A very few gardening books keep me nailed to the couch instead of working in the garden. One is Designing California Native Gardens: The Plant Community Approach to Artful, Ecological Gardens by Glenn Keator and Alrie Middlebrook. Each chapter features one complete garden design focused on one or more of the California plant communities.
Alrie Middlebrook practices this approach in her business, Middlebrook Gardens, a design/build company, and now a small native plant nursery on Race Street, San Jose. She also fosters it in her foundation, the California Native Gardening Foundation, whose mission is to make more California natives available for gardening, and to promote gardening with natives. In a lunch-time interview, Alrie said:
“The pinnacle of the sustainable gardening model is ecological restoration in suburbia. It’s planting natives in the home gardens that would naturally grow in your region and restoring the biological diversity that was there before it was developed.
