Lake Merritt Trials Garden
Discover the Lake Merritt Trials Garden in Oakland—a haven where vegetable trials meet vibrant gardens designed for small spaces, butterflies, and pollinators. Explore our innovative gardening techniques and get inspired by our thriving plant displays.
Directions
666 Bellevue Way, Oakland, CA | View on Google Maps
From Grand Avenue, turn onto Bellevue Way. Pass Children’s Fairyland on the right and then the Lakeside Park Garden Center on the left. After the Garden Center building, there are two gates into the gardens on the left. Enter through the second gate. (If you reach the boat house, you have gone too far.) It has “The Gardens at Lake Merritt” engraved on the gate. Inside the gate, take the first path to the left and we are the second garden on the right. A small sign at the corner and a sandwich board by the kiosk identify it as the Master Gardeners’ garden. Parking on Bellevue is available, but the parking fee varies by day.
Visiting hours
The garden is open from 9am-3pm most days, except on major holidays or during severe weather events.
Master Gardeners are available to answer questions on:
- Mondays from 9:30am-11:30am
- Wednesdays from 11am-1pm
- Fridays from 11am-1pm
When we are unavailable, there is also a self-guided tour of the gardens and literature for you to take home.
Our gardens
We have six unique garden spaces offering inspiration, supporting varying needs, and demonstrating different techniques.
Trials and Demonstration Garden
The Trials Garden includes five large vegetable beds that serve two complementary purposes. First, they provide the space for Master Gardeners to carry out vegetable trials so that we can provide information to local gardeners. Our vegetable beds offer a unique space to try different varieties of the same vegetable to determine which ones do best in our Mediterranean fog-influenced climate. We have conducted trials of spinach, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, beans, fennel, squashes and many more. In one recent trial, we examined an ancient companion planting method called Three Sisters, which involves planting corn, beans, and winter squash in one bed to support each other.
Secondly, the Trials Garden allows us to demonstrate year-round best practices for home gardeners, including how to compost, what to grow in each season, and how to grow it. Master Gardeners are on hand at the garden during our visiting hours to answer your vegetable gardening questions. Stop by to learn valuable how-to tips, techniques, and science-based methods for garden success.
Kitchen Garden
The Kitchen Garden sits in the middle of the Lake Merritt Trial Gardens. This garden demonstrates how to grow herbs and a few vegetables in a small space. Over the years, rosemary, oregano, marjoram, and thyme have been a staple to our garden plot. More recently, we added chives and saffron. The magic of saffron is that the plant that produces the crocus flower in the fall also produces bright yellow stigma and style threads, which are harvested as the spice saffron used in cooking.
We harvest and share the oregano, marjoram, rosemary, and thyme with garden visitors regularly. We also grow parsley, cilantro, two types of basil, and two types of sage in our kitchen garden, and lately, we have grown onions and garlic to demonstrate what can be cultivated in a small area.
Container Garden
In our Container Garden, we demonstrate that many different types of plants can be grown in pots. Perennial plants such as small trees (such as lime and fig) and shrubs (such as rose, blueberries, rosemary, thyme, and bay) can be grown in various containers ranging from wine barrels to felt planter bags, many of which are inexpensive. We also plant annual herbs and vegetables throughout the year. By using containers, gardeners can create a garden without a plot of land!
Outstanding Plants for Alameda County Garden
In the early 2000s, the Master Gardeners created two lists of outstanding plants to help home gardeners identify attractive plants that:
- require less water
- are low maintenance
- create visual interest for an extended time each year
- provide food and shelter for wildlife
We planted two beds with many plants from these lists at the Trials Garden so visitors can see how they grow through the seasons and decide which suit their gardens. The outstanding plants also provide food and shelter for insects pollinating our vegetable trials.
Butterfly & Moth Garden
The charismatic Monarch galvanized the public’s interest in the plight of butterflies and moths as their caterpillar host plants vanished from our communities. Initially, our Butterfly Garden was geared towards sustaining the monarch population in the area. However, it has now expanded in an attempt to support the less visible species of butterflies and moths that are also disappearing due to habitat loss and the use of insecticides such as Bacillus thuringiensis and ubiquitous neonicotinoids. As Dr. Douglas Tallamy has shown, birds in 16 out of 20 bird families feed their chicks predominantly caterpillars. So, the loss of butterflies and moths seriously affects local bird populations. We have, therefore, created a garden designed to be eaten!
Bee Garden and Habitat Garden
The Native Bee Garden and the Habitat Garden at the Trials Garden showcase plants that research scientists have found the most attractive to native bees, other insect pollinators, butterflies, and birds. Both gardens offer ample food, water, and shelter to our colorful flying visitors to help offset their steep worldwide decline. An ongoing project, the Pollinator Survey, evaluates how our plants draw in the pollinators we seek to feed and protect. In the future, as we collect more data, we plan to contribute our observations to appropriate Citizen/Participatory Science databases.
About the Lake Merritt Trials Garden and Demonstration Gardens
In 2007, the UC Master Gardeners of Alameda County created the Lake Merritt Trials Garden in Oakland to try out vegetable varieties, determine which ones grow best in our microclimate, and demonstrate different ways of growing crops. We quickly added the Container and Kitchen Gardens for people with small growing spaces or decks. To showcase the beauty of the plants in our Outstanding Plant Lists, we added borders displaying the plants on our lists. As the plight of the Monarch became known, we created a Butterfly Garden, which we expanded to provide habitat for many once-common butterflies and moths. In 2014, an area near the original Trials Garden became available. The Master Gardeners of Alameda County took it over in two phases, creating a Bee Garden in 2014 and an adjacent Habitat Garden in 2019, both of which showcase excellent plants—many of them California natives—to help the pollinators and other wildlife in our area.