Natural Landscaping Ideas
Elegantly organized by season, this lyrical yet practical guide to backyard restoration gardening celebrates the beauty, the challenges, and the rewards of growing native plants at home. Judith Larner Lowry, winner of the prestigious John Burroughs award, here builds on themes from her best-selling Gardening with a Wild Heart, which introduced restoration gardening as a new way of thinking about land and people. Drawing on her experiences in her own garden, Lowry offers guidance on how to plan a garden with birds, plants, and insects in mind; how to shape it with trees and shrubs, paths and trails, ponds, and other features; and how to cultivate, maintain, and harvest seeds and food from a diverse array of native annuals and perennials. Working in passionate collaboration with the scrub jays, quail, ants, and deer who visit her garden, and inspired by other gardeners, including some of the women pioneers of native plant horticulture, Lowry shares the delights of creating site-specific, ever-changing gardens that can help us better understand our place in the natural world.
Preface
My Dream Neighborhoods
FALL
1. Esperando la Lluvia:Waiting for Rain
2. Birdsong Ripens Berries, Wind Brings the Seeds
3. The Keynote Bird: Creating Habitat through Focus on a Single Species
4. I Live in a Quail Yard: A Garden Designed with Quail in Mind
5. The Keynote Plant: Rules of Thumb for Garden Design
6. Sing Willow
7. The Landscaping Ideas of Jays
8. In Praise of the Unleaving: Deciduous Trees and Shrubs for the California Gardener
WINTER
9. Eating the Rain
10. Eternal Vigilance: Featuring Bermuda Buttercup
11. Rain-time Reading
12. Supreme Advocate for California’s Native Plants: Lester Rowntree
13. Bright Were Her Days: Edith Van Allen Murphey
14. An Inordinate Number of Good Things: Gerda Isenberg
15. Forest Gardens: The Lessons of Coarse Woody Debris
SPRING
16. The Flower Dance in Modern Times
17. The Weed Dance in Modern Times
18. Do You Talk to Plants?
19. Rock Knows: Features for the Restoration Garden
20. Where’s the Clover? The Real California Cuisine
SUMMER
21. Saying Farewell to Spring: Growing Site-Specific Clarkias
22. The Preservation of Small Things
23. The Pollinators of Small Things
24. Animal Assistants
25. Celebrations from the Native Plant Palette
26. Fog Flower: Four Guidelines for Backyard Restoration Gardeners
27. Scale Is All: Large Shrubs and Small Trees
THE FIFTH SEASON
28. The Quiet Time
29. The Berry Harvest
30. Paths and Trails: Making Our Way through the Restoration Garden
31. Everything’s Here: The Late Summer Riches of the Pond Scum Production Area
32. Life Is Maintenance
Coda: We Are Not the First
Acknowledgments
Notes
Recommended Reading
Index
For the past twenty-eight years Judith Larner Lowry has been the proprietor of Larner Seeds in Marin County, California. She is author of Gardening with a Wild Heart: Restoring California’s Native Landscapes at Home (UC Press) and her essays have appeared in Orion, Bay Nature, and other magazines and anthologies, including American Nature Writing 1996, edited by John A. Murray. She lives in northern California.
“I recommend this book to anyone interested in natural history as well as those contemplating a restoration project in any state as Mrs. Lowry’s knowledge of native plants will inspire you.”—Botanical Rsrch Inst Of Tx, Jbrit
“There is much wisdom here.”—Ibis
“Provides a lovely immersion in the seasonal flow of Lowry’s garden and will no doubt inspire many to become backyard restoration gardeners themselves.”—Bay Nature