Laguna Beach Garden Club tour a showcase of collaboration and culture
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Boundless beauty awaited hundreds who wanted to take a peek at the properties included on a gate and garden tour in Laguna Beach.
Enchanting fairy gardens and fountains, lush green backyards with side entrances through towering hedges, and an exotic ceramic scarecrow draped in vegetation were just some of the sights on the walking tour.
The Laguna Beach Garden Club organizes the tour, holding it annually on the first Saturday in May. As a primary fundraiser, the event allows the club to support several causes, including educational school gardens, local scholarships and community projects.
“We give scholarships to Saddleback College, to horticulture students, or college-bound seniors from Laguna Beach High who are interested in horticulture,” said Karen Nelson, the club’s director of media publicity. “We’ve donated and built the educational gardens at El Morro and Top of the World elementary schools and Thurston [Middle School]. … If you can get kids to grow stuff, they’ll eat the stuff that they grow, and so there’s a whole other way to teach them how to eat properly.”
More than 600 people joined the gate and garden walking tour in its 20th year, which featured eight homes in the Lower Bluebird Canyon neighborhood. It’s a chance for the horticulturists to appreciate gardening efforts in the community.
For those less familiar with the subject, it presents an opportunity to be exposed to and learn about different types of plants. The garden club supplies a team to identify various species and genera of plants by placing labels in the flower beds, said Susan Denton, the tour director.
Anemone, calla lily, cymbidium, euphorbia, hellebore, lithops, lobelia, Mexican mint, Santa Barbara daisy and veltheimia were among the plants pointed out to the patrons.
The event was put on in collaboration with multiple groups, including local beekeepers, the Laguna Plein Air Painters Assn. (LPAPA) and the Laguna Beach County Water District.
Those partnerships have become increasingly visible. In March 2024, Matt Willey’s “The Good of the Hive” bee mural went up on a wall outside the water district, a project that came together after the artist was a guest speaker for the club.
Laguna Beach will celebrate its centennial year since it was incorporated as a city on June 29, 2027. The garden club was around in its infancy, and the water district is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary.
“In 1928, there were 275 actual full-time residents in Laguna Beach, and 205 of them were members of the garden club,” Nelson said, noting the history of the club.
More recent history has brought forth the gate and garden tour, and now a hat contest, which has happened around other notable events known to put fashion in the spotlight.
“The first year we did, it coincided with [King Charles III] being coronated in England,” Nelson said. “This year, it coincides with the Kentucky Derby, as it did last year, so kind of a double theme there. The hat contest kind of just keeps rolling.”
Ally Cook, owner of the Lucky Cowboy hat bar in Laguna Beach, chaired the committee for the hat contest, which sported competitors in the categories of “Best in Bloom,” “Pollinator’s Paradise” and “Garden Party Glam.”
The activities take place at the water district property, where tour participants also board buses to be transported to the featured properties in a given year.
“It also gives people the ability to come and see our demonstration garden,” said Christopher Regan, assistant general manager at the water district. “The synergy between the right way to do gardening in Laguna and also our district being part of the fabric of this community — we are one of the oldest government agencies in Laguna — so having that ability to partner with other established organizations in town that have the same message that we do, it just fit together.
“We actually help each other. They get a great venue with us as name recognition, and we get the ability to reach 600 to 800 on that tour date that wouldn’t normally come to our garden, wouldn’t normally come to our district and hear about our message.”
A property on the tour received recognition as the “Most Waterwise and Fire Safe Gate and Garden.”
“[The homeowner’s] water usage was low for the amount of plant material that he had, for how beautiful it was,” Regan said. “It was a perfect representation. It was drought-tolerant plants, it was low irrigation, it was beautiful, which is one of the huge things that we try to point out to people. You can have a beautiful landscape that is water-efficient.
“Their landscape personified that. … It still had some really cool things. It had a treasure chest in there. It was funky. It was Laguna.”
Throughout the tour, participants gazed upon more than plants, also watching the painters who replicated the natural beauty in their midst. On a dreary, cloud-covered day, the artists stationed at the respective properties had more time than usual to capture their surroundings.
“The idea is for them to just be into the creative process, so when people are walking by, they can see the progress of the painting,” said Bonnie Langner, executive director of LPAPA. “‘En plein air,’ which means outside, usually a painting has to be done within a couple hours because the light changes. That was kind of a little different this weekend because we were drizzling the whole time, so the light didn’t really change.”
LPAPA artists seen on tour included Carole Boller, Denise Bradley, Tim Bush, Joni Emily, Mark Jacobucci, Kelley Mogilka, Lisa Mozzini-McDill, Nadalena Radis-Cobbs, Diane Snyder, Renae Wang, Kathleen Williams and Mason Williams.
The painters acted as ambassadors for the local arts organization, and some sold the pieces they were working on to the owners of the homes, Langner said.
“The collaboration is a match made in heaven,” Langner added. “Many of our artists paint flowers. That’s what they do. They make a living painting flowers. … Our painters come in and love the exposure.”
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