Tour the inspirational gardens of Sonoma County

Fifteen years ago, a front yard like Natasha Granoff’s might have elicited whispers and anquished complaints from the neighbors concerned it would hurt their property values.

Back then, social propriety dictated that a responsible homeowner keep up apperances with a neatly trimmed and well-watered lawn. But over the last decade a revolution has taken place in home landscaping. And now, a yard like Granoff’s that is densely packed with tall perennials and native grasses and even includes a few raised beds filled with vegetables and herbs, is no longer an outlier but an object of admiration. So much so that it is worthy of being included on a spring garden tour.

Granoff’s garden is one of 18 included on the Eco-Friendly Garden Tour on May 5. This is the eighth year that the Sonoma-Marin Saving Water Parnership - a consortium of 10 North Bay water utilities - has sponsored the tour as a way of showcasing ways homeowners can make their own yards more water-wise and friendly to wildlife. Unlike other spring home and garden tours, this one is completely free, although visitors need to register at savingwaterpartnership.org/eco-friendly-garden-tour.

Tourgoers can start their day with an irrigation controller programming workshop and a tour of the Sustainable Education Garden at Santa Rosa City Hall and then choose which gardens they want to visit, from Santa Rosa and Sonoma Valley to Petaluma, Novato, San Rafael and San Anselmo. Gardens are open to visitors from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Complete information and registration is at savingwaterpartnership.org.

Granoff’s Bennett Valley neighborhood is still in obvious transition. Built in the early 1950s, it features midcentury homes with midcentury lawn landscapes. But popping up here and there are other exuberant front yards where the only grasses are ornamental or native varieties that bear no resemblance to the green turf of yore. Instead, they are filled with flowering native and Mediterranean plants that are vibrantly alive with buzzing bees and fluttering butterflies.

Granoff bought her house 20 years ago. At the time, both front and back yards were covered with lawn, some rose and wild blackberry brambles. But in 2006 she embarked on a slow transformaiton, slowly giving her little ? of an acre back to nature. Each year she added more native and more low-water using plants and more features so that now, it is a tiny wildlife habitat in the middle of suburbia. There are hummingbird feeders and water fountains for bees and birds that she made herself from pots and an old utility sink. She’s incorporated a pipevine because it’s the larval host plant for the pipevine swallowtail butterfly.

“I’ve always loved to garden. My mother loved to garden,” said Granoff, who is retired after years working in business development for wineries. “I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula, where my parents with involved with local planning and water use and development. My mother was a member of the California Native Plant Society, and I was too.”

One of the most significant investments she made in sustainability was a rainwater catchment system. She installed six 550 gallon tanks in 2009, along with a water filtration system, with the idea that she might use it for drinking water.

As as it turned out, she uses the water instead to water her annuals and perennials during the dry summer months. Her water use is pretty low, averaging only 1,000 gallons a month most of the year. The average family household by comparison uses 99,000 gallons a year, according to the Sonoma County Water Agency.

Granoff spent about $8,000 for the system, a price that included some gutters and other improvement as well as a required rain garden, a small area with a soil depression that can capture any additional runoff if or when the tanks fill.

Granoff hopes to tie the system into her home so that she can continuously use rainwater during the wet reason without reaching her storage capacity.

The garden is wildly crowded with plants that are both beautiful and serve a purpose. Cheerful little California monkey flowers, the daisy-like fleabane, waves of pink flower heuchera, sages, scabiosa, echinacea and tall and stately agastache native sedges, wildflowers like tidy tips and baby blue eyes and Phacelia tanacetifolia, beloved by bees and other beneficial insects.

She allowed a few favorites to remain grandfathered into the landscape, like a massive Incense Cedar that has overtaken a corner of the backyard. There are other Incense Cedars in the neighborhood, where, as the story goes, local schoolchildren back in the 1950s were given little seedlings to plant at home. Granoff keeps the logs of another dead cedar probably planted at the time, to serve as habitat for small critters like lizards, native bees and as a food source for birds.

In the spirit of recycling, she makes her own mulch out of cuttings from the yard,

Granoff has only a small food garden - three raised beds in the front yard where she grows primarily herbs and winter greens.

After years of planting, adding and changing up, she’s now in an editing mode, pulling things out here and there with the idea of creating more masses of plantings - better for birds and beneficials - than a visual cacophony of different plants.

She will be on hand to greet visitors on Saturday and answer questions. The Native Plant Society as labeled many of the plants so tourgoers can take notes of plants they might like to incorporate into their own yards.

“It looks like a lot of work. It actually isn’t, once you get it established,” she said of her natural garden, which needs cutting back but no fancy grooming. “It may look to some people like it’s a little messy, but we’re creating so much biodversity and forage and food.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.