The Open Days program thrives thanks to the many people who nurture it season after season—plant collectors eager to explore new gardens, hosts who open their gates, designers inspired by endless styles, and volunteers who help the program grow.
Joseph Marek has been all of these. Since first sharing his Santa Monica garden through Open Days in 2003 with his partner, John Bernatz, he has continued to lend his time, talent, and vision, inspiring many others to do the same. “It’s a joyful day,” Marek says of Open Days’ enduring appeal. “You never walk out of an Open Day in a bad mood. It’s a happy day in a garden.”
Marek and Bernatz transformed a modest bungalow and detached garage into a lush sanctuary of interconnected spaces—two courtyards in front and five distinct garden rooms behind. Though the property measures just under 8,000 square feet, its layered design feels expansive. Visitors enter through a juniper hedge to discover a bubbling fountain surrounded by aloes, agaves, and olive trees, then move to a sandstone checkerboard courtyard adorned with pots of succulents, bromeliads, and rare plants.
Behind the house, a Chinese elm shades a series of garden rooms filled with aloes, birds of paradise, begonias, tillandsias, roses, and orchids. “I have an orchid blooming every day of the year,” Marek says.
In Santa Monica’s benign climate, his roses flourish—an expression of his lifelong passion for growing and hybridizing them. Because the home garden is mostly shaded, he also tends a nearby community garden plot where he cultivates vegetables.
Marek’s love of gardening began early. At age five, living in Alaska, he planted nasturtiums and pinto beans. “My father was in the U.S. Air Force, so we moved often,” he recalls, “but I always made a little garden wherever we lived, even if it was just on a windowsill.”
In California since 1994, Marek delights in autumn, when rains awaken the landscape. In 2018, he and Bernatz hosted a fall Digging Deeper event, In the Pink—Autumn in a California Garden, celebrating the vivid hues of blooming aloes in tangerine, coral, and buttery gold, and the brilliant magenta blooms of ribbon bush (Hypoestes aristata) that has seeded itself happily through the garden.
As Regional Ambassador for Los Angeles, Marek helped expand Open Days to embrace a broader range of gardens—from professionally designed estates to intimate, entirely homemade creations. Each, he believes, offers its own inspiration and beauty.
“Open Days are not only joyful experiences,” Marek says, “they’re also a way of appreciating our cultural heritage. Just as museums celebrate art, music, and architecture, Open Days celebrate gardens in all their variety and wonder.”
Marek sees this as central to the Garden Conservancy’s mission of preserving gardens as national treasures. The Conservancy’s first project—the preservation of Ruth Bancroft’s pioneering California garden of succulents and cacti—remains a model.
“It was something we hadn’t seen before,” Marek notes, “a garden born from one woman’s passion that became a celebrated destination, a botanical garden that hosts tens of thousands of visitors a year.”
Today, as a Garden Conservancy board member and chair of its Open Days Committee, Marek looks ahead to a new generation of garden lovers. He imagines a 28-year-old whose apartment overflows with houseplants and hopes that, one day, that enthusiasm will blossom outdoors—into a garden to share, and a future rooted in joy.
