Mediterranean Gardening
A Waterwise Approach
Heidi Gildemeister
foreword by Christopher Brickell
University of California Press, 2002
, ISBN-10:0520236475
, 101/4 x 73/4 in / 260 x 195 mm
, paperback
, 208 pages
, 350 full-color plates
, includes index
"Gardening in harmony with a Mediterranean climate means taking advantage of winter rain and allowing the garden to rest over hot summers. In this beautifully illustrated, practical handbook, Heidi Gildemeister provides both novice and experienced gardeners with a comprehensive guide for waterwise gardening, with over one thousand drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants chosen both for their beauty and for their easygoing ways. Well indexed with common and botanical names, Mediterranean Gardening will be indispensable not only for gardeners in California, the Mediterranean basin, and Mediterranean climate areas in South America, Australia, and Africa, but for anyone living in a region that experiences drought.
"Gildemeister explains how drought-tolerant plants that are suitably matched with a site and carefully planted and mulched can live on winter rain and, once established, do not need additional summer water-as in nature. The Plant Selection lists over one thousand plants from nearly five hundred genera, including their preferred growing conditions, propagation, best use, and maintenance. Guidelines in eight steps describe the planning of waterwise gardens, such as for the establishment of dappled shade to conserve precious soil moisture. Successful alternatives to the water-intensive lawn offer attractive design ideas.
"Mediterranean Gardening offers a wealth of information: "easy" plants for the beginner, new choices for the garden architect, and for botanists the latest findings on minimum temperatures plants can endure. An extensive bibliography covering drought tolerance and a list of useful addresses make this book as helpful to people converting to water-, labor-, and ecology-conscious gardening as to those starting from scratch.
"Heidi Gildemeister converted a maquis-covered western Mediterranean landscape into a thriving ten-acre garden and became a pioneer of waterwise gardening in the Mediterranean region. A gardener of long and varied experience, she has gardened in Switzerland, the Andes, and on the Peruvian coast. She lectures worldwide and has contributed to The Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening. She is a member of the Botanical Society of South Africa, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and the International Dendrology Society and is a founding member and former president of the Mediterranean Garden Society."
University of California Press
"This is no ordinary book on drought tolerant plants, but the accumulated wisdom of twenty years spent learning about the Mediterranean climate, it plants and soils. The learning was not the casual process of one warned by municipal authorities that water is becoming scarce, but the urgent seeking of knowledge of an intelligent gardener entirely dependent on rainfall whose tank had run dry. The author's first garden in southern Spain was burnt by the summer sun. She wrote for advice to staff members at botanic gardens in similar climates and was launched into a style of gardening appropriate to her climate instead of one carried south in childhood memories.
"Some basic principles emerge from her experience:
- choose plants that have evolved in a similar climate and soil
- having chosen suitable plants, help those least able to survive drought by placing them where they are sheltered from the strongest sun and worst winds
- prepare soil thoroughly to enable it to retain more soil moisture
- mulch heavily and repeatedly.
"It is rare to have a European gardener's point of view that comes other than from a land of summer rain. And despite the similarity in our circumstances, it is refreshing to learn from a resourceful gardener in southern Spain how she deals with the demands of a long dry season and garden maintenance twelve months of the year. The pictures, too, are delightfully different from those we have come to expect in books on waterwise gardening. Backgrounds of stone more ancient and mellow, it seems, than those of old England, give a startlingly picturesque quality to the plants around them."
Pacific Horticulture magazine
