Native garden tour in Silicon Valley draws enthusiasts

Tan is the new green.

The nascent "de-lawning" movement was on proud display around the South Bay and Peninsula during Sunday's Going Native Garden Tour, which showcased native plants in an elegant palette of khaki, tawny, umber, bronze, olive and gold.

"We killed the grass with plywood," said Pamela Chesavage, happily. Instead of a carpet of turf, her Palo Alto front yard is decorated with fragrant salvia and thousands of poppies.

One yard at a time, native gardeners are striking a blow against Miracle-Gro, Weed-B-Gon and fleets of lawn mowers, reclaiming small corners of the valley and returning them to nature.

Nativists used to be environmental zealots whose rigid anti-water orthodoxy created dull and dusty summer yards. Now, they're pragmatists. Water is expensive — and in short supply. Faced with drought, climate change and spiraling energy costs, an increasing number of homeowners are embracing an approach to landscaping that marries traditional environmental concerns — sustainability, biodiversity, restoration, conservation — with aesthetics. 

The gardens on the tour, visited by more than 4,000 on Sunday, are not your 1970s weary xeriscapes. They are more thoughtful and seductive, with a greater sensitivity to aesthetics. Wild things — domesticated — can be lovely, many visitors agreed.

Since 2003, the Bay Area's pioneering native garden tour has showcased more than 40 gardens in a do-it-yourself, open house format. Supported by more than 200 volunteers, the annual event spread over a dozen neighborhoods, is sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley Water District and others. 


"They're beautiful," said Sally Tazuke of Menlo Park, viewing her seventh garden. "We're trying to find out what it's like. We should all be making more of an effort."

In San Jose, a Ninth Street garden features a meandering path over a dry creek, past a small sedge meadow dotted with rushes. Elsewhere in town, a conventional tract home has been transformed into a mini-wilderness.

In the affluent Palo Alto hills, one homeowner resisted the usual tennis courts and swimming pool, instead creating a landscape that is frequently visited by foxes, skunks, frogs, salamanders and an infinite number of bugs. In Los Altos, a well-timed sequence of blossoms provides almost year-round food for hummingbirds.

For years, native plants were largely ignored in the race to market plants like petunias, begonias, impatiens and hollyhocks — a horticultural homogenization that made yards in Gilroy look just like Greenwich.

The nursery industry wasn't interested in producing plants from locally collected seeds, but preferred to titillate gardeners with plants that were new, exotic — and thirsty.

Now even Home Depot and Wal-Mart stores sell a few local native plants. 

Because some of the most prized plants are still not widely available in the nursery trade, gardeners will wait in line for the opportunity to buy special specimens. Next weekend, the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society will host a sale at Mission College of more than 400 species of wildflowers and native plants. The event will also offer free classes on native plant identification and gardening, as well as books, posters, seeds, note cards and a children's activities table. 

Under Sunday's cobalt blue skies and blazing sun, Glenda Jones recalled her once overly tidy yard with diseased firethorne and invasive Algerian ivy. 

"We killed the grass by withholding water," said a proud Jones, who lives in a corner of Palo Alto known for its collection of one-story mid-1950s modern homes.

Now her yard is filled with an array of plants that are thankful for sun, native clay soil and chemical-free care. Her crop of poppies is so abundant that she needed to cull some to make room for less prolific plants.

"I love the poppies the most," she said. "I'm a California native."