We have started to see some of the fruits of Oakland community members' planting throughout the city of Oakland! In November of 2017, we gave out 4700 daffodil bulbs and hundreds of packets of poppy seeds to more than 200 groups. 

Daffodils have been providing the opportunity for Oakland to beautify their neighborhoods and bring the joy of spring flowers to their neighborhoods every November for the past decade. Stay tuned for more stories about blooms in Oakland and our annual event in November!

Check out Keep Oakland Beautiful daffodils planted by Naomi Schiff, an Oakland community member, on the three traffic islands between Harrison St. and Oakland Ave.  and Orange St., Fairmount and 29th St. 

Naomi picked this location because she has been planting in this highly visible area between heavily-used roads for two decades. This area was once a building parcel, with two small stores on it, long ago in the days of streetcars and before the freeways. At one time the city maintained it as a  grass lawn, watered automatically and mowed. Some neighbors would kick a soccer ball around. Then came a drought in the 1980s and they stopped watering. When the grass died, people started using it as an informal car repair lot. Neighbors got tired of this and asked the city to do something. A landscape architect had a donated landscape design, which would have been wonderful to execute, but a city staffer left and never followed through.

Finally the city planted a few miscellaneous trees in a line down the middle (and a nice oak tree on a smaller traffic island). A neighbor added some trees that had outgrown his planting pots, and some roses. Naomi began planting drought-resistant plants, picking up trash, and keep up with pulling out the weeds.