Join Us On The Tour!

The 2011 Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase will be held on
Saturday April 30th from 11:00 AM to 4 PM.
See the gardens on the tour here.


Think of it as a giant eco festival comprised of block parties throughout Mar Vista. With most people making it a walking or bike tour, there is a tremendous sense of community as residents throughout Southern California come to Mar Vista to celebrate our shared vision for a greener life.

This year the Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase expands to include tours within the tour to address even more aspects of sustainability. We will showcase drought resistant landscaping, edible gardens, composting techniques, water capture and even chickens!


To further our goal of achieving 100% clean electricity by 2018, the tour will host the American Solar Energy Society’s National Solar Tour and showcase Mar Vista locations that have gone solar. See those gardens here.

You can pick up maps at any one of these 6 sign in booths 
or at the solar sign in booth.

You can find the mapped walking tours
and a little history of Mar Vista here.
Click here to download the pdf of maps for
 tours 1 - 4 and tours 5 & 6.

Read this article by Emily Green in the LA Times The Dry Garden
for tips on how to take the tour.
Preview garden 5N in this LA Times feature by Lisa Boone
Visit Fresh Dirt on Sunset Magazine to see the previews
on gardens 5F, 5B and 5M by Sharon Cohoon

3482 Beethoven Street (Map 5 - C)

To help our Monarch population flourish this gardener will be giving away Asclepias, milkweed plants throughout the day to visitors of the garden tour.


With a keen eye for aesthetics and an intense dislike of lawns, this homeowner created a low water landscape combining California natives with various other low water plants. They paid close attention to textures, fragrances, patterns, architectural elements and rich colors. They took great care when choosing the plants, which were chosen for their aesthetic beauty as well as being beneficial for the environment. The plants include three kinds of salvia, Arbutus trees, wooly thyme, native columbine, grevillias , flax, euphorbia and wooly bush from Australia, an Olive tree, deep purple heuchra, fescue, ameria maritima and senecio, and others.




This is a complete DIY project. Starting with ripping out the old Bermuda grass, designing and installing the drip irrigation system , choosing the plants, designing and installing the plantings and laying the walkway, they came away with lots of blisters and a true feeling of satisfaction.


There is a rain catchment barrel on the property and reclaimed cement from the old path was used for the walkway.

3513 Rosewood Avenue (Map 5 - B) (Map 6 - P)

Featured on Fresh Dirt - Sunset

The front yard lawn was brown and flat, great for Frisbee, not much else. This was five years ago. One partner was searching for a career where she could use her talents/vision as an artist, trading in the brush for a shovel and fingers in the dirt.  The other had a desire to assuage unrest in a searching soul. This is how the zero-landscape front yard came to be. Over a few months, they installed a yard of many drive-by photos!

The backyard is a different design, complimentary and unique as the front, though created based on many conversations with friends, kids, and other designers. It has play area, art space, quiet nooks, patio and outdoor shower that water the veggie and berry gardens. It is a fun yard to be in if you are a kid or grownup!  

Interestingly 80% of the landscape plants and materials for both yards were given to them from gardens of friends. The rocks were found gifts from the 210 Freeway. Many a day trip was made to special areas to drag 100 lb rocks with just the right coloring and shape into the car. It truly became a fetish!

Plant list in front yard:   Most plants are drought tolerant, Manzanita, weeping Mexican bamboo, ceonothus, agave, firecracker, various succulents, pompus grass. There are also two Palo Verde trees which let light through and soften the landscape. In the back yard there is a vegetable garden, blackberry bushes, blueberries, Mexican Weeping bamboo, succulents,

The plants draw plenty of wild hummingbirds, butterflies, cicadas, praying mantis, bees, and birds etc.

In the front yard they do not irrigate, in the back yard the outdoor shower irrigates the gardens.

Christine Wiseman - Front yard Design, located Northern California

Yvonne Suter - Dwell by Design, drawings, back yard. She will be there the day of the tour. She is a local Landscape designer who has done many properties in the area that are quite stunning.

3401 Cabrillo Boulevard (Map 5 - M)

Featured on Fresh Dirt - Sunset

The combination of sleek new architecture and contemporary garden design make this stop a must for anyone wanting to create a modern feeling that fits in with the existing neighborhood. The garden inspires oohs, aahs and even stopping and staring. It is reminiscent of a well-crafted handmade quilt, pleasing to the eye without screaming for attention.

Watering of cactus and fruit trees is minimal, done with drip and spray 3 days per week in summer and almost none in winter. Drought tolerant material replaced a large, unsightly front lawn. Delivery time and limited watering days have greatly reduced properties water needs. Both the homeowner and designer, Doug Shemer of Groundswell, feel that responsible irrigation techniques need to be part of every new garden design. You may also want to see Groundswell’s other garden at 3759 Boise Avenue.

The Gift of Love And Monarchs (Garden 2 - C)

I’ve had milkweed and monarch butterflies in my garden for so many years that I don’t often give much thought to how it started. But recently people in Mar Vista have started talking about monarchs and I’ve been remembering. It began with a gift from a man I think of as the Johnny Appleseed of Westside milkweed.

For years when my daughter was young, we had dinner every Friday night at the Spitfire Grill. This comfortable family restaurant next to the Santa Monica airport was the perfect spot for an exhausted single mom with a demanding career and her toddler daughter to spend the evening. I could relax over a dinner that someone else cooked, nurse my glass of wine, and no one complained about my very active toddler running around the place. We became friendly with the owner, the staff and many of the other regulars, including a group of pilots and flight fans who always talked aviation over their evening cocktails.

One man in particular formed a grandfatherly relationship with my daughter, Caroline, and he delighted in her lively curiosity. We learned that Griff Horner was a contractor with an office over the restaurant and that he also taught flying lessons. One night, when Caroline was about 5, he asked if she might like a monarch butterfly to take home. He explained that he maintained a sort of monarch breeding sanctuary in his upstairs office – milkweed seedlings, chrysalides and, when they hatched, butterflies. He explained the life cycle of the monarch to Caroline, how the caterpillars only ate the milkweed which protected them by making them poisonous to birds and animals. He told her that for a long time he’d been sowing milkweed seeds around the Westside in an effort to help the monarchs survive. He disappeared upstairs for a few minutes and when he came back, he carried a Styrofoam cup containing a tiny milkweed plant and an impossibly beautiful monarch butterfly that had just hatched – it was still drying its wings. Caroline was mesmerized. And then he helped her pick it up. And she was over the moon. She walked around the restaurant all night with the butterfly delicately balanced on her hand – moving from table to table: “Hello,” she’d say, “I’m Caroline and this is my monarch butterfly.”

I was delighted for her, but seriously wondered how I would manage the drive home with a tiny milkweed plant and a living butterfly. And what would we do with the butterfly? Caroline, of course, wanted it to stay with us forever. That evening we had a long conversation about life and death and nature and the way of things and we left that special butterfly in the garden on the milkweed in the dark. In the morning her monarch was gone and we had another hard conversation about loss. We planted the milkweed seedling in our garden and over time it grew, self seeded and grew some more. But for years we never saw a caterpillar or a butterfly.

In the Fall of 2008, we heard some terrible news - Griff had been seriously injured in a plane crash just off the Malibu Pier. The initial reports were reassuring –he was conscious as he was airlifted to the hospital. But, tragically, Griff never left the hospital, dying at the age of 70 as a result of his injuries. Several months after Griff died, I was in the garden wondering if I should replace milkweed with something more “useful” and, unbelievably, for the first time ever, there were caterpillars. Monarch caterpillars. The milkweed was crawling with caterpillars. I called Caroline out to the garden and we marveled at the sight. I told her that I knew Griff was looking down from heaven and smiling and he was so very happy because we finally had monarchs in our garden.

Since that day, more than 100 monarch butterflies have hatched in our garden and there isn’t a moment in the process that I don’t think of Griff and his generous gift to my family, which was so much more than just the gift of a milkweed plant. Visit this garden 2C to meet Caroline's Monarch Butterflies.