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.



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





I dig this squash structure.







Around the vegetables, flowers, of course.



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

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

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

Moving on to the bonsai section...

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

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

And birds! We saw several herons today

Also egrets.

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

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.







I don't know much about palms.





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