A leader in California native plant horticulture

It is the state's most extensive garden dedicated exclusively to California native plants. More than 2,800 species of plants, 280 of which are rare or endangered, are represented on the Garden's 86 acres in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains.

Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden has sold California native plants to the public for more than 30 years. Grow Native Nursery Claremont opened in 2009 to help make native plants more widely available to home gardeners and landscapers. A second nursery location opened in Westwood, L.A., in 2010. See the Grow Native Nursery pages for more information.

Self-guided interpretive brochures are available at the California Garden Shop and enable visitors to fully enjoy the three distinct areas of the Garden: Indian Hill Mesa, the East Alluvial Gardens and the Plant Communities.

Floristic Province

In nature, the distribution of plants rarely coincides with political boundaries, but rather is determined by the interaction of climate, geology and geography. A regional association of plants that share these growing conditions is called a floristic province. Of the 13 North American floristic provinces, four occur in California: Californian, Vancouverian, Sonoran and Great Basin.

Californian is defined by its Mediterranean climate. It is the smallest floristic province in North America, but has the greatest diversity of plants north of Mexico. It includes such characteristic vegetation as chaparral, coastal sage scrub, oak woodland and grassland. These plants exhibit classic adaptations to California’s hot dry summers and cool wet winters: leaves that are small and leathery, light-colored or drought-deciduous.

Vancouverian encompasses the state’s major forests. The California portion of this province is an extension of the Pacific Northwest rainforests and includes mixed evergreen and coniferous forests of pines, madrones and coast and sierran redwoods.

Sonoran is characterized by giant cacti (eg. saguaro) and desert scrub vegetation. The state of California includes only the northwestern edge of this extensive desert province. Plant communities in this area include Joshua tree woodland, California fan palm oasis and creosote bush scrub.

Great Basin is dominated by the vastness of sagebrush scrub vegetation - the sagebrush ocean. The majority of this high-elevation desert lies to the east of California in the rain shadow of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada ranges.