When Kathy Kramer first moved to the East Bay from Los Angeles, she wanted to turn her garden into a wildlife habitat. She soon realized there was “a steep learning curve.”
That’s what inspired her to start the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour in 2005, at a time when native plants were hard to come by and few landscapers integrated native plants.
The tour is back this weekend, with more gardens participating than ever before – 72 private homes and two school gardens, from as far north as Martinez down to Fremont, with most concentrated in the near East Bay. Since its founding, there have been more than 230,000 garden visits made, according to Kramer.
The idea behind the free garden tour is to inspire others who are on the journey. “I think people realize the world is in crisis and this is something they can do to help alleviate it by providing a habitat in their own backyard,” Kramer says.
Part of the crisis is that in North America alone, the abundance of birds has declined by 30 percent since 1970. Research shows that among the reasons is habitat loss – including a loss of habitat for insects – and pesticide use. Each road that is paved, each building built, each farm using pesticides means less space for insects that birds rely on for food.
Since the tour’s founding, Kramer says the idea of native plants has “become more mainstream.” Today, there are at least nine dedicated native plant nurseries in the East Bay. East Bay Wilds in Oakland just turned 25 years old. Down by the Bay Nursery just opened a brick-and-mortar shop in Fremont. Environmental influencers like Saumitra Kelkar, known as “Oakland Bio” on Instagram, preaches native plants on a daily basis and is reaching new audiences. Along the Peninsula and Santa Clara Valley, there is the Growing Natives Garden Tour, which took place this April and started in 2003.
Growing a Wildlife Habitat
“The California thrasher. Ash-throated flycatcher. And a white throated sparrow.”
An avid hiker, Stefanie Pruegel lists new birds she’s spotted the past two years. But these are not species she’s seen on hikes—these are ones from her own backyard.
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It’s a sunny day in San Leandro, and the bees flitted from flower to flower in Pruegel’s yard. She’s planted more than 100 different species in her yard, with the vast majority being California native plants (“I’m not a purist,” she says, pointing out a nonnative passionfruit vine with purple flowers and some nasturtium).
Long before she started her own native garden in 2017, she’d attended Bringing Back the Native Gardens tour and other garden tours. She had been dreaming about having a wildlife garden for years. With 6,000 square feet of outdoor space to play with, it didn’t start off easy. First, she hired a designer. Soon, her yard was a “sea of mulch.”
Today, a coast live oak that started as a small, five-foot tree is now over 30 feet tall. She points to several species of manzanitas, all different heights and widths.
She struggled with giving up a traditionally neat-looking garden for something that’s beneficial but, in parts,wild-looking. This includes leaving dead seedheads for birds, which she’d normally want to pull out of the ground. There’s a section in the back of her yard that’s growing denser by the day—and she plans to keep it that way, to simulate a thicket to attract birds.
“There’s a tension between our need for aesthetics and the need of wild animals,” she says.
Just before we chatted, she sat at her home office, looking outside her window and spotted a hooded oriole—a bright yellow and black bird – sitting in a small birdbath. “Every year, more insects would show up. Then, every year, more birds would show up. Still every year, there’s new stuff.”
She’s been a part of the Bringing Back Native Gardens tour since 2019. This year, she’ll give a talk on gardening for birds. (In order to be on the tour, gardens must be at least 70 percent native plants, but most in the tour are over 90 percent).
Like Pruegel, Valerie Matzger also wanted to create a native wildlife habitat in her yard. But, that wasn’t always the case. Matzger, a former city councilwoman and mayor of Piedmont, was a professional landscape designer for decades. For years, she helped create hundreds of beautiful, manicured yards for others.
Valerie Matzger’s Garden
The importance of native plants didn’t dawn on her until she attended a talk in recent years by Doug Tallamy, a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware and advocate for native plant gardening.
Matzger said she and her husband, John, traveled around the world to see birds. She didn’t realize that bird habitats were at risk at home—and that she could do something about it with the skills she had. “I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I’ve been designing very pretty gardens, but not with an eye toward habitats.”
When COVID-19 hit, Matzger started changing her own yard. She pulled the grass out of her yard, added terraces, native plants, and a fence to keep deer out (“the deer eat everything down to the dirt and they love native plants”).
For her, it was also unlearning some things.
“I prune loosely, leaving branches low and close to the ground. A lot of birds nest close to the ground.” The other day, she was looking at a monkeyflower that had been infested with many little bugs. “Sure, there are some misshapen leaves, but so what.” Having a native garden means no pesticides, no fertilizers, and leaving dried leaves under the trees as potential habitat for insects.
All of it’s paid off, in the wildlife sense. Matzger has recorded 54 bird species in her garden since 2020. Her house is now also part of the tour.
Today, “I’ve got a bug garden,” she said. Her garden was recently added to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens.
Tallamy’s research shows that some North American birds prefer to feed their nestlings native caterpillars, which co-evolved with specific plants. It’s not that nonnative plants don’t play a role or host insects—it’s just that their ecological value is not as high, Kramer says.
Kramer has created a chart that lists species of plants that host the largest number of butterfly and moth species that will lay eggs on them, using Tallamy’s research. The top “keystone species” are the most ecologically valuable—plants that can host at least 30 species.
How to Attend the Tour
The Bringing Back the Native Gardens tour is in its 22nd year. During the pandemic, it pivoted to people watching from Zoom while gardeners showed their yards on camera. Now, it’s fully back in person. Kramer has been running the free tour all these years; she gets some technical and website help from her husband, Michael May.
Kramer says the tour has 21 more gardens compared to last year. Saturday is focused on “Bayside” gardens, while Sunday’s open gardens are inland.
Kramer recalls a time when people lined up to buy native plants at the East Bay chapter of the California Native Plants Society annual sale. “When they opened the gates, people would sprint in and snatch them off the shelves,” she said. Now, people can easily find native plants locally.
When the tour first started, up to 7,000 people registered for the tour, in part due to the novelty of a free native garden tour at the time, as well as the splashy articles and photos in home and garden sections of newspapers. Kramer says she doesn’t track individual visitors now, but estimates that there are more than 10,000 garden visits during the two-day event each year (people drop tickets at each home they visit, which are later counted).
Stefanie Pruegel’s Garden
Some new features added to the tour are highlighting homes that have electric appliances, such as induction stoves. There’s also more discussion on firescaping. In addition, there is live music and entertainment, native seeds and plants sales, and dozens of talks.
Besides being organized by location, there is a matrix of 38 garden features that people may be interested in seeing, such as homes with graywater systems, solar panels, bird-safe windows, water features such as ponds, and more. And, there’s even one home designated as a wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Foundation.
For Pruegel, it’s not only sharing a habitat with wildlife, but sharing the joy it brings her. “I wanted to literally give back to nature, and it’s so exceeded my expectations in terms of what wildlife my garden would bring, and what joy it would bring me.”
