Gardening in Summer-Dry Climates Plants for a Lush, Water-Conscious Landscape

Dry summer, wet winter climate? This is your must have plant guide.
 
Selecting plants suited to your climate is the first step toward a thriving, largely self-sustaining garden that connects with and supports the natural world. With gentle and compelling text and stunning photographs of plants in garden settings, Gardening in Summer-Dry Climates by Nora Harlow and Saxon Holt is a guide to native and climate-adapted plants for summer-dry, winter-wet climates of North America's Pacific coast. Knowing what these climates share and how and why they differ, you can choose to make gardens that maintain and expand local and regional biodiversity, take little from the earth that is not returned, and welcome and accommodate the presence of wildlife. With global warming, it is now even more critical that we garden in tune with climate.

Nora Harlow is a landscape architect and gardener with wide-ranging experience in the summer-dry climates of California. She was assistant editor of Pacific Horticulture magazine for many years and supervisor of water conservation for the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland, where she designed low-water landscapes for District facilities. She is the author of Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the Bay Area, co-editor of The Pacific Horticulture Book of Western Gardening, and co-editor of Wild Lilies, Irises, and Grasses.
Saxon Holt is a photojournalist who has spent more than 40 years exploring Kingdom Plantae and the fundamental importance of plants to the health of the planet. A lifelong gardener, he abandoned commercial photography when he discovered garden publishers and could no longer stay in a studio. His work has been featured in diverse publications, from Architectural Digest and Pacific Horticulture magazine, to Smithsonian and Money magazines.