While this garden is open all year round, visiting it during the tour day provides an opportunity to ask the docents about any particularly interesting plants or features.

Address: 1751 Grand Blvd, Alviso (click the address to show it on a map).

Directions: From 101, take 237 East; from 880/680, take 237 West. Exit at Zanker Road and go north towards the bay for approximately 2 miles, passing the Water Pollution Control plant, landfill, and railroad tracks. Watch for the large brown sign on the right reading "Don Edwards SF Bay National Wildlife Refuge". Make a sharp RIGHT turn immediately after this sign and follow the access road to the EEC parking lot.

Showcase Features: Volunteers established this garden to provide critical habitat for songbirds and butterflies, and to demonstrate how to garden for wildlife using beautiful California native plants, without the use of herbicides. It contains mature specimens of Ceanothus, fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, pink flowering currant, buckwheat, toyon, and black sage in a naturalistic setting. Among trees, look for California buckeye, western sycamore, Fremont cottonwood, coast live oak, and alder.

Other Garden Attractions: Look for the bioswale between the parking lot and the driveway. Willows, rushes, California fuchsia, California bee plant, and mugwort filter runoff from the surrounding parking lot.

Gardening for Wildlife: The butterfly garden contains milkweed, California buckeye, and other host and nectar plants for swallowtails and western pygmy blue butterflies. Black phoebes, warblers, scrub jays, and mourning doves frequent the songbird garden. Bushtits forage for insects on the branches of several mature coast live oaks, and Anna's hummingbirds find nectar in California fuchsia and hummingbird sage. Jackrabbits and cottontails find cover under mature coffeeberry, toyon, and lemonadeberry. As you walk the garden paths, you may spot a Western fence lizard.

Years of CA Native Gardening at this Location: 22

Garden Size: 1.5 acre

Designer: Volunteers
Installer: Community Volunteers and USFWS

Click here to display the plant list in a printer-friendly format (from year 2012).