Annette Bening kicked off the grand opening for the brand new TreePeople Center for Community Forestry today, waxing lyrical about how much she and her kids love TreePeople’s work educating and greening Los Angeles.

Ed Begley, Jr. also showed up, along with LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and LA City Councilmember Wendy Gruel (below, with TreePeople founder Andy Lipkis), to celebrate this 4-acre enviro-educational campus — expected to see 70,000+ visitors a year.

The Center itself’s gorgeous, with a LEED Platinum certified Conference Center, a learning center decorated with kids’ nature-inspired art work, a spacious nursery (below), and an educational urban watershed garden with interactive exhibits. Plus, a 216K-gallon underground cistern stores rainwater collected from all over the Center, including the parking lot, sloped to direct rainwater to the cistern.

During the opening ceremonies, groups of students were already taking tours around the Center. I actually heard squeals of delight when a guide (below) made it “rain” in the watershed garden to illustrate what happens to urban runoff.

The Center’s located at Coldwater Canyon Park, 12601 Mulholland Dr., Beverly Hills. The main carbon footprint issue I see, as you can imagine, is the fact that the place isn’t easy to access except by car — though I believe some TreePeople employees manage to bike up the hill. The wooden bike rack, however, sat empty while I was there.

On the upside, Wendy Gruel (above, with Annette Bening) pointed to this exact problem in her short speech — she, like most of us, had to fight traffic to get there (the last 2 miles took me a half hour) — and said the first meeting at the new Conference Center should be to discuss transportation and environment issues in the 2nd district — Her district, in which this new Center sits. 2nd district constituents: Follow up with Wendy on her initiative!

Don’t understand how the Center can have a Beverly Hills addy while being located in an LA district? Juan Villegas, Public Relations Associate for TreePeople, explained it to me. Apparently, the TreePeople buildings and yurts are located in LA — but the mailboxes sit just across the Beverly Hills border –

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