Shonduel and Don Duel's garden
Hayward
Garden Lot size: 5,100 square feet
Years gardened at this location (Gardening Experience): 6 years
Years on the "Bringing Back the Natives" Garden Tour: 3 years
Showcase feature: This lawn-free garden, which provides food, medicine, and beauty, connects its owners to the seasons in a way that they never expected. It is a haven for children who love walking the trails, foraging for food, catching bugs, looking for tracks, and learning about nature. The low-maintenance sunny front yard needs only occasional water during the summer.
Other garden attractions:
- Deer trail in the front garden also serves as swale, which increases the infiltration of rainwater.
- Greywater system in the backyard diverts laundry water to the avocado trees in the summer.
- You'll want to linger over the informative signage in this garden!
Gardening for Wildlife: A pond, logs, and rock and brush piles provide shelter for wildlife. 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, raccoons, squirrels, moles, alligator lizards, hummingbirds, California towhees, jays, bushtits, dark-eyed juncos, Nutalls woodpeckers, chickadees, warblers, plain titmice, kinglets, black phoebes, cedar waxwings, and hermit thrushes are regular or seasonal visitors.
Garden Talks: 3:00 "The garden trail as a means of educating children about the seasons, rhythms of life, and the whole of the universe"
Garden Tours: Lead by host: 10:00, 11:00, and 1:00.
Read Shonduel's account,"How I Got Started Gardening with Natives"