Go north on Foothill Expressway or 280, head west at Woodside Road, and in a mile or two you'll reach one of the most understated and relaxing gardens around. Located in back of the library at 3140 Woodside Rd., the Woodside Library Native Plant Garden is open to the public during library hours (closed Sundays; call 851-0147 for hours). It was established in 1970, when the library was built, so it has mature manzanitas as well as preexisting native oaks. A major garden renovation a few years ago added a thousand new plants.
In mid-July, I wandered through the half-acre garden on a scorchingly hot afternoon. From the sunny terrace at the back of the library, the garden goes gently uphill, with wide gravel paths curving around island beds, ending in a shady terrace under the redwood grove. A fairly new planting of gray-white chalk dudleyas, just starting to bloom, and feathery-leafed yarrows in pinks and reds catches the eye at terrace level.
Manzanitas, with their rich, deep mahogany bark and leaves turned perpendicular to the sun, share a bed with lower-growing, textured, lighter green coyote brush. A short distance away, the shiny, deeply veined dark-green leaves of a ground-hugging ceanothus provide counterpoint.
Another bed features various native buckwheats in full bloom, from the low-growing soft red spheres of rose buckwheat and pink-tinged white pompoms of coast buckwheat to the exuberant eye-level creamy sprays of St. Catherine's Lace cascading over the path, busy with bees. Their more dignified cousin, California buckwheat, blooms in creamy rounded sprays at the top of upright stems clothed in rosemarylike leaves. All the buckwheats attract pollinators when in bloom, then as the blooms age and form seedheads in late fall, birds enjoy the seeds.
At the other side of the bed, Winifred Gilman sage blooms in pinwheels of deep purple-blue encircling the stems, radiating out from light green leaves dusted with a hint of gray. Across the garden is woolly blue curls, with furry purple-magenta spikes and thin, shiny light-green foliage. A challenge to grow in most gardens, it owes its success here to the slope and to the gravel that was added to the beds, both of which help provide the excellent drainage it needs. The lilac verbenas are still small, but form mounds of color from spring to fall.
Other splashes of color come from orange California poppies and from small shrubby monkeyflowers, in soft orange and apricot. Hummingbird fuchsia, low-growing gray foliage with red-orange flowers, is just starting to bloom and will continue until late fall, drawing hummingbirds daily.
From the shaded benches under the redwoods, look for the spikes of deep yellow California goldenrod emerging from the bed of grasses. Farther downhill, Hooker evening primrose, an aggressive biennial with big yellow flowers at the tops of tall stems, looks wilted in the heat of the day because its flowers open in late afternoon and wither the next day.
© 2007 Tanya Kucak