ELSEE stands for Environmental Lab for Sustainability and Ecological Education. Alrie developed the concept of ELSEE Garden in 2009 to make the original garden at 76 Race Street when she was the executive director of CNGF. Under her leadership, ELSEE gave design grants to schools where volunteer garden designers and college students worked with the school community to assist in offering native garden designs with food components.

Occasionally, CNGF was hired to design and build school gardens using our flagship ELSEE Garden as the model. Here are some school gardens Alrie designed that meet many of the benchmarks required to be a Certified SITES Garden model. Many of the plants selected are native to Santa Clara County. In these gardens, she aspired to achieve the biodiversity of Santa Clara County and to restore the look of the native grasslands prior to European contact. In many cases, she mixed in comparable perennial food plants, especially those that were the diet of indigenous Californians.

Designed and built in 2006