San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden

History

Gardens

Mediterranean gardens

• The California chaparral and woodlands garden will be with nine collections: oak woodland, mixed evergreen forest, grassland, coastal scrub, chaparral, sycamore glen, agave-yucca rise, riparian forest and wetland. It will display specimens from Baja California northward to a point about halfway between San Francisco and Eureka.
• The Mediterranean Basin garden will be organized into three collections; oasis, Canary Island crest, and Mediterranean slope.
• The Chilean Matorral garden will be devoted to the flora of central Chile with seven separate collections; araucaria crest, southern beech forest, coastal matorral, puya palisades, Chilean arroyo, Chilean mixed forest and Chilean palm grove.
• The Cape Province-Western Cape of South Africa garden will contain three collections: Cape succulents, floral carpet of the Cape and a tapestry of diverse vegetation woven into a continuous shrub land.
• The Southwest Australia garden will hold four collections from two areas of Australia; a garden of the protea family, kwongan, karri, marri, and jarrah forest and grass tree slope.

  Theme gardens

• The Orchard, Vineyard and Entry Plantings will highlight plants of economic importance: orchards of grapes, walnuts, pistachios, olives and other productive plants of the Mediterranean climate areas with naturalized flowering ground covers from each region. It will also include an avenue of Mediterranean cypress intermixed with a broad leaf evergreen canopy lines the entry road.
• The Gardens of Exploration will contain groupings of demonstration gardens. Five general areas have been identified: horticultural therapy, ecology, biology, cultural influences and horticultural opportunities.