The Great Bay Area Garden Tour, parts 4 and 5 :: The Garden for the Environment and the Conservatory of Flowers

Garden tour recap:

Stop #1 - The Edible Schoolyard
Stop #2 - The Slow Food Nation Victory Garden
Stop #3 - The Alice Fong Yu Elementary School Garden

And now, the Garden for the Environment and the Conservatory of Flowers!

Unfortunately, we never got a tour of the Garden for the Environment because everyone was away at a conference. But they have lots of really cool workshops and demonstrations going on all the time, so if you're in the area you should definitely check them out.



The garden basically serves as a demonstration garden for urban food production and low water landscaping. They have volunteer days on Saturdays too, and the people leading the volunteer day were very helpful. I think a garden like this is a great resource for a community, maybe I should start one . . . .



The very last stop was the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, one of my favorite places in San Francisco. We had a docent-led tour of the greenhouse, which was great except that we were all incredibly tired from a long day of walking.



The conservatory is always beautiful and full of wonderful plants, but the real draw at this time of the year is the outdoor dahlia garden.





Amazing. I love public gardens. This tour took a lot of time to plan, and was a bit stressful at times. But it was totally worth it to know that I have the organizational skills to pull off something like this.