The Latest Dirt - March 2023

If You Plant It, They Will Come

By Liz Rottger

It was a late afternoon in early April 2022 when I arrived at Pacific Oaks Community Garden to pick up the garden’s key. UC Master Gardeners finally had a formal agreement with the community garden to take over its operations. The garden was a chain-linked fence enclosure of a steep, grass-covered hillside with a very large vacant flat area. A small community garden had struggled for several years to gain a toehold in this space without success. There were two formal, weed-choked raised beds, along with several other areas that had once been cultivated, but were now mostly covered in either wild oat grass or Oxalis. As I walked across the lot, the only sound I heard was the late afternoon wind blowing in from the Bay. It was a beautiful setting, but essentially dead.

When the West Contra Costa Unified School District tore down the old Middle School that once stood on this site, they did so with a vengeance. They had promised the City of El Cerrito that they would return the site to its original condition and proceeded to scrape off every bit of concrete and asphalt right down to the original heavy clay found in this watershed. They disconnected the water and the electrical hook-ups and built a concrete trench to control any run-off from the slope. Then, they fenced in the entire site and once a year in late spring they sent their mowers in to cut the wild oat grass that immediately began to sprout. It was probably all they could afford to do with a school site decommissioned by an earthquake fault.

So among the very first projects we undertook at the new UC Master Gardener Water Conservation Garden was to plant a pollinator garden to reestablish a connection with the surrounding nature. We planted predominately California natives—a large variety of clarkias, sages, milkweeds, asters, Monkey flowers, penstemons, lupins, yarrows, yampas, buckwheat and seaside daisies. I don’t think we realized how easy it was to restore a little nature to such a barren wasteland. But as soon as our plants began to flower a few weeks later, lots of bees, insects, butterflies and hummingbirds suddenly found their way to our pollinator garden. I’m not sure how that happens, but it does. It was very beautiful and quite remarkable! It demonstrated how close nature really is, even when we think it has been lost. By restoring and protecting habitats, we can promote species diversity and local ecosystems.