Welcome to The Gardener — home and garden goods that celebrate the season, located at 1836 Fourth Street in Berkeley, California.
Alta Tingle opened The Gardener in 1984 in a small storefront in Berkeley. In 1987, the shop moved across the street to its present location, into a space more than triple the size of the original store. A second location in Healdsburg, California, operated from 1998 until 2022, and a third store was open in the San Francisco Ferry Building from 2003 to 2024.
Alta—a former garden designer, landscape design lecturer, avid gardener, and photographer—has officially stepped away from running the business; however, her legacy lives on. The Gardener is a collection of all the things that Alta, through her talents and interests, has learned to enjoy and appreciate in her life. This includes a great pair of Japanese scissors for cutting flowers, the purest bar of lavender soap, and a big ceramic kitchen bowl to hold the season's offerings—items that previously required trips to multiple nurseries, hardware stores, and specialty shops.
When The Gardener first opened, there had never been a collection that recognized that even the most avid gardener lives indoors. For more than four decades, The Gardener has been part of the fabric of Berkeley, and it remains a Fourth Street mainstay with a mission to honor Alta's legacy by continuing to inspire and delight shoppers while celebrating beautiful, useful objects for the home and garden.
