Garden secrets

The Laguna Beach Garden Club will host its annual fundraising Gate and Garden Tour on Thursday, and the homes on the tour’s path have been getting spruced up in preparation.

The tour takes a mostly downhill meandering path from St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church to Mountain Road and Catalina Street. It visits a dozen gardens.

The types of gardens and plants vary from sets of tropical flora to traditional flower beds. Myriad plants, including standard but beautiful roses and the rare purple trumpet tree, are represented. Also along the tour are a number of historical, Laguna Beach houses.

Guests on the tour will receive a tour brochure, which will guide them with plant information, a map of the route and background on many of the places along the way.

The tour takes guests through hidden holes in fences and onto hidden streets many don’t know exist.

The club’s tour chairwoman, Nancy Englund, said the tour used to be a driving tour all around Laguna Beach. Englund said between getting lost and difficult parking situations, the tour was too much of a hassle.

“I hope that if I have one legacy in the club, it will be making the tour a walking tour,” Englund said.

Englund says the idea of the tour is to get people out and about, not driving around.

“Gardening is about being out in the world,” Englund said.

Many people who are asked to have their gardens featured in the tour are flattered by the offer, Englund said.

“I thought in the beginning it was kind of funny,” said Margot Carlson, whose garden is among the featured. “Our garden isn’t really formalized. You don’t see a designed garden, you see whatever I saw at the nursery that I thought had a life after at my house.”

Englund said that about 500 tickets are sold each year, which adds up to about 650 people walking through the gardens if docents and friends of the garden owners are included.

Being on the tour can actually be a bit of a service to the garden owners, Englund said. She said that instead of residents’ working all summer on a garden, they finish their main gardening by late spring so the gardens are ready for showing.

Tickets must be bought in advance and are $25. They’ll most likely sell out. Buy them at Laguna Drug, 239 Broadway; or at Dana Point Nursery, 34100 Pacific Coast Highway, Dana Point.