Walnut Creek, California
San Francisco Bay Area
Sunset Zone 14
I live in downtown Walnut Creek in an old house with a small but sunny backyard. When I bought the house, I thought that I would introduce California native plant species to provide a "drought tolerant" and "low maintenance" landscape. I do have quite a few plants and shrubs that survive very well without any summer water at all. But California is a very diverse place, with a broad variety of habitats ranging from sea coasts, to redwood forests, to inland valleys, to deserts, to high Sierra peaks. Some of the most interesting "native" plant species are from places very different from Walnut Creek, and thus require a lot of special attention if they are to grow in my garden. In pursuit of my hobby, I have installed large pots of sandy soil for desert species that don't care for the thick clay of my back yard, a sprinkler system in a bed with plants from the cooler and wetter areas of our state, and even a "seep bed" for a few species that like to have their feet wet at all times.
Many of my plants come from the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park, where I do volunteer work propagating native plants for our annual plant sale in April, and also help out weeding and planting in the garden. We sell native plants propagated by the volunteers on Thursday mornings throughout most of the year. It's a great place to find native plants that simply aren't available at most nurseries.
I developed this web site to share some of my experiences growing California native plants, to sharpen my programming skills, and to demonstrate how a database-driven web application might be designed to share information about gardens. I hope you enjoy browsing here.
The distribution maps displayed on this site are based on data from the CalFlora database (www.calflora.org).