Native Habitat Garden Opening

Join us to celebrate the opening of the Native Habitat Garden, the newest exhibit at The Water Conservation Garden!

The new Native Habitat Garden at the Water Conservation Garden represents a restoration ethos in landscape design, the purest form of ecological integration possible in a garden. The essence of ornamental gardening is control, leveraging human knowledge of natural processes to create idealized expressions of natural beauty. Contemporary ecological landscape design takes our ever-deepening knowledge base and interprets that data into principles that can be practically applied to integrate gardens into the local web of life. No matter where you are, closely examining local ecosystems not only supplies the best practices for gardening, but also offers up unique aesthetic potentials to give your home habitat a regionally authentic sense of place.

Some progressive gardening modalities attempt to recreate idealized norms from nature. For instance, permaculture aims to create “closed loop” farming systems that utilize only the resources naturally occurring on the site to produce crops. Xeriscape design, a water-conserving modality that emerged from our region, features strategic hydrozones and a suite of plants described as “climate appropriate.” Fully ecological landscape design goes a step further and actually reproduces something very close to what would occur in nature. An ecological landscape is still a garden because a gardener exercises control over the space, but the aim of the design is restoration and habitat as much as beauty.

Our Native Habitat Garden features plant community based design that reproduces locally occurring, natural assemblages of plants, including oak woodland, Coastal Sage Scrub, and riparian (streamside) interface plants, arranged much as they occur in nature to optimize habitat structure. As many of these species have cultural value for our local native peoples, a portion of the exhibit will be devoted to Kumeyaay ethnobotany. And finally, plant species have been specifically chosen to support local butterfly species by providing both adult nectar sources, and larval host sources. As an example several species of native milkweeds are being planted to support Monarch caterpillars.

The Native Habitat Garden will provide an opportunity for children and adults to experience nature brought home, to see many beneficial insects and critters otherwise unknown to most city dwellers, to learn about scores of garden-worthy native plants that are naturally “climate adapted,” and to gain a closer relationship to the wilderness of the San Diego region. Often, an appreciation for nature begun at home translates into a love for the wider natural world.