Beyond the present green oasis and waterfall, the early sound track was the steady sound of rakes and hand shovels, saws and mallets for the development of this beautiful spot. Our Japanese style garden was originally designed by Hisaichi Harry Tsugawa. It was built in 1959 by members of the Japanese American community of Oakland and the East Bay, supported by the California Association of Nurserymen, the Oakland chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, and various citizens and businesses.

By the mid 1980’s the garden had suffered from lack of maintenance. Then vice-mayor Frank Ogawa asked Dennis Makishima to bring his students to the garden to improve it. Makishima had initiated and taught the Aesthetic Pruning classes at Merritt College.

Merritt College’s Aesthetic Pruning Club started maintaining this garden in 1985. Now under the direction of Bill Castellon, it continues to provide maintenance and improvements. The Friends of the Japanese Garden was formed to raise funds so that the irrigation system could be installed by the Merritt College landscape irrigation class.

The stunning Japanese Garden fence and gate was made possible in 2009-2011 by a grant from the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation, and support from the Friends of the Japanese Garden. Carpenters for the project were Jay van Arsdale’s Laney College Daiku Dojo students. Van Arsdale has studied this and taught for more than 25 years. For more information about Daiku Dojo, visit, www.daikudojo.org. Construction is not your typical western style nailed fence. This is mortise and tenon work using hand tools, the crafter’s ancient way of doing this joinery work.

As lead carpenter for the project and a Daiku teacher at Laney College (perhaps the only class in the world taught outside Japan) van Arsdale understood that the new fence was an extraordinary gift to the carpenters, the Gardens and Oakland.

The Merritt College Aesthetic Pruning Club provides monthly maintenance and twice-yearly daylong pruning workshops for the garden. This is a group of
current and past students of the College’s Aesthetic Pruning classes.

To rent this garden for private functions, call the Oakland Parks and Recreation Central Reservations Unit at 510-238-3187.

For general information contact

Here’s the thing: habitat gardens are inherently messy! Seedlings are growing underfoot, so conventional weeding and mulching have to be handled with special care. The caterpillars chomp through the milkweed leaves – in a normal garden this would be an unsightly cause for alarm, but for us it’s a sign of success! If they eat here, they lay their eggs here and hatch here.

The first year of the Pollinator Posse project we had just a few butterflies – six by our count. Last year there were about 300 and this year, thanks to our fostering program, we have released about 600 butterflies into the garden.

And fostering – what is that anyway? We find lots of Monarch caterpillars in the garden. To protect them from their many predators, we gather them, and volunteers take them home in mesh cages, feed them milkweed for a few weeks till their go into chrysalis, then wait patiently for the exciting emersion when the butterflies “eclose” from the chrysalis.

Watch for workshops in the garden teaching families how to participate in this early science learning for kids.

Vireyas are a special kind of tropical rhododendron native to islands between Asia and Australia, and they flower throughout the year in coastal California.

They love a frost-free environment. So, we house them in a special sheltered environment in The Gardens at Lake Merritt, in the back of the garden near the citrus grove and the succulent garden. We highlight locally produced hybrids, and selected plants from areas generally unavailable to botanists.

Numbering over 300 species, Vireyas can be found in the wild growing across much of SE Asia, principally in New Guinea, Borneo, Sumatra and the Philippines. Although these are tropical regions, the plants grow mostly in the cool mountainous areas, either as epiphytes in the tall trees of the cloud forest, or in open ground as shrubs. These low altitude vireos are idea for our Oakland climate. As anyone who has visited the San Francisco Botanical Garden’s Cloud Forest area knows, the Bay is most hospitable to these beautiful plants.

The beauty of the vireya has long attracted hybridizers and many excellent cultivars have been developed.

BUY TICKETS HERE!

VOLUNTEER AT THE AUTUMN LIGHTS FESTIVAL HERE!

The festival welcomes over 1,000 children and adults to take a nighttime stroll through the gardens, where they encounter enchanting illuminated art installations set among the flowers and trees. The Autumn Lights Festival is a fundraiser for the Gardens at Lake Merritt, a free public garden that truly is the “Green Heart of Oakland.”

Local artists have been selected and invited to create pieces of art that incorporate light in many forms. Last year, over 1000 people attended, and it was a major fundraiser for the Gardens. People who attend get into the spirit, often creating costumes with light!

The Gardens at Lake Merritt depend on donations and volunteer help to stay open.  It has  provided gardening education and experience to generations of Oaklanders.  Here are a few photos from last year’s event:

Image courtesy of: Greg Linhares www.omnisourceimages.com

Glass Artist: Kim Webster www.kwebsterglass.com
Image courtesy of: Greg Linhares www.omnisourceimages.com

If you build it they will come.

The Gardens at Lake Merritt are well-known as a showcase for a plethora of species of flora.  Recently, a leaky, resource-wasting water feature– designed in a day when few questioned the constant draining, cleaning and refilling involved in maintaining decorative ponds– was transformed into a habitat for several species of  fauna– dragonflies, damselflies and tree frogs.

What started as a badge project concept for Eagle Scout, Jordan Soulman,  coalesced around Park Supervisor Tora Rocha’s long-held notion that the Gardens’ mid-20th Century water feature might be more efficiently maintained through the installation of a cutting-edge bio-filtration system.

The project came together quite quickly and took a virtual village to accomplish.

Among the contributing personnel and organizations:

With Native Bee Specialist Celeste Ets-Hokin

Early spring is the right time to rejuvenate or plant for a soon to be blooming, fragrant and buzzing native bee garden. A premier example of plant selection and pairing can be seen in the new native bee garden overseen by native bee specialist Celeste Ets-Hokin. The bee garden is located in the Pollinator Garden (across from the Edible Demonstration Gardens –look for the Pollinator signs).

“A good bee garden should include a mix of pollen- and nectar-rich annuals and perennials, offering flowers of different colors, sizes, shapes and bloom periods.  And of course you’ll want to make sure that at least some of these plants are California natives.  Native plants are generally four times more attractive than exotic varieties to our native bees,” says Celeste.

To give you a head start, here’s a look at some of the perennials and annuals she’s introduced to the bee garden. Then to learn more about native bees and the creation of their glorious garden in the Gardens at Lake merritt, be sure to read the following article by Celeste, “The BEE-UTIFUL Gardens at Lake Merritt:  We Built It and They Came!”

PERENNIALS

California Natives:

Erigeron glaucus (seaside daisy), “Bountiful” and “Wayne Roderick” cultivars

Grindelia stricta (gumplant)

Penstemon heterophyllus (beardtongue), “Margarita BOP” cultivar

Spheralcea ambigua (desert mallow),

Lupinus latifolius parishii (lupine)

Monardella villosa (coyote mint)

Solidago californica (goldenrod)

Exotics:

Agastache (giant hyssop) – there are some native species, but more difficult to locate

Bulbine frutescens (bulbine)

Coreopsis lanceolata (tickseed)

Calamintha (calamint)

Gaillardia (Arizona blanket flower) “Oranges and Lemons” cultivar

Lavandula (Spanish lavender)

Helenium (sneezeweed)

Nepeta (catmint)

Salvia melissidora (sage)

Salvia uliginosa (sage)

ANNUAL SEEDS:

Best scorpionweed species –

Phacelia tanacetifolia

Phacelia distans

Phacelia cicutaria

Phacelia campanularia

Eschscholzia (California poppy)

Lupinus succulentus arroyo (arroyo lupine)

Gilia capitata (gilia)

Cosmos bipinnatus (cosmos)

Cosmos sulphureus (cosmos)

The BEE-UTIFUL Gardens at Lake Merritt:  We Built It and They Came!

Article by Celeste Ets-Hokin, native bee expert and advocate overseeing

 the Gardens’ native bee garden

There are some 4000 species of bees that originated here in North America, and these native bees are far and away our most important pollinators.  Their pollinating services are vital to the survival of North American plant communities, which in turn provide food and shelter for the many animals in these ecosystems.  Ironically, the more familiar honey bee, an introduced species from Europe, is not included in this group of essential native pollinators.

Like the honey bee, our native bee populations are suffering steep declines nationwide, threatened by habitat loss and pesticide poisoning.   While these trends are alarming to environmental scientists, most of the rest of us aren’t even aware of the existence of native bees, let alone their astonishing diversity or their profound importance to our ecosystems and food webs.

So about four years ago I began working with the Alameda County Master Gardeners to establish a native bee demonstration garden within their section of the Gardens at Lake Merritt.  Our goal was to attract a diversity of native bees to the garden and introduce the public to this amazing and colorful cast of characters.  We hoped to educate gardeners about how easy and rewarding it is to create a bee-friendly garden and participate in the conservation of these critical species.

Beginning in February of 2009, we planted a diversity of California native and exotic plants known to offer good pollen and nectar resources for our native bees.  We added a few nesting blocks for solitary wood nesting bees, and kept much of the area free from mulch, to allow ground-nesting bees easy access to the soil substrate.  Then we waited to see who showed up.

We couldn’t have been more delighted.  Our small efforts were rewarded by a steady stream of native bee visitors from spring through fall, including mason, mining, digger, leaf-cutter, long-horn, sweat, cuckoo and bumble bees.  Our little bee garden was living proof that when you build it, they will come!

Now it’s been just over a year since we moved our demonstration bee garden from the modest section of the ACMG trials area to a larger, sunnier, triangular plot at the center of the Lake Merritt Gardens.  The new site is easily identified by a large stump at one end, drilled with holes for wood-nesting bees, as well as a sign provided by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, designating the area as a pollinator habitat.

And within a few short months of its establishment, what a glorious pollinator habitat the new location became!  I must admit that on that cold bleak day in January of 2012, when we first transplanted our proven perennials from the old site, we had our doubts about the new garden.  There wasn’t much to see then but an expanse of muddy ground, interrupted here and there with some twiggy clumps holding on to a few sad looking leaves.

But by the end of the year we had seen roughly 80 species of native bees visit the prolific succession of spring, summer and fall blooming plants that soon blanketed the entire plot.  And on any given day there was such an abundance of bees that one visitor to the gardens declared it to be “Bumble Bee Central”! So for all you Doubting Thomas’s out there who think you can’t readily build a bee-friendly garden, think again!

I hope the story of the Lake Merritt bee garden will inspire gardeners everywhere to join us in creating habitat for our VIP (very important pollinators) native bees.  Together we can make the landscape BEE-UTIFUL!

In addition, Celeste has authored an extraordinary resource for true bee and pollinator enthusiasts “Garden Variety Native Bees of North America – Perpetual Calendar.” It is a wealth of stunning photography and pollen and nectar sources.  For more information contact: celeste.ets@comcast.net.

July Special Events

Golden Gate Lily Society Show and Sale, Saturday and Sunday, July 13-14, noon-5pm, in the Lakeside Park Garden Center. Free admission.

Sydney Mitchell Iris Society Sale, Friday, July 26, 7:30pm in the Lakeside Park Garden Center. Free admission.

Managing Pests in Your Garden Safely, Saturday, July 27, noon-1pm: Want to learn more about what is eating your vegetables? Or what virus killed your tomato plants? And where to find out more when you do have a pest problem in your yard? This is the talk for you.  Learn how to identify your bugs and manage them in the least toxic manner. Bring leaf & bug samples!

Master Gardener Dennis Brown will help you see your way through aphids, ants, snails and slugs as you learn about common pests and diseases. This talk is free and open to the public. Please join us, and bring your own gardening questions! Gather in the Master Gardener Trials Gardens in the Edible Demonstration Garden. Download the full Workshop Series schedule here: 2013 Trials Garden Workshop Series

Introduction to Bonsai: Interactive Demo and Questions in the Bonsai Garden, Sunday, July 28, 1pm-3pm. This free workshop (held every fourth Sunday of the month) covers the art of Bonsai including techniques, styling, care and grooming. You are welcome to bring your own tree for some TLC.

June Special Events

Love Our Lake Day, Sunday, June 9 from 11am to 4pm at Lake Merritt, Lakeside Park and in the surrounding Oakland neighborhoods. Oaklanders and visitors alike are invited to come play in the car-free streets & parks surrounding Lake Merritt and celebrate the area’s transformation through Measure DD!

We are expecting many visitors to the Gardens at Lake Merritt.  We need 8–12 Volunteer Ambassadors to welcome our guests. If you would like to join the fun, please send us an email and include your contact information and the times you are available to volunteer with us.

The festive event will enrich three miles of car-free streets with recreation and cultural activities for the entire family. At 2pm Mayor Jean Quan will be at the south end of the lake for the Grand Opening of Lake Merritt Boulevard featuring a beautiful new amphitheater and four-acre park.

California Suiseki Society Show,  Saturday and Sunday, June 8 & 9 from 10am-5pm, at the Lakeside Park Garden Center. Free to the public. Stones have been admired and collected by mankind since time immemorial. And throughout history, cultures around the globe have developed unique names, disciplines and guidelines for their particular art form.

The Japanese art is called “Suiseki”, in China “Scholar’s Rocks”, in Korea it is “Suseok” or “Gongshi”. Among many other terms used, some might include: viewing stones, artistic stones, object stones and many more.

Bay Area Carnivorous Plant Society Show, Saturday June 15, noon-4pm. Free at the Lakeside Park Garden Center.  Carnivorous plants derive some or most of their nutrients (but not energy) from trapping and consuming  animals or protozoans, typically insects and other arthropods.