Bay Area garden tour goes native

Add up the benefits of a garden brimming with California native plants and you'll have a full column of pluses.

These landscapes take a miserly amount of water to keep up, are low-maintenance, tend to not need chemical applications and are friendly to birds, butterflies and other ``good guys'' of the garden.

And they can be downright spectacular -- especially this year, when the mini heat wave we had in March pumped up the bloom factor in many plant varieties.

See for yourself this month at the Going Native Garden Tour, which will feature about 30 gardens stretching from San Jose to Redwood City. The April 18 tour is free, but you must preregister by 11 a.m. April 10.

Of course you're not going to traipse through all 30 landscapes, although it's a tempting and challenging proposition. Once you register, you'll get maps showing where all the gardens are, and that's when the pre-tour planning fun begins.

Don't want to drive a lot? It's easy to plot a route that includes just the gardens nearest your home. But tour organizers have added a nice feature to the 2004 event by grouping them not only by geography but also by attributes. Are you particularly interested in gardens with water features? It's simple to find them. Does a drought-tolerant garden appeal to you? Go see several. Are bunchgrasses your thing? The tour has a bunch.

Other groupings include gardens that are newly planted (less than 3 years old) and well-established (older than 10 years); mixed gardens with and without lawns; landscapes that are attractive to wildlife, birds and butterflies; gardens that are maintained by collectors of certain varieties of plants; and those that have been professionally designed.

There also are spaces that represent what are called ``restoration gardens'' -- that is, they are mostly faithful to plant life that is truly native to the area, such as a riparian or water environment, grassland/chaparral or oak woodland.

New to natives? This is a great way to see a wide variety of approaches to incorporating these striking plants in almost any landscape, from a small bungalow or patio garden to a suburban estate. The tour also includes at least a couple of community gardens.

Are you a veteran of last year's tour? Many of the gardens will be repeats, so you can skip ahead to the ``significant number of new ones,'' says Arvind Kumar, a member of the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society.

``What's special about California native plants? They are adapted to our soil and climate and tend to be hardy and easy to care for,'' says Kumar, an amateur gardener who embraced natives fairly recently.

Kumar's East San Jose garden -- landscaped front, side and back with a profuse variety of salvias, poppies, buckwheat and the like -- was included on last year's inaugural tour. He handed out plant lists to visitors and proudly pointed out his favorites as tour participants strolled the paths.

``We gave tours every half hour and we were busy all of the six hours'' of the tour, says Kumar, who was host to as many as 90 visitors. ``People were very interested, very appreciative. They had all kinds of questions about the plants and exposure, that sort of thing.''

More than 1,100 garden enthusiasts registered for the 2003 tour and collectively made 3,800 garden visits. Gardens in Palo Alto and Los Altos drew the largest number of visitors, with one in Los Altos ushering through 323 people in six hours.

Sponsors of this year's tour are the Santa Clara Valley Water District, Guadalupe River Park & Gardens, Santa Clara Valley Urban Runoff Pollution Prevention Program, Mediterranean Garden Society, Native Habitats and the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society.

Garden tour WhereThirty private gardens in the Santa Clara Valley.

When10 a.m.-4 p.m. April 18.

CostFree, but register by 11 a.m. April 10. Garden descriptions, maps and directions will be e-mailed the week of April 10.

RegistrationSend e-mail to info@goingnativegardentour.org, call (408) 274-6965 or register at http://www.goingnativegardentour.org/.