Our natural heritage

California Native Plant Gardening;

Las Pilitas Nursery

www.laspilitas.com

It’s hard to think of another garden website that boils over with quite such sublime enthusiasms. Run by Las Pilitas, a native plant nursery with sites in San Diego County and Central California, it could be loosely described as a catalog. Yet the hosts seem shy of their own enterprise. The clever and determined might figure out how to actually shop on it. For most visitors, it seems like a free reference tool, guiding us capably from Abies to Zauschneria.

The owners seem part vendors, part schoolmarms: If they’re going to sell you a plant, they’re going to tell you how to take care of it. If they’re going to do that, they’re going to tell you about it in the wild. If the plant is going to attract birds and butterflies, then the website will tell you which ones and what to do about them. It’s bossy, impassioned, funny. You’ll find plantsmanship, anecdotes, pet peeves (drip irrigation on natives), passions (fauna), botany and pleasantly old-fashioned taxonomy. Its message: Shop with them, shop at other native plant nurseries (Tree of Life, Theodore Payne, Matilija Bob), but shop for natives. An obsessive little miracle of a URL.

-- Emily Green

Worth an extended stay

The Contemporary Guesthouse: Building

in the Garden

Susanna Sirefman

Edizione Press, $45

“In early medieval European castles, nobility would retire side by side with friends, family and guests in the same cavernous great hall where they had just feasted. Everyone was together in this one great room, although rank and lineage determined where in the open- plan space each person slept.”

That quote, from the opening page of this lavishly illustrated book, shows just how privacy-conscious our culture has become. From sleeping en masse, to private quarters for the family, to private quarters for each member -- and then, private quarters for guests.

Of course, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to build a guest wing, guest suite or a totally separate house for guests. In big cities, big spenders often buy two or three adjoining apartments to ensure separate quarters for visiting friends.

The 33 guesthouses from around the world illustrated here are probably more luxurious -- and better designed -- than many people’s primary homes. The architecture, materials and exquisite view sites are a far cry from what many readers will ever own. Yet it is an inspirational book, packed with ideas, even for those who may have a tiny pool shed they want to convert.

An 800-square-foot West L.A. guesthouse, built on a steeply sloped site, features two cubes as living and bedroom, with a slanted roof that’s planted with reed grasses for viewers to see from the main house above.

In Santa Monica, on another steep site, the owner of a 1,000-square-foot 1940s house was forced to build a covered parking structure to comply with city codes that didn’t exist when the house was built. He went above and beyond the mandate, to create a charming 2,000-square-foot, two-story structure that combines garage, studio, guest quarters and entertainment area where friends and family can hang out. It sure beats the lumpy living room sofa.

-- Bettijane Levine

Stating the obvious

Guest Rooms

Hilary Heminway & Alex Heminway

Gibbs, Smith, Publisher, $24.95

If ever a book didn’t need to be written, this is it. The photographs of guest rooms are attractive. The written prescriptions for the care and handling of houseguests are absurd. Do you really need the Heminways to tell you that your guest bedroom and bathroom should be clean? That you should “use a mattress pad to protect from incontinent guests”? Or that cut flowers are “a welcome embellishment” in a guest room -- and then dictate which flowers to cut?

“Arrange forsythia with daffodils in spring; roses, peonies and lavender in early summer, dahlias at summer’s end ... “ Oh, please. Then there’s the double page spread which tells you what, exactly, you need in a bathroom that might be used by your guest. Would you believe a bar of soap? Toilet paper? Clean towels?

If you’d grown up on another planet, this book might come in handy, but even that would be a stretch.

Our least favorite is the photo of an open drawer in a dresser. This, our authors tell us, is where to stash the baby who arrives unexpectedly with an adult guest. We beg to differ. The baby could fall out, the drawer could fall out, both could fall out, with the drawer on top of the baby.

-- Bettijane Levine