March in the Gardens

March is springing forth, and with it comes burgeoning color and life in our Pollinator garden. This garden is a big program focus at our The Gardens at Lake Merritt, especially this month leading up to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, where our Pollinator Posse, the Oakland Museum, the Gardens at Lake Merritt and our Morcom Rose Garden have been invited to create a huge space for education on the importance of Pollinators. Check out all we have planned: http://sfgardenshow.com/kids/ March 18-22 in San Mateo.

While there are many beautiful, more formal themed gardens ringing the center of the Gardens at Lake Merritt, the middle of the garden holds a big area for a wild and crazy pollinator habitat garden. Pollinators – bees, butterflies and other beneficial insects – are in decline and threatened because their habitats are being destroyed by widespread weed spraying and urban sprawl. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the birds and the bees here!
Our park director Tora Rocha founded The Pollinator Posse a few years back to draw more pollinating insects to the garden. The Posse has ridden to new heights with local and national attention, including that huge display at the 2015 San Francisco Flower and Garden Show.

With a nod to the alarming declines in the population of the Monarch butterfly, we plant native and a little tropical milkweed in our gardens, as habitat for the butterflies, their eggs and their caterpillars. Other butterfly species are cultivated as well, and of course our famous Bee Hotel, modeled on a Bee Hotel in the Place des Jardins in Paris. http://www.arkinspace.com/2012/06/welcome-to-bee-hotel.html Built by Oakland carpenters in the Department of Public Works, it is a draw for young and old, and adds to our magnetism for many pollinator species. The Bee Hotel shelters drilled openings of many sizes to provide nesting space for various species of native bees and other insects.
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. There might be larvae of something spectacular lurking under any dead leaf. The caterpillars chomp through the milkweed leaves leaving gaping holes – 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 306 and in 2014-15, thanks to our fostering program, we have released over 600 butterflies into the garden.

And fostering caterpillars – 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.
Monarchs have a storybook migration, metamorphosing their way from Mexico and California to British Columbia each year, over four generations of butterflies that magically keeps knowing where to go. The Western Migration of the Monarchs overwinters in coastal California, while the Eastern Migration goes to Mexico.

February in the Gardens:

Tucked in a back corner of The Gardens at Lake Merritt, under a special wooden shelter, we have the largest outdoor collection of Vireyas in the continental United States. They have just burst into bloom. Come visit soon, and prepared to be stunned!

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 vireyas are idea for our Oakland climate. As anyone who has visited the San Francisco Arboretum (http://www.sfbotanicalgarden.org/) Cloud Forest area knows, the Bay is most hospitable to these beautiful plants. For a history of how our garden developed under the careful hand of Bill Moyles, read this: See:http://www.vireya.net/index.html

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

January in the Gardens

Our buttons are going to pop off, we are so proud of being on the cover of the Oakland Museum of California’s newest issue of its member magazine. Inside Out features our Bee Hotel at the Gardens at Lake Merritt on the cover. This languid summer image really captures the feel of our gardens! The issue, which is all about how to enjoy and share the city’s treasures, includes a story on the new exhibition Bees: Tiny Insect, Big Impact, which opens to the public January 31. Photo: Greg Linhares, City of Oakland. Courtesy of Oakland Museum of California. — at Gardens At Lake Merritt.

Our buttons are going to pop off, we are so proud of being on the cover of the Oakland Museum of California’s newest member magazine. Inside Out features our Bee Hotel at the Gardens at Lake Merritt on the cover. This languid summer image really captures the feel of our gardens! The issue, which is all about how to enjoy and share the city’s treasures, includes a story on the new exhibition Bees: Tiny Insect, Big Impact, which opens to the public January 31.
Photo: Greg Linhares, City of Oakland. Courtesy of Oakland Museum of California. — at Gardens At Lake Merritt.

OMCA takes a look at the wildly diverse and intricate world of one of the most important creatures to human agriculture and the natural environment. Through family-friendly experiences, hands-on activities, and media, Bees: Tiny Insect, Big Impact touches on topics of honeybees and Bay Area beekeeping, the diversity of California native bee species, citizen science projects, and the similarities between bees and humans. Discover real bee specimens under a microscope, crawl through a human-sized beehive, and try on a beekeeper suit. The exhibition continues outside of the Gallery: get involved with citizen science organizations, check out bee hotels installed in the OMCA gardens, and take home guides on planting a bee-friendly garden and building bee hotels for your own garden. In an immersive gallery environment, explore the causes of bee population decline, learn about the significance of bees to California’s economy and ecosystems, and discover how simple but powerful actions by Californians can help bees to survive in a changing world.
Check us out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see lots of current updates on what’s going on in the garden. Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/gardensatlakemerritt?ref=tn_tnmn