Books like Botanica's Roses — picked by fans

The first three books on my list concentrate on building form and space, with little about function.

The ‘pattern language’ is different, mapping human activities onto appropriate built forms, and advocating repeated patterns that have been found to work.

Christopher Alexander wants us to use the patterns in designing responses to situations, but they also help to judge how well-built spaces fit their contexts in analysing architecture.

Although Alexander maps activities onto his own preferred design style, the patterns are not inherently specific to any style or period of architecture.

Despite being written 50 years ago, this one-of-a-kind book is still fresh and relevant.

For years Henry Mitchell wrote for The Washington Post about the agony and the ecstasy of gardening and, consequently, everything else. This classic is laced with pith, wit, gems, and instruction throughout. No one does it better or funnier. The easiest path is to quote the man himself: “Shasta daisies are far more agreeable and lovely than one thinks they are going to be.”

For more than half a century the Sunset Western Garden Book was the first and last word for Western gardeners. This compendium established a zonal system specifically for the nuanced West, and provided exhaustive, accurate, updated, and unbiased information, plant by plant, variety by variety, from A to Z. It offered a selection guide for specific situations suited to inland heat and the temperate coast. It provided basic information about planting, pests, soils, pruning, and weeds. I sold hundreds of copies of this indispensable volume to nursery customers. My co-workers did the same. That the sun has set on this essential field guide to gardening in the West is a bitter pill. Our Western gardens are diminished without it.

Most of us who took action on our ache to “get back to the land” gave ourselves over to a rustic bucolia we’d created in our minds. And, yes, as it turned out, it was all of that, the harmony of seasons, the deep peace, the night sky, the quail, and deer. It was other things, too, things we hadn’t reckoned on—isolation, endless labor, and the hourly rate of the well man. Readable and entertaining, Get Your Pitchfork On! eases the urban to rural transition with hard-won practical advice. It will infuse your dream, whatever its scale, with a healthy dose of preparedness to assure its best chance of success. 

Historically, California native plants were often grown in European gardens before they were accepted into California gardens. Now they are being grown in California for their beauty and frequent drought tolerance. Here you will see photos of plants in garden landscapes with information about the regions in which they will grow, their needs, and their care. 

This book is different in perspective from the other ones on my list, since it focuses on climate change caused drought and the actions individual human beings might have to resort to in the face of the stresses of the environment and a corrupt political world. Yet this is an engaging climate change-related thriller, more at the micro-level. Ex-Marine Martin Makepeace is faced with dire choices as he has to save his loved ones in a world where water has become an impossible scarce resource…

This is one of the scarier disaster novels I’ve read, targeted at young adults rather than middle-grade readers.

People die in frighteningly believable ways in this story about a severe water shortage in California. I live in a semi-arid region that has been experiencing more frequent droughts in the last few years, so this novel’s premise felt plausible: the taps are literally turned off.

As well, the various characters’ reactions to the crisis reflected people I know, from preppers to climate changer deniers to those who dig deep and find kindness no matter how bad things get.

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton lived through one of the most tumultuous periods of history in California. She was born in Baja California to an elite family but moved to Mexican Alta California, as it was then known, during the Mexican-American War, marrying US army captain Henry Burton and becoming a US citizen. Ruiz de Burton watched California’s transformation under US rule, and this 1885 novel uses fiction to lay bare the very real problem of land dispossession of the Mexican Californians (known as Californios) and the arrival of ‘squatters’ from the eastern US who were claiming contested property. Ruiz de Burton is considered to be one of the earliest Mexican-American female authors to write in English, and this work illustrates how Alta California’s transition to statehood upended the lives of many people who had lived there under Spanish and Mexican rule.

In this book are directions for planting and pruning roses and protecting them from pests, all keyed to the climate of the greater Bay Area. The separate chapter on rose-growing in the fog will be especially welcomed by coast-side gardeners, as will the list of rose varieties rated for the SF Bay Area. Order the book's current edition on the San Francisco Rose Society website using the direct link below. 

Growing up in rural East Texas, some of my earliest memories center around the fire station where my father was a volunteer firefighter.

Although this book is set in Northern California, it manages to render the small town and its politics familiar enough that I can almost smell the smoke. Lex’s reluctance to return to where everyone else in her immediate family died is tempered by the romance igniting between her and an old flame, but everyone has secrets here—and some can be deadly.