The Pacific Northwest abounds with native plants that bring beauty to the home garden while offering food and shelter to birds, bees, butterflies, and other wildlife. Elegant trilliums thrive in woodland settings. Showy lewisias stand out in the rock garden. Hazel and huckleberry number among the delights of early spring, while serviceberry and creek dogwood provide a riot of fall color. Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest is the essential resource for learning how to best use this stunning array. Close to 1,000 choices of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, and grasses for diverse terrain and conditions, from Canada to California, and east to ..

Before any other influences began to fashion life and its lavish diversity, geological events created the initial environments--both physical and chemical--for the evolutionary drama that followed. Drawing on case histories from around the world, Arthur Kruckeberg demonstrates the role of landforms and rock types in producing the unique geographical distributions of plants and in stimulating evolutionary diversification. His examples range throughout the rich and heterogeneous tapestry of the earth's surface: the dramatic variations of mountainous topography, the undulating ground and crevices of level limestone karst, and the subtle realm of sand dunes. He desc ..

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award Bounded on the east by the crest of the Cascade Range and on the west by the lofty east flank of the Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound terrain includes every imaginable topograhic variety. This thoughtful and eloquent natural history of the Puget Sound region begins with a discussion of how the ice ages and vulcanism shaped the land and then examines the natural attributes of the region--flora and fauna, climate, special habitats, life histories of key organisms--as they pertain to the functioning ecosystem. Mankind's effects upon the natural environment are a pervasive theme of the book. Kruckeberg looks at both po ..

Carnivorous pitcher plants, pygmy conifers, and the Tiburon jewel flower, restricted to a small patch of serpentine soil on Tiburon Peninsula in Marin County, are just a few of California's many amazing endemic plants--species that are unique to particular locales. California boasts an abundance of endemic plants precisely because it also boasts the richest geologic diversity of any place in North America, perhaps in the world. In lively prose, Arthur Kruckeberg gives a geologic travelogue of California's unusual soils and land forms and their associated plants--including serpentines, carbonate rocks, salt marshes, salt flats, and vernal pools--demonstrating alo ..

This is the first comprehensive treatment of an important segment of the flora of California: native plants that have varying degrees of fidelity to serpentine rock and soil that make up over 1100 square miles in the Coast Ranges and the Sierra Nevada. Many of California's unique endemic plants are found nowhere else but on serpentine; over 200 species, subspecies, and varieties of native plants are restricted to some degree to serpentine. The author describes the geology, soils, and mineral nutrition of serpentines (low in normal essential nutrients, high in magnesium, iron, and toxic heavy metals, nickel, and chromium), the vegetation and flora that tolerate t ..