Garden With Us!
The Garden Club at Friends of Elysian Park is responsible for the restoration and rehabilitation of several plots within the park. Primarily, the historic westside plots of Victory Memorial Grove (est. 1920) and Marian Harlow Grove (est. early 1970s). As with many 20th-century gardens, you will find plenty of non-native ornamental landscaping plants established in these groves. But over time, when new plants are desired or needed, we are choosing natives specific to the original land, pre-colonization.
We tend and maintain these special sections of the park with fellow volunteer club members. Our events not only sustain the ecological viability of these spaces but encourage community in an era of screens and isolation. We love meeting new neighbors and seeing familiar faces!
Join as Individuals or Groups
Our core volunteers are neighbors who use the park regularly. They are eager gardeners who attend as individuals, pairs, and families. We’re often joined by larger groups of student volunteers and official volunteer organizations like Help on the Go. We all share a passion for ecological restoration and a drive to get away from the internet and actually do something about it!
We also share a love of botanical and biological sciences. We like to include official ecologists (and citizen scientists) who can lead off the day with tips and instruction on issues from native rehabilitation, invasive removal, entomological identification, best practices for watering and maintenance specific to this large park environment.
We’re looking forward to expanding club activities to include formal garden tour field trips, propagation seminars, native seed collection, foraging, craft projects, and more. We’d like to add native planting plots in the East side of Elysian Park using the Miyawaki Method (dense planting of native trees and perennials, as Test Plot does). Please bring your ideas and friends to help us maintain and enhance Elysian Park!
If you’re not on Instagram, stay updated with our once-a-month email calendar: info@elysianpark.org
Or find us on the L.A. event calendars. Bring Your Own Pen lists on MeetUp. And we list on Eventbrite and Partiful.
Fighting Invasives
If you’re as into ecology and horticulture as we are, you’ve surely noticed the plague of invasive trees and plants that have overtaken the natives in Elysian Park. The biggest offenders being: Tree of Heaven, Black Mustard, Russian Thistle and Ricinus. But the seemingly innocent (and edible) plants like London Rocket and Cheeseweed Mallow cause their own amount of problems.
We really want to do something about it instead of sitting back and waiting for RAP to send their subcontracted brush clearing crews through in spring. There are so many problems with this non-approach to invasive maintenance. The focus is only on the edges of the park, and the middle gets ignored, leaving fire-prone tall dry brush everywhere. Crews aren’t trained about what to leave (natives) and what to remove, so they clear-cut everything. The methods of removal are clumsy at best, spreading seeds everywhere making the problem so much worse.
Recently, Friends of Elysian Park and other representatives from ecological restoration groups (in the northeast L.A. area) met at Terremoto Landscape. Test Plot’s Jen Toy and Terremoto’s Jenny Jones (the instigators) had jokingly referred to it as a “Mind Meld.” Vulcan associations aside, it was a fruitful discussion about what can be done to assist underfunded RAP with these efforts, and protect our parks from the dangers of fire. We’ve offered Elysian Park as the testing grounds of a pilot program that’s currently in the development stage.
We’d love to have interested members of the Garden Club join in these efforts. We will keep you updated on the progress!
