The Landscaping Ideas of Jays: A Natural History of the Backyard Restoration Garden

"Willful, eloquent, and humorous, Judith Lowry broadens and deepens the themes found in her popular first book, Gardening with a Wild Heart. Grizzly bear and scrub jay join native people and a company of colorful personalities in a celebration of our home ground, a place called California."--David Fross, coauthor of Ceanothus and California Native Plants for the Garden

"In humorous, accessible, and inspirational prose, Judith Larner Lowry reminds us that California truly does have real seasons. All we have to do is listen to the native animals and plants around us."--Jerry Emory, author of The Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide

"With much beauty and elegance, Judith Lowry underscores the importance of restoration gardening as a way to honor Native American traditions, protect biodiversity, and restore our relationship with the earth. A must read for those interested in how we might become truly native to the places where we live."--M. Kat Anderson, author of Tending the Wild

"Within the pulse of California's five seasons, this finely calibrated treatise is a beguiling and eminently accessible model of a restoration gardener's physical and mental engagement with the vegetable world. From the horticultural accomplishments of formidable women in her field to the age-old interactions between animals and plants, Lowry gives us an attentive, lyrical guide to full inhabitation of our landscape."--Lillian Vallee, poet, translator and columnist for Stanislaus Connections

"Judith Larner Lowry combines a spiritual love of nature with practical suggestions and stories for renewal of the beauty and restorative power of gardens. She leads you through the 'five' seasons of California gardening and lays a plan to recreate, renew and revive California's natural native beauty and in the process your soul."--Carl Pope, Executive Director, Sierra Club

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.

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.

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