The Alan Chadwick Garden at U.C. Santa Cruz is a three-acre organic garden and on a 25-acre organic farm to serve research, teaching, and training purposes. The organic garden is named for former English Shakespearean actor turned gardener-philosopher Alan Chadwick. With student volunteers and using only a Bulldog spade and fork that Smith & Hawken would make popular, Chadwick turned...
The public are only admitted to the Arizona Garden accompanied by qualified military personnel or on special community open days. Railroad pioneer Charles Crocker hired German gardener Rudolph Ulrich to landscape his famed Hotel del Monte seaside resort in 1881. Ulrich created extravagant formal gardens of roses, terraces, lawns and hedges around the hotel at the heart of the 126-acre...
A living field guide to California’s Central Coast, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History displays permanent exhibits on regional birds, butterflies, mammals, geology, plants, and native people. Showing over 600 species of Central Coast flora, the museum’s annual wildflower show is one of the largest in the world. At the rear of the Museum, the Native Plants of Monterey County...
Monterey County Agricultural & Rural Life Museum (MCARLM) in San Lorenzo County Park outside King City celebrates the history of southern Salinas Valley. In addition to the Main Exhibit Barn and a History of Irrigation Museum, the complex includes three buildings from the time period of East of Eden. A Spreckels Company House (1898), a one room schoolhouse from La...
John Cooper jumped ship in Monterey married into an important local Spanish family. He built the Cooper-Molera Adobe in the late 1820s. Owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the 3-acre complex of house and farm buildings secured behind high adobe walls depicts life in California in the mid-1800s. The site is currently undergoing renovation and will be reopened...
The Arboretum at U.C. Santa Cruz is a research and teaching facility open to the public on 135-acres of gently sloping campus hillside overlooking Monterey Bay. This collection of more than 300 plant families is the largest display of Australian and South African plants outside of their native countries. Other regions of special interest are California, New Zealand, and Chile....
The “Secret Gardens of Old Monterey” comprise a collection of gardens around historic adobe buildings in the Monterey State Historic Park. California’s first capital under Spanish rule, Monterey has preserved more of its heritage from this era than any other city in the state. The gardens are found along a 2-mile “Path of History” beginning at Custom House Plaza near...