THE GARDENER’S BIBLE : In the nearly 40 years since it was first published, novice and professional gardeners alike have come to regard the Sunset Western Garden Book as the essential reference guide on plants and planting in West.
The Sunset Western Garden Book.
You will find it hanging from a nail or sitting on a counter at most nurseries. You’ll see soiled, dog-eared copies clutched tightly by gardeners at flower shows, plant sales and club meetings.
These green-thumbs call it their bible.
“I’ve worked in this business 20 years and I wouldn’t be without it,” said Phil Miller, vice president and general manager of Roger’s Gardens in Newport Beach, the largest-volume garden center in the country.
“Every day that I’m here, I use it. It’s on every counter, at every manager’s desk, at every salesman’s position. It’s the most widely used book in the nursery and we sell three cases a week.”
Published in four editions, the Sunset Western Garden Book has been the reference guide for thousands and thousands of gardeners west of the Rockies for nearly 40 years. It has sold more than 4 million copies since it debuted in 1954.
Its fans--and they are legion--insist that they do not turn a spadeful of earth or broadcast a handful of rye-grass seed without consulting the Sunset Western Garden Book.
“My first one is falling apart because I go through it constantly. If I sit down with the book I’m hooked for four or five hours planning some new landscaping,” said Monya Lane, a back-yard gardener from Newport Beach.
“If everybody read the first 200 pages of the book, I’d be out of a job,” said David Lofgren, the plant “answer man” at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia.
He answers about 3,000 inquiries annually from gardeners perplexed over their sick seedlings or looking for advice on what plants to put where. The Sunset Western Garden Book occupies a prominent place on his desk and holds a special place in his heart.
“I’ve used it almost as long as I can remember. My folks picked up the book for me when I was a teen-ager and I still have it here on my desk,” Lofgren said.
The Western Garden Book has won the hearts of generations of gardeners tilling the soil from Colorado Springs to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. But how?
When you look into it, you find everyone has a reason for loving this book.
For some, it is the maps that plot 24 Western climate zones, pinpointing air currents, high and low temperatures, marine influence and detailing what plants can be grown where--sometimes neighborhood by neighborhood.
For others, it is the Western Plant Encyclopedia that makes the book a standout--it is the only comprehensive listing of what can be grown in the West and it includes exhaustive information on each plant, listing its botanical as well as its common name along with basic characteristics and care information.
For still others, the book’s opening section--a how-to guide on planting, pruning, spraying and sowing--is invaluable.
Then there is the Plant Selection Guide, which compares and evaluates plants for specific landscaping needs. There are recommendations for plants to grow in parking strips (try juniperus chinensis “San Jose”), as lawn substitutes, around a pool (the selections are as litter-free as possible with no bristles or thorns). There are fast-growing plants, plants that are easy to grow and plants that will cascade over a wall. Then there are plants that attract birds, draw bees and provide fragrance.
But underlying all the recommendations, charts and hands-on gardening knowledge, the Sunset Western Garden Book rises above the typical how-to book with writing that is clear, precise and entertaining.
The book’s creator, Walter Doty, captured the essence of gardening this way in the opening lines of the book’s first edition: “No man who has poked a kernel of corn into the ground can help but watch with wonder and disbelief the consequences of this simple act.”
The book keeps its readers enthralled through discussions of “pests and diseases” and “the pruning primer.” Even when relating distasteful information, the book does it with grace and style.
From the 1967 third edition, on gophers:
“Several methods of control are used, with the best being those that show you incontrovertible evidence of success in the form of a dead gopher. Although it’s possible to clobber a gopher with a shovel (especially one that’s been driven from its burrow by flooding or gassing) or to shoot one (city ordinances seldom allow it), trapping is the most widely used and generally most successful method.”
The story of the Sunset Western Garden Book is the story of a group of gardeners--plant fanatics, really--who combined their love of the earth with a tremendous facility for the English language.
Their leader was Doty, a former Berkeley advertising man with incredible energy and the ability to turn a phrase.
“His motto was ‘Take the reader by the hand,’ ” said Dave Clark, editor of Sunset’s book division from the early 1970s through 1988. “That meant you showed him how to do it, you took him around the garden. You didn’t just talk at him.”
Doty was in charge of the first real Sunset Western Garden Book, published in 1954. “It was a magnificent book, widely acclaimed. Doty was full of imagination and challenges,” recalled Joe Williamson, who took over when Doty retired in 1964. Doty died in 1990 at the age of 94.
Doty’s partner in publishing was Elsa Uppman Knoll, who served as Sunset magazine’s garden editor. Knoll graduated from Stanford University in 1928 and attended the California School of Gardening for Women in Hayward. She took over the school in 1936 and in 1939 Sunset Magazine profiled her and she met Doty, who later hired her.
“I learned so much from him. This was my treasure and my dream, to be able to work with someone who wrote with such grace,” Knoll said.
She attributed Doty’s meticulous writing style to his days in advertising, when he wrote the slogan, “Let’s Get Associated” for the Associated Oil Co., one of his accounts.
“He was a natural about clean, straightforward, simple, direct information and giving it in that way,” Knoll said.
Knoll, who lives in Carmel and still gardens at 85, is no slouch with words herself. She stated her philosophy of gardening in the introduction to her 1941 Visual Garden Manual:
“Yes, the soil gives us much more than flowers that are beautiful to look at or fruits and vegetables that are good to eat. It gives us hope, courage, patience and quiet joy. It anchors us to something solid, fundamental, timeless and constructive.”
When Doty and Knoll first set out to write the Western Garden Book in 1954, they had scant material to build on.
In November, 1933, Sunset had released a book called the “All-Western Garden Guide.”
The 96-page paperback’s main claim to fame was a dictionary-encyclopedia, the first of its kind published for gardening west of the Continental Divide. In those days, Sunset summarily divided the West up into three climate zones: the Pacific Northwest, Central and Southwest.
The Garden Guide was illustrated with panel drawings called “Western Garden Movies” on topics such as “Diary of a Dahlia,” written from the point of view of a flower as it progresses from seedling to pruning to winning first prize at the San Leandro flower show.
In the book was a coupon offering a two-year subscription to Sunset Magazine, plus the guide, for $1.
“Those meager books were selling because there was nothing better. People were even calling them ‘the bible.’ It was embarrassing,” Williamson said.
When Sunset decided to do the job right, Doty and Knoll, along with 20 other staff members, worked for a year to put together the 384-page, spiral-bound tome.
The book was immensely popular. At $2.95, it sold 100,000 copies in the 21 months after its publication on March 5, 1954.
The book included a 25-page section on perennials and 13 pages on California natives, although drought-tolerant plants were seldom used in the 1950s and 1960s,
The Sunset Western Garden Book has been updated about once a decade since the first edition. The price has gone up each time and it now sells for $18.95.
Williamson, who took over the book in 1964, made a major contribution to the 1967 edition by introducing the 24 climate zones of the West. He based his climate maps on preliminary data done by the UC Agricultural Extension Service.
“You can be in a nursery and you’ll hear someone say, ‘I can’t grow that, I’m in zone 17, or zone 24.’ It’s used as a currency now--everyone understands what that means,” Williamson said.
He was also responsible for one of the most controversial changes to the book, made just after the 1967 edition was published. It was at that time that DDT began to be suspected of causing the rapid decline of the peregrine falcon and other birds.
“The people making money from (DDT) would deny the stories about it causing the problem for top-of-the-food-chain birds, who were in a hell of a fix,” Williamson recalled. “But we chose to go along with the scientists rather than the farmers or the pesticide manufacturers.”
In August, 1969, Williamson persuaded Sunset to cancel all DDT advertising in the magazine. He rewrote the insecticide chapter of the garden book before the next printing--leaving out the references to DDT.
“It was quite a task to get all the brass to go along with me,” he said, recalling that the chemical companies had lucrative advertising contracts with Sunset.
Currently, the information in the book on treating pests and diseases is weighted toward using natural methods.
During his tenure, Williamson also instituted panels of experts that met regularly to consult on future editions, providing invaluable in-the-soil experience for the book.
“We’d meet about nine times a year, no more than 25 people from growers to home gardeners to university people and agricultural extension agents. There would be a carefully worked-out agenda of questions about the degree to which particular plants would grow in certain areas, how tall they’d get, how they’d fare over the winter,” Williamson said.
As a pay-back for their time, Sunset usually took them all out to dinner. “There was a lot of time to talk to people afterward. Some of the biggest deals in landscaping were struck over those dinners,” Williamson said.
Another editor who made major contributions to the book was John R. (Dick) Dunmire. He put together the 278-page Western Plant Encyclopedia, which first appeared in the 1967 edition.
It took Dunmire four years to compile, relying on a reference work called “Hortus II” for botanical names and on gardeners in the field who checked his facts and added input on how plants grew in different climate zones.
Before the Computer Age, Dunmire wrote each entry out in longhand and then copied it on a precursor to the Xerox called a Bruning machine.
“It was a machine that looked something like a gigantic toaster. It made copies, but it was clumsier and slower than the old mimeograph,” he recalled.
For the 1978 edition, illustrations were added to the plant encyclopedia, a change that brought about the hiring of several artists.
In the last edition, published in 1988, a 24-page color section was added to kick off the book and an index to the botanical and common names of plants was compiled.
Each time the book comes out it is updated to reflect the latest information on gardening, said Elizabeth Hogan, Sunset’s current book editor.
Sometimes, even the most basic information can be improved upon. Recently, the section on how to dig a hole was revised. “Instead of digging a very deep hole, now the theory is you should dig wide, shallow holes. We used to recommend digging a hole two or three times as deep as the plant root mass. Now, it’s not believed to be necessary. Also, we now use natural soil to fill in the hole. Before, we used to tell people to use soil amendments,” Dunmire said.
Over the years, the popularity of the Sunset Western Garden Book has not waned.
It sells about 75,000 copies annually, almost exclusively in the West. The book’s editors get around 500 comments and questions each year from readers.
“It’s still unique because it’s comprehensive. Other pretenders have come along over the years but they don’t last,” said Clark.
Some have criticized the book for being slanted toward Northern California because Sunset’s headquarters are located in Menlo Park. Other criticism has been that there is not enough illustration, that it does not get specific enough on exotic plants and that the climate zones could be more precise.
In the last two years, many of the original editors and writers of the book have retired, including Williamson, Dunmire and Clark. They were offered a severance package when Time-Warner bought Sunset Magazine and its book division from the family of L. W. Lane Sr. in June, 1990.
Will the book retain its charm and its old-fashioned, cultured writing style?
Never fear, said Clark. “Sunset still has tremendous interest in and knowledge of gardening. I can’t see them ever dropping this book.”
Western gardeners will always need a specialized book that deals with the opportunities and challenges of gardening in a climate that allows the growing of plants from tropicals to cacti, said Dunmire.
“Rudyard Kipling said that the British empire had dominion over palm and pine. Well, we’ve got that right here in California,” he said.
