San Francisco Group

Celebrate Mothers' Day with San Francisco native plants

Sunday, May 14, 10 am - 2 pm.

The surprise is not that they were here before the Indians, the Spaniards, and the Americans. The surprise is: they're still here - all over San Francisco. The Sierra Club will be co-sponsoring a free self-guided tour to enjoy them on Mothers' Day.

The mysterious "they" refers to poppies, lupine, wallflowers, angelica, blue elderberry, toyon, manzanita - and a host of other native flowers, shrubs, trees, and grasses in gardens throughout the city. Unlike more suburban tours in the East Bay and the Peninsula, the San Francisco tour features native plants in urban settings - a grocery store, a firehouse, a museum, a school, a children's magical play garden, front yards, and back yards. It also highlights unusual "designer gardens" tucked away in Glen Park, Potrero Hill, South Beach, and other spots.

Organized by the Yerba Buena Chapter of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) and co-sponsored by the San Francisco Group of the Sierra Club as well as San Francisco Tomorrow, Earth Island Institute, and other organizations, the free Mother's Day Native Plant Garden Tour will be held rain or shine.

Private gardens will be open to the public, with hosts and volunteers available to discuss the natives and hand out plant lists, how-to packets, and book lists. The tour will also feature several public gardens and small parks that are clearly educational. Visitors at the Presidio Native Plant Nursery, for instance, will be able to study the demonstration garden and the A-to-Z row of natives in pots, getting to know plants that were present when the first botanists inventoried the Presidio in 1816. Visitors can then see what happens to these plants once they leave the nursery by stopping at the refurbished Baker Beach Apartments, newly landscaped with 4,000 nursery-grown dune-scrub plantings. Those on the tour will also be able to purchase low-cost natives grown from San Francisco seeds at the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center.

For tour details, visit the CNPS Yerba Buena Chapter web site at http://www.cnps-yerbabuena.org/gardentour.html or call tour coordinator and Sierra Club hike leader Jeanne Halpern at (415) 841-1254.