One benefit of the 20 Parks Project (now officially completed) is that I pay more attention to news about parks. This year I finally visited the La Loma Native Garden while it's in bloom (though, according to the Stanislaus Sprout, about a month short of peak bloom). (Official site)

I was only going to walk a ways to see what's what, but it was so soothing and full of delightful surprises that I walked the entire length and back. While the park is officially only two acres, it's along an old canal site, so it's a-long.

Snapping pics of native plants so I could identify them gave me fresh appreciation for professional photographers' ability to capture the mood of the plant. There are plenty of instructional signs, usually pitched for child height -- which I agree with, as the gardening norms you absorb as a child will stick hard, so educating children is great for long-term change. Working on ID from pics on my phone also makes me happy because it gives me a record of what I might want to plant.

My own California poppies bloomed last year but didn't successfully re-seed this year. I am most interested in seeing if our yard has enough sun for Ceanothus (dark purple in top middle, looks vaguely like lilacs) because I miss lilacs from when I lived in Minnesota... and also the Golden Currant (yellow and orange trumpet-shaped flowers at middle right). Golden Currant has the plus that it both attracts pollinators and has edible fruit!

Speaking of how the gardening you learn as a child sticks... here, ready for its close-up is Miner's Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata). In fourth grade, learning about California history involved gathering native edible plants from... geez, where did we gather them? Odds are good it was the weedy lot that later became a city park. I liked the taste of Miner's Lettuce at a time when I wasn't into vegetables. I may see about planting some for salads.

The Native Garden is full of benches, Little Free Libraries, and art work, so it's a very pleasant place to hang out!

I've found my park for nature walks.

This is the Tuolumne River Regional Park, toward the eastern (airport) end. The full park is about seven miles long, spanning the southern edge of town. I did not walk 14 miles roundtrip this morning! I walked about a mile through the enchanted quiet and giant trees.

I knew as soon as I walked down toward the entrance that this one was a winner.

This is downhill from both the airport (which hasn't had commercial flights in almost 20 years, alas) and an old working-class neighborhood.

There are educational signs about the local wildlife in both English and Spanish. This one tells about Steelhead Trout. I also passed signs for the San Joaquin Kit Fox and the North American River Otter.

The playground is surprisingly old-school, so likely not long for this world.

The missing Ent Wives moved to suburban California and settled down to a peaceful life.

Like the prior park, Sutter, John Muir Park is named after a prominent Californian with no meaningful connection to Modesto. This is not Muir Woods. This is a city park in a managers-and-dentists neighborhood from the 1960s. This is my favorite so far of the relatively ritzy parks.

It has the cutest old-school concrete block restroom.

It has a memorial bench, designed to make unhoused people uncomfortable.

It's had its playground done recently enough that it's very pretty and shiny.

There's another, smaller park nearby -- Ashby Park -- that requires ignoring various "dead end street" signs. It's just a blob with some nice trees, in the kind of setting where the residents' landscaping crews eye strangers with suspicion.

I'd sworn off visiting parks behind schools (even though I support them philosophically) because they remind me of how thoroughly I loathed elementary school. However, I'd gone on an errand that took me behind Beyer High School and past an entirely unexpected shabby little elementary school.

When I was in second grade, we were required to participate in a contest to name that elementary school, which is in the distance of the photo above. The school was then named after the white settler who used to own the land where the school was built, so I doubt our input had much impact.

It's in an interesting little neighborhood, though, with lower-middle-class 1960s/70s tract homes to two sides, a trailer park on another, and a blob of early 2000s tract homes for Bay Area commuters on the remaining side. "Does it have a park?" I asked myself.

It does. It has the right trees to smell delightful.

It's otherwise pretty standard for a neighborhood park. I just like the vibe.

It looks like the city did significant work on it circa 2002, since there's a memorial wall with tiles designed by the local children.

That feature, with character that speaks directly to people using the park and caring about it, is part of its charm. While I'm trying to avoid being prescriptive about park design, I do wish every neighborhood park had some quirky memorial to the history and meaning of the neighborhood. (There are higher priorities, like safety and accessibility. The latter will come up as some parks get finished later this summer.)

Since I don't drive down Mable often -- it's basically one mile of residential street that used to mark the northern end of civilization before the city grew out to Claratina -- I proceeded east and discovered a fully park-developed "city hole."

A city hole is an area designed to become a pond during rainy season, partly as drainage, partly as wetland mitigation. (All that grass swoops down into a pit more dramatically than my phone captured.) I remember the subdivisions out here having land reserved for drainage, but I've never paid attention to how they were ultimately developed.

The answer is grass, with big drainage pipes below street level. Mable Park has no amenities other than a city trash can and a nice entrance.

I'd sworn off pocket parks in affluent neighborhoods, because they never have amenities, but Pierre Park jumped out at me while I was driving along Encina to see if the Native Plants Garden was in bloom yet.

It's another patch of grass with some nice trees, but the lure was the mystery at the east end of the park.

There's an entire vineyard. The vineyard is private property, extensively fenced, and accessed only through a security gate. No source is particularly candid or consistent about what's beyond the gate, and nobody comments on why there's agricultural land in a part of town that's been built up as residential for over 50 years.

Here's the view, peering through the wrought iron fence at the end of a little side street.

I stumbled on Sutter Park while driving a stretch of Orangeburg that I apparently rarely use. It has lots of romantic gnarly trees and the added interest of an in-progress playground renovation.

The winning playground concept is "butterfly grove."

A brand new tree is not what I expected to see at this park. It's in an older side of town, near the junior college, with industrial stuff on two sides and residential on the other two.

The old trees are all at the far end of the park, across a vast grassy expanse.

"Gee, that looks like they put a water basin under this park," I thought.

Sure enough -- it's a stormwater basin project, completed in September 2025. The full slide deck is here.

Sherwood Park sits in a doctors-and-lawyers neighborhood built in the 1960s, so its restrooms are rustic stone rather than concrete block. It's behind Sherwood Elementary School, in a largely Robin Hood-themed part of town. Ironically, most of the swanky houses are 1960s modern, rather than the Tudors and fairytale cottages found in neighborhoods nearer the original downtown.

It has its own Stonehenge, temporarily.

Photos on the Birding Hotspots site confirm that the restroom roof used to extend to the pillars. This restroom is slated to be torn down and replaced, using Measure H funds. Despite its exterior rustic charm, it's probably more than time for an upgrade.

Compared to some of the other older neighborhood parks, Sherwood Park is very "designed," with swooping paths and picturesque vistas. There's a playground off there somewhere.