Felicia Van Stolk of the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History explains how a California native-plant garden benefits wildlife in the neighborhood and beyond.
By Eric Johnson
Apr. 2, 2024—Felicia Van Stolk came to work as the education director at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History in 2016. That job involved expanding the museum’s school programs and incorporating the outdoor garden space—working with the local tribal band to make sure the interpretive information was correct, and growing partnerships with native plant groups.
Born and raised in Santa Cruz, Van Stolk holds a degree in marine biology and conservation, and has been doing outdoor education since she was in college. She was selected to be the museum’s executive director in 2019.
Eric Johnson: There is so much going on at the museum right now, including the recent announcement of a big fossil discovery–but I’d like to focus today on your garden. Please tell us about the transition of the land around the museum into a native plant garden. What led you to decide to make this change?
Felicia Van Stolk: Landscaping with local natives is very trendy now, but the idea of a Garden Learning Center with native plants has been part of the museum for a long time. Our first record of a plan to have native plants in the area around the museum with little exhibit labels is from 2008, back when this was still a city-run museum.
Throughout the long history of the museum, we have had the idea that we're displaying the natural history of Santa Cruz County—both indoors and outdoors. And 2008 is also when we transitioned into being a nonprofit, independent of the city. The idea has just continued to grow and develop.
Can you tell me some ways you’ve experienced the educational value of having a Garden Learning Center on your property?
It's really neat, because having the Garden Learning Center in the city park is a way that the museum can be open all the time, and free for all. Every person who walks through Tyrrell Park gets to enjoy a beautiful green space—and also to learn by seeing those native plants and habitats being interpreted. So it's just an invitation. It kind of slows people down and gets them to take a minute and look around. And for the museum, it's an opportunity for people wandering by to get to know us and maybe be inspired to come inside to learn a little bit more.
I can remember being surprised when I first started learning about native plants many years ago. I was kind of shocked to learn that the Douglas iris is a native plant—a wildflower. I'm guessing there are some serendipitous things that happen in your garden.
Absolutely. The flowers especially. When we had the superblooms last spring, with this trend around the whole state of people taking selfies with superblooms, we had our own little superbloom in our garden. And we had people sitting in our garden beds taking pictures (which of course has its own issues), but the fact that folks could do that on their way to the beach, or just while walking their dogs on their normal daily routines, was kind of nice. It was a nice way to connect with folks and draw attention to how beautiful California native plants are.
Was there a most-popular flower in your garden during the super bloom?
In the front area, the things that were really going off were poppies and yarrow, making this gorgeous blanket of golden and white. We had a lot of buttercups as well, so some yellow popping in there. It was just spectacular. And poppies, our state flower; they seem so delicate, but dang—they can grow for a long time, and they were kind of everywhere.
The staff have our favorites in the garden: We love our silk tassel trees, and we're also all very big fans of the California Dutchman's Pipe.
What is that flower?
The California pipevine; it's sometimes called the Dutchman's Pipe. They’re shaped like a pitcher, and insects have to go inside them to pollinate them. They're really funky looking, and they're habitat for a type of swallowtail butterfly.
Let's talk more about habitat. Not everyone knows how valuable native plants are to other species, to things like pollinators and butterflies and hummingbirds and et cetera. What is good about having a native plant garden and letting it be dormant sometimes, and letting dead branches lay around sometimes.
That’s another thing that happens serendipitously. We don't have the capacity to tend the garden to be a perfectly manicured space all the time. And that’s great, because when you let a plant go to seed, it's still beautiful; it's got a totally different shape, but it's also food for birds and insects. And then when it lays on the ground, it can provide nesting material for birds and insects and other animals. And even having bare spots in our garden is important habitat for insects that live in the dirt.
I'm not gonna say that non-native plants don't also provide some of those benefits, but native plants are much more co-evolved and supportive of a broader diversity of our native fauna.
How has this changed things over the years?
Our little Garden Learning Center is part of a lovely habitat corridor that has been developing in the Seabright neighborhood. The living shoreline installed by Groundswell Ecology and Oikonos on the bluffs of Seabright Beach connects to us and to Pilkington Creek, which flows through Tyrrell Park and has also all been restored as a native-landscaped riparian zone. It's all kind of a connected story throughout the Seabright neighborhood.
And we have seen an explosion of wildlife, especially in the creek and the park, in the last two years—I think we have the iNaturalist data to back this up. More and more rare birds are being spotted right outside the museum. The alert goes out on eBird and all of a sudden the park is swarming with birders—looking for one bird! [laughs]. And that wouldn't have been happening 15 years ago when the creek was full of invasive plants and the park was just all lawn.
I understand that the native garden also created an educational opportunity for some neighbors and others who had some concerns about the transition.
Since at least 2008 we’ve had native plants, but they were in planter boxes, and the rest of the museum grounds had more traditional gardening. We put the Coastal Prairie in front of the museum during the drought, when the city had already turned off all of its irrigation as a water-saving measure. So the lawn was dead, and we replaced it with California native grasses and flowers. That became an opportunity to educate people about water-saving, about how these plants are adapted to this climate—and it also required a little bit of an adjustment, that this is what native plants look like when they're dormant. And let's maybe change what we think of as “beautiful” in a garden—it's not always the European manicured aesthetic. And we've really seen a shift in how people are accepting and viewing the little bit of messiness that's part of nature as beautiful.
Our garden skirts at the edge of that. We do put a lot of effort into curating it and taking care of it so it's native plants looking their best, and with a little bit of sensitivity toward the traditional aesthetic. But a native plant is going to be dormant for a little while, and that's an opportunity to talk to people about those natural cycles.
When we tore up the dead lawn and planted a much broader swath of landscaping, some folks just saw dead-looking, dormant grasses. And they felt that it looked kind of ratty and uncared for. But some folks who were the most vocal with concerns about the change now come by and show it off to their friends—now that it's an established garden. It just takes time. Change is hard for folks.
What are your plans going forward?
As of 2020, our management of the Garden was formalized by an Adopt-a-Park agreement. Obviously we've been gardening in the park for a lot longer than that. But our agreement was recently extended to include the whole creek area. And we're looking forward to even more involvement in caring for the park and creating improved educational spaces where we can deepen that whole idea of slowing down and noticing the nature in an urban environment. We have all of our school programs out there, and so it's a natural fit for us to work with the city and the city park, and finding ways to continue to improve those interpretive moments in this beautiful park that we have.
You can experience the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History’s Garden Learning Center, Tyrrell Park, and Pilkington Creek first-hand (and get those hands dirty!) in a fun way. Follow this link to learn more about Saturdays in the Soil, which takes place on the third Saturday of each month.
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