A Visit to Blake Garden

Beautiful green views over the city

A relative who lives in the Bay Area took us to Blake Garden today, a public garden north of the UC Berkeley campus in an area called Kensington. We had to go up hills and along narrow roads before we reached the entrance.

It's free admission, with entrance at a pedestrian gate off to the side. There's no paper map to follow so it's best to just wander around and the paths eventually meet up with each other. The garden is 10.5 acres which includes Blake House, which is supposed to be the residence of the president of the University of California. 

Giant flowers under blue skies today

But upon closer inspection you can see it's deserted and empty, and not maintained. We asked a gardener working on the property about it and she said the last president lived there 15 years ago and since then successive presidents prefer to live closer to the campus. The place has also fallen into disrepair and would need a huge budget to not only renovate the home but also maintain it. Not exactly a priority at this time, which is too bad, but at least the garden is kept up using organic methods.

The house includes a long rectangular reflecting pool that is fed fresh water from a grotto. Upon closer inspection of the manmade pool there were giant Japanese carp swimming in there! They got excited to see me, thinking I would feed them and came swarming around, but then realised I did not bring anything, and there's also a sign warning visitors not to feed them human or fish food, as they are already well fed.

Twin Japanese girls and their parents came to have a picnic by the pool and the siblings were excited to see the fish. One of them counted how many and rushed back to report the number to her parents.

Blake House in the background

Wandering around the garden we were impressed in particular by a giant magnolia tree. We'd never seek such a big tree with big leaves and big flowers in a creamy yellow colour. While the garden tries to maintain things as natural as possible, many of the 1,500 species of flowers and shrubs did not have labels so we either had to guess or didn't know what they were. 

Nevertheless the view was beautiful -- down below we could see San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The garden is quite compact, as it abutted some public roads and residential area. There's a mini redwood forest but we didn't go in, and instead admired some Asian-inspired ceramic sculptures near the Blake House, as well as the numerous flora and fauna.

There was also an area with a sign that says "caterpillar X-ing" and some milkweed grown there to help foster more butterflies, and there were a lot of succulents and flowers, a few roses and even an artichoke tree with artichokes growing on it!

Blake Garden is a lovely place to walk around and immerse yourself in nature for a few hours!

Massive magnolia flower!

Blake Garden

70 Rincon Road

Kensington, CA