The day long festival includes a Gardener’s Marketplace that serves as the event’s central hub. Marketplace vendors offer unusual plants, vegetable seedlings, garden art, and more. Exhibitors and guest speakers provide information about gardening in San Diego. They cover topics such as backyard chickens, bee keeping, container gardens, Southern California blueberries, and fruit and vegetable gardening.

The 2013 tour celebrates all types of gardens with a special focus on how homeowners use their spaces, both large and small. This year’s garden neighborhood features a natural meadow, tranquil water features, meandering paths, and birds flitting amidst mature trees and citrus groves.

We hope our Festival inspires you with ideas for your gar­den, and with an appre­ci­a­tion for com­mu­nity, gar­den­ing, and the hor­ti­cul­tural her­itage of Encinitas. We hope you join us Saturday, April 20th for our 2013 Festival and Tour!

The day long festival includes a Gardener’s Marketplace that serves as the event’s central hub. Marketplace vendors offer unusual plants, vegetable seedlings, garden art, and more. Exhibitors and guest speakers provide information about gardening in San Diego. They cover topics such as backyard chickens, bee keeping, container gardens, Southern California blueberries, and fruit and vegetable gardening.

The 2013 tour celebrates all types of gardens with a special focus on how homeowners use their spaces, both large and small. This year’s garden neighborhood features a natural meadow, tranquil water features, meandering paths, and birds flitting amidst mature trees and citrus groves.

We hope our Festival inspires you with ideas for your gar­den, and with an appre­ci­a­tion for com­mu­nity, gar­den­ing, and the hor­ti­cul­tural her­itage of Encinitas. We hope you join us Saturday, April 20th for our 2013 Festival and Tour!

On April 21st, 2012 our tour-goers strolled through more than 20 gar­dens in the Capri Elementary School neighborhood of Leucadia. Because this is a walk­ing tour, vis­i­tors got an up-close view of the neigh­bor­hood, along with a gen­uine feel for its tex­ture and the char­ac­ter of its residents.

This hid­den cor­ner of Leucadia offered a trop­i­cal oasis filled with rare plants, a pri­vate sanc­tu­ary gar­den with French touches, an his­toric Spanish home and gar­den, a birder’s par­adise of native plants, a canyon side gar­den with stun­ning views of habi­tat and ocean, sev­eral artists’ gar­dens, the Capri Outdoor Learning Center and gardens, and much, much more!

Our fes­ti­val also fea­tured a free Gardener’s Marketplace where we offered a unique col­lec­tion of garden-related ven­dors. We fea­tured talks by gar­den experts on top­ics such as back­yard vine­yards, gar­den­ing with natives, chicken gar­den­ing, children’s gar­den­ing and using art in the garden.

We hope our Festival inspires you with ideas for your gar­den, and with an appre­ci­a­tion for com­mu­nity, gar­den­ing, and the hor­ti­cul­tural her­itage of Encinitas. We hope you join us Saturday, April 20th for our 2013 Festival and Tour!

The festival celebrates all types of gardens, and all types of gardeners, with a special focus on how homeowners use their spaces. Every neighborhood brings its own surprises. Gardens range from small and intimate to grand and formal.

This year, the festival visits an hidden corner of Leucadia where garden tourists will stroll through a tropical oasis filled with rare plants, a private sanctuary garden with French touches, an historic Spanish home and garden, a birder’s paradise of native plants, a canyon side gardens with stunning views of habitat and ocean, several artists’ gardens and much, much more!

Our festival also features a free Gardener’s Marketplace where we offer a unique collection of garden-related vendors. We feature talks by garden experts on topics such as backyard vineyards, gardening with natives, chicken gardening, children’s gardening and using art in the garden.

We hope our Festival inspires you with ideas for your garden, and with an appreciation for community, gardening, and the horticultural heritage of Encinitas.

This nearly century-old neighborhood featured more than 20 well-established gardens on large lots, some surrounding historic architecture. There were old-fashioned gardens and modern style gardens, Mediterranean gardens, succulent gardens, a Balinese garden, a healing garden, and even an urban farm.

The Gardener’s Marketplace was held in Orpheus Park, a neighborhood park in the heart of the community. Gardens on tour were eclectic; from tropical to desert-like, from large to small, their owners warm and welcoming. We visited greenhouses along the route, a fire station garden and the Monarch Project, an organization that focuses on education about and conservation of monarch butterflies. The fabulous school garden at Paul Ecke Central elementary school was also part of the 2010 tour.

Gardens reflected a distinct beach lifestyle, complete with daily attention to the sunset, as well as plants that thrived in the moist coastal air. One garden, for example, spanned Rossini Canyon with plantings on both sides connected by a Swiss Family Robinson-type bridge. Another historic property featured a decades old avocado and citrus orchard, a remnant of the neighborhood’s agricultural past. Still another was a lovingly restored beach bungalow with elegant succulent plantings.

Tour goers strolled down a mile long route that felt like a country road. Along the way, they visited gardens that ranged from 10-acre horse property to a lovely courtyard garden, a waterwise sanctuary to a grassy, shaded yard whose large pond is frequented by the abundant variety of native birds.