Explore Home Gardens Across the San Gabriel Valley

Attention gardening lovers: Here’s your only chance this year to feast on the botanical beauty of as many as 37 home gardens in the Los Angeles area—from Acton to Long Beach—where native plants are grown and smart gardening practices de rigueur.

The 9th Annual Theodore Payne Native Plant Garden Tour is scheduled this weekend, on Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday’s tour includes gardens across much of Northeast L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley, spanning Highland Park, South Pasadena, La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena, Altadena, Monrovia, Arcadia and Sierra Madre.

Click here to view the full list of gardens.

For those who’d rather not venture too far from home, the good news is that five homes on the tour are in Glendale and 12 in La Cañada. 

Click here to view further details about the Markota garden.

Like all the other gardens within Northeast Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, the Markota garden tour is on Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This is a six-year-old, multi-level back garden (see attached photos) covering 30,000-square feet. The landscape includes natives as well as non-natives (see attached PDF for a full list of plants), recycled materials, lookouts and cozy retreats in what the garden-tour website describes as “a rustic woodland setting with several distinct microclimates” and a “no-mow front lawn [that] is native creeping red fescue.”

The entire weekend tour is self-guided, allowing visitors to explore gardens at their own pace and in whichever order they choose.

Tickets, which can be purchased online at the above-mentioned websites, are $25 per person for all gardens on both days of the tour. The ticket/guide has addresses, with Thomas Brothers map numbers and basic directions.