Golden Gate Gardening: a Book Review
Photo of Pamela Peirce courtesy of the author
Golden Gate Gardening: 30th Anniversary Edition by Pamela Peirce
Book review by Cheryl Angelina Koehler
“When I garden, I connect to the lives of all humans who are living, or have lived, directly from the earth. I call it ‘emotional archaeology.”’—Pamela Peirce
A new favorite on my home bookshelf is actually an old favorite. It was a chance meeting in 2023 in an East Bay garden that brought me face to face with Pamela Peirce, author of Golden Gate Gardening, whose first edition I have admired since she published it in 1993 with agAccess. Learning that Peirce was about to come out with her fourth edition (with Sasquatch Books) was heartening. In the age of climate change, we have more and more reasons to pay attention to nature, and there are few better ways than by gardening.
My surprise on opening this fourth edition has been the reminder of how Peirce does so much more than provide expertly organized and beautifully illustrated practical information on the specifics of Bay Area urban home gardening. Throughout this huge 8.5 x 11 x 1-inch-thick volume, she demonstrates the deep personal satisfaction derived through the practice. Educated in a Midwestern gardening family and with a college degree in botany, Peirce came to the Bay Area in the 1980s to confront a whole new set of gardening conditions. Growing fruits, vegetables, and herbs in her San Francisco home garden meant learning how to gain the advantages of a year-round growing season while working with the profound impacts of the cooling marine layer.
While she has put her findings together with myriad useful charts, sidebars, appendices, and indices, Peirce is also an engaging writer, who has honed that second craft through an ongoing blog on her website and years of columns for the SF Chronicle. She writes like a storyteller with passages that follow the human narrative on gardening from early times through development of new techniques, and she introduces each fruit, vegetable, or herb like it was a family member. Another set of gems are her easy, practical recipes that also show how the food items have been enjoyed in different cultural traditions. In her book’s beautifully crafted set of introductions, Peirce writes that for most urban home gardeners, the goal is not food self-sufficiency but rather the opportunity for daily meditation on the natural world as the gardener becomes a partner in the complex activity of nature’s web of life.
Note: Golden Gate Gardening: 30th Anniversary edition, Sasquatch Books (August 15, 2023) is currently in short supply, so look around online and especially at your local independent bookseller.
