsenic-treated wood) has been used in the bat house pole and fencing uprights.
- A variety of wildflowers reseed themselves each year.
- You'll want to linger over the great signage in this garden!
Gardening for Wildlife: Logs, rock, and brush piles provide shelter for wildlife, and a small pond and marsh provide water. A variety of native berries—coffeeberry, toyon, Pacific wax myrtle, and blue elderberry—were planted throughout the garden to provide fruit and insects for birds. Leaf-cutter bees nest in the garden, and bumblebees are frequent visitors. Deer, squirrels, moles, alligator lizards, California towees, jays, bushtits, dark-eyed juncos, Nutalls woodpeckers, titmice, black phoebes, and mourning doves have all been seen in the garden. The gardener happily reports that letting the aphids go on the kale brought in an army of lady bug larvae, soldier beetles, hummingbirds, and bushtits, and letting vegetables go to seed brought in flocks of sparrows and house finches. A bat house waits hopefully for inhabitants.
Plants sold or given away: A limited number of free cuttings of California fuschia, penstemon, California sage, and monkeyflower will be given away.
Read Shonduel's account, "How I Got Started Gardening with Natives"