9/8/11

The Gardens at Lake Merritt

So this whole time I've been blogging about Bay Area gardens there's been a 7-acre collection of theme gardens--community, bonsai, palms, vireyas, Japanese, proteas, Mediterranean, fragrance,... am I missing anything?--right smack in the middle of Oakland's Lake Merritt area, for the last 50 years! How come I never knew about this? I think it's really mind-boggling.

We entered by the community garden, where the Alameda County Master Gardeners have a large plot.

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Raised beds of kales and coles flanked a fabulous arbor supporting beanstalks and hops vines.

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I dig this squash structure.

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Around the vegetables, flowers, of course.

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People say pink and orange look bad together. Yeah. Sure they do.

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I'd love to put some pink cosmos around the dark sunflowers. (Haha, I mistyped that as funflowers.)

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Traditional garden flowers and vegetables get a little scraggly by September, but these gardens still have a lot of interest and charm.

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Moving on to the bonsai section...

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The bonsai display garden was impeccably maintained, and featured a hundred fine specimens.

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Lots of other fun features between the feature gardens...

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And birds! We saw several herons today

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Also egrets.

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The new Mediterranean garden, next to the palm area, was installed in 2009 and features an historic fountain piece at the center.

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I admired these fallen palm fronds braided together around the base of several trees, designed to discourage graffiti/vandalism on the tree trunks. I don't know why people are so tacky, but the palm skirts look great.

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I don't know much about palms.

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I'm going to end here with a couple pictures from the fragrance garden.

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1 comment:

Jonah Winn-Lenetsky said...

I've actually never been to this garden, but it looks beautiful.