Helen Popper’s recent book (March, 2012) Cal­i­for­nia Native Gar­den­ing hit my mail­box a few weeks ago. It’s been reviewed [ here ] and [ there ], and it looked worth check­ing out.

The quick take on this new guide: Yes, it’s a good book, and it’s a nice sup­ple­ment to other books out there on hor­ti­cul­tural uses of Cal­i­for­nia native plants.

Look at its title and you’ve got a good idea of its focus: Cal­i­for­nia Native Gar­den­ing. That’s the active verb-noun “gar­den­ing” at the end, and the gerund sig­nals that this is a book about doing and not just sit­ting back and admiring.

The core of the book is orga­nized around the months of the year. This being Cal­i­for­nia, it begins with Octo­ber, the begin­ning of our “spring,” our annual renais­sance. It’s a use­ful device to get read­ers to rethink tra­di­tional notions of a garden’s cycles and get used to how plants behave in our Mediter­ranean climate.

Each month presents you with a list of tasks for the month, and each of the tasks is devel­oped into sev­eral para­graphs of expla­na­tion. May’s essays are: Let Wild­flower Seeds Ripen, Pinch and Prune, Prop­a­gate with Cut­tings, Water Now Before the Heat of Sum­mer, Plant and Sow, and Weed and Mulch. (Dif­fer­ent months have dif­fer­ent lists of things to do.) Each area under the larger head­ings gen­er­ally gives you a short list of plants that you would be apply­ing that task to that month. Under the sec­tion on cut­tings, for instance, we’re told that sev­eral shrubs and peren­ni­als are good for attempt­ing prop­a­ga­tion by cut­tings this month, includ­ing golden cur­rant, wild mock orange, coy­ote bush, tree anemone and yerba buena.

Lest you fear that the book will leave you exhausted after all your chores, each month also ends with a sec­tion called What’s in Bloom. Here you’ll learn some of the plants that are likely to be in bloom this month, with May host­ing flow­ers from sul­fur buck­wheat, Cal­i­for­nia phacelia, grape soda lupine and west­ern columbine, among over a dozen oth­ers. You can sit back and enjoy the blooms or add the plants to a shop­ping list for next fall in case the gar­den is lack­ing flow­ers dur­ing parts of the year.

The eco­log­i­cal niche that this book occu­pies places it in the com­pany of cul­tural guides like the under-appreciated Care & Main­te­nance of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Gar­dens by Bart O’Brien, Bet­sey Lan­dis and Ellen Mackey. The O’Brien book orga­nizes its gar­den tasks around plants and what they require through­out the year. Cal­i­for­nia Native Gar­den­ing uses the month-by-month approach, which some­times spreads out tasks for one plant over sev­eral months. For instance we learn that coy­ote bush, is a good can­di­date for cut­tings in Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary, May and Sep­tem­ber, which can be a lot of page-flipping if you’re inter­est in a plant and not nec­es­sar­ily the month. Both meth­ods of pre­sent­ing tasks are imper­fect ways to orga­nize infor­ma­tion, and you can decide for your­self which one you might respond to. Also, Cal­i­for­nia Native Gar­den­ing car­ries a wider selec­tion of plants from around the state. If any­thing, it seems to have a slight–not huge–bias to the north, though I could be imag­in­ing this. Related to this thought, many of the plants that make up a typ­i­cal native plantscape also come from the north. I’d be curi­ous to see what oth­ers think on this point.

So, in the end, I’d def­i­nitely rec­om­mend this book to cover the active gar­den­ing activ­i­ties of hav­ing a Cal­i­for­nia native plant gar­den. It doesn’t present a lot of infor­ma­tion on gar­den plan­ning and design, some­thing that is bet­ter dealt with in books writ­ten with that pur­pose in mind. (My favorite in that cat­e­gory is Design­ing Cal­i­for­nia Native Gar­dens: The Plant Com­mu­nity Approach to Art­ful, Eco­log­i­cal Gar­dens by Glenn Keator and Alrie Mid­dle­brook.) But whose library con­sists of only one book? Add this to yours.

PS: It’s got nice pic­tures, too.