Our Favorite Bay Area Botanical Gardens
By Josh
Botanical gardens are places where plants are grown for display to the public and often for scientific study. Visiting public botanic gardens is a great way to get some exercise, sunshine, fresh air, and inspiration for your garden.
Wandering through a botanical garden, we often see new plants we want to try growing, or old favorites paired with others in a way that we haven’t seen before. Of course, most of these gardens are of a size that we can only dream of creating, but many of the plants and design elements can be easily scaled down for use in a private garden. Importantly, local botanical gardens give us a great idea of what plants grow in the different microclimates around the Bay Area, and how they are grown. Are they in the ground? Are they in containers? On raised beds? On top of berms? All of these details help us figure out if a plant will work in our clients’ gardens.
Feel free to take photographs of favorite plants while you visit Bay Area botanical gardens and share them with us to help create the same effect in your garden! We are happy to accompany you to visit any of the gardens below, or other Bay Area public gardens, to see which plants you like, which combinations of plants make you smile, and to discuss how to bring these plants and ideas into your home garden.
Here are some of our favorite local public gardens.
Ruth Bancroft Garden and Nursery
Located in Walnut Creek, this garden was once part of a larger walnut and pear farm started in the 1800s. The last of the walnut trees was cut down in 1971, and Ruth Bancroft had 3 acres to use in creating a new garden near her house. She had fallen in love with succulents, and along with Lester Hawkins of Western Hills nursery, planted many in this new garden. By the 1980s, it was so well known that the Garden Conservancy was formed as a nonprofit dedicated to preserving significant American gardens, and The Ruth Bancroft Garden became the first preservation project of the newly formed organization.
The Garden opened to the public in the early 1990s. The garden has become an outstanding example of a water-conserving landscape, appropriate for our Mediterranean climate. It houses important collections of aloes, agaves, yuccas, and echeverias in addition to many other plants and trees. The nursery stocks many common and rare drought tolerant plants that do well in Bay Area gardens. The selection includes an immense variety of succulents from 2” to 15 gallon sizes, including agaves, aloes, sedums, aeoniums, echeverias, cacti and many more. They also stock a huge range of other water-wise plants, including a large selection of protea, leucospermum, leucadendron, grevillea, and banksia. They also carry a selection of pottery, soil, and container gardens.
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 9am to 4pm
1552 Bancroft Road
Walnut Creek, CA 94598
https://www.ruthbancroftgarden.org/
UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley
This 34-acre garden is located in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus in Strawberry Canyon. The garden has been in this location since 1925. It has an amazingly diverse plant collection, with over 10,000 types of plants! They are displayed in geographical collections, with an emphasis the areas of the world with mediterranean climates similar to that of the Bay Area. This means that they have great collections of plants from California, the Mediterranean Basin, Australia, South Africa, and Chile.
A walk through this garden never fails to give us inspiration for our gardens. They regularly have plants for sale on the plant deck near the entrance, including a selection of California natives, cacti, succulents, trees, shrubs, insectivores, herbs, perennials, and more. They also have periodic plant sales with lots of plants that are propagated in the nursery. This is a great place to get plants that are not always readily available in the commercial trade.
Open daily 10am – 5pm
200 Centennial Drive
Berkeley, CA 94720
https://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/
Tilden Regional Parks Botanic Garden
Located in Wildcat Canyon within Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley, this garden was founded in 1940. It contains an amazing array of California native plants including bunchgrasses, bulbs, manzanitas and so many others! The plants are arranged by geographical areas within the state, so some are more likely to do well in Bay Area gardens. There are lots of special events in the garden, and there are weekly plant sales on Wednesdays from 10am to noon, and the first Saturday of the month from 10am to 2pm. If you are looking for Bay Area native plants, such as manzanitas, ceanothus, dudleyas, California fuchsias, and native buckwheats, they are often sold from seeds collected in the garden.
Open October-May: 8:30am-5pm, June-September: 8:30am-5:30pm
1550 Wildcat Canyon Rd.
Berkeley, CA 94708
https://www.ebparks.org/parks/tilden/botanic-garden
San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum
Still simply called ‘Strybing’ by many garden lovers, this 55-acre botanical garden features plants from all over the world. Located in the fog belt in Golden Gate Park, this garden has a very different microclimate from gardens in the east bay. It is cooler and foggier for most of the year, and does not get the summer heat that East Bay gardens experience. There is a wide range of plants grown in this garden, although many of them cannot be realistically called drought tolerant. However, there are great examples of plants for dry gardens, such as California native wildflowers, cacti and succulents from around the world.
There is a great book store and plant shop near the main entrance, and there are monthly plant sales for members that are a great source for many fun and unusual drought tolerant plants. The botanical garden is now part of the Gardens of Golden Gate Park, an institution that also includes the Japanese Tea Garden and Conservatory of Flowers. The latter two gardens are also favorites of ours, but don’t have many waterwise plantings that can be translated into local gardens.
Open November through January: 10am - 3pm, February through October: 10am - 4pm
Corner of 9th Ave. at Lincoln Way, Golden Gate Park,
San Francisco, CA 94122