Wildflower Watch: Harvey’s Garden blooms at Blackie’s Pasture thanks to volunteers

A lot is happening right now in Harvey’s Garden at Blackie’s Pasture. Dazzling colors of a variety of flowers are attracting bees and other insects, and the UC Masters Gardeners and other community volunteers are on their knees tenderly caring for this small plot of land that brings joy to many hikers and cyclists every day.

Woolly yarrow, Achillea tomentosa, blooms in dense small canary-yellow clusters at the tops of soft, feathery gray-green foliage. It thrives in full sun. A native to western Asia and southern Europe, it is drought tolerant. A fibrous root plant, it is shunned by deer. It is in the family Asteraceae, one of the largest families of angiosperms, which are diverse, colorful and all beautiful.

Harvey’s Garden is named after the late Harvey Rogers of Belvedere. In the mid 1990s, the Tiburon Peninsula Foundation launched a campaign to improve the appearance and call attention to the history of Blackie’s Pasture. The attention was focused on a patch of land at the northern end of the Old Rail Trail, just a few feet away from the eastern side of the pasture’s perimeter fence, that was used as an informal parking lot.

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