Hits the nail on the head for why we seem to have so many northerly species or nothern hybrids in the trade.

Ricki, I think you’ve hit on a topic that needs to be written about. Do you think you have another book in you? You’d definitely need different chapters for the coastal strip versus the dry and hot parts of the state. And be sure to remember one of the most amazing carnivorous plants out there: Darlingtonia californica. (Sorry for stealing the glory of the species name, even though many predominant populations live up farther north.

David, most books that don’t weigh 30 pounds are probably compromises as to what they keep and exclude. I think this book does a good balancing act. I’m glad you mentioned the index. For a book that isn’t organized by species, in particular, an index is really essential, and this book’s index makes it easier to get to the plant you want to research.

Now, you have me looking for “where I put that” Care and Maint of So Cal plants book I bought a few summers ago…

Well, the entire state is “north” from where you are. How are you defining “north”? Ignoring human population density and looking strictly at geography, everything south of San Jose is in the southern half of California. Bakersfield is in the southern third of the California, and Sacramento is in the central third. I’m in the northern third, but not by much. It is a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Sacramento to the Oregon border, but only about 5% of the state’s human population lives north of Sacramento. Simply put, everything that most people think of as “northern California” is geographically in the central third of the state, and everything that is geographically in the northern third of the state pretty much never occurs to anyone in other parts of the state at all — and that includes the plants.

To me it seems obvious that the plants that only grow in the state’s less populated areas are much, much less likely to get mentioned in any of the native plant gardening books. There are good reasons for that — what’s the use in telling gardeners all over the state about plants that hardly any of them can grow? — but it still means that some very interesting plants in the northern third of the state get far, far less attention than they would if they grew farther south. And when you read a gardening book that seems to you biased toward the plants of the “north,” I’m probably reading the same book and thinking that it seems biased toward the plants of the “south.” (I haven’t actually read this book yet, though, so we’ll see.)

Epiphyllums–yeah, they create mixed feelings, don’t they? Unearthly wild flowers for a few weeks, an ugly plant to hide behind the nearest shrub the rest of the year.