In recent years, California gardeners have been presented with a number of excellent books on the state’s native flora and its value for gardeners and landscape professionals. ….

Helen Popper has chosen a different approach in her delightful California Native Gardening. As the subtitle suggests, this is a seasonal guide to the care of native plants in our gardens and landscapes. Popper emphasizes the rhythm of growth, flowering, fruiting, and rest that is inherent in our natives. …

Popper leads the reader through the gardening year, beginning with October and the first hint of a change from the summer siesta. She presents a concise list of tasks for each month, then expands upon it in a wonderful readable prose-nurturing our understanding of the needs of native plants in the landscape, month-by-month. She concludes each monthly chapter with a discussion of the flowers that will likely be in bloom in that month….

This is the book I’ve been looking for to guide me through a year’s program of maintenance of the increasing number of native plants in my own garden. The native gardener in California should not be without it.

via Pacific Horticulture — Book Reviews: California Native Gardening: A Month-by-Month Guide.

You can buy the book on amazon.com.