Plants, books, and tools are the obvious gifts for native-plant gardeners. The best single mail-order source I've found that offers an enticing array of seeds, a broad selection of books, and essential tools is Larner Seeds. If you can't choose, you can go with a gift certificate. Done!
If you'd rather buy tools in person, go to Hida Tool in Berkeley or Common Ground in Palo Alto. A hori hori is a good choice.
It's planting season! If the gardener on your docket is ready to plant a new garden and would love a road trip, you can offer to be the chauffeur and load the vehicle with plants from a native-plant nursery. Be sure to call ahead. Gold Rush Nursery in Soquel and California Flora Nursery in Fulton (north of Santa Rosa) sell many plants in 4-inch pots at $4-5 each, a good size to get roots established in your garden.
A membership in the Regional Parks Botanic Garden (known as Tilden) in Berkeley is a good gift for gardeners who have enough plants for now but want to learn better how to take care of them. Tilden members get discounts on its classes on maintaining native gardens, and it's one of the best places in the Bay Area to visit a huge variety of native plants in natural groupings. (Merritt College in Oakland also offers classes on native horticulture.) With a Tilden membership, gardeners who travel a lot get benefits at dozens of other U.S. gardens outside the Bay Area, including free entry at native gardens such as Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont.
You can offer monthly or seasonal Tilden trips to a gardener who's planning to add natives. Free native garden tours in the spring are another way for you to offer your time and company as the gift. You can add a 1-hour consultation with a native-garden designer, offer help with mulching or weeding, or help apply for a landscape rebate from the water district.
For an ecologically minded friend who's interested but not persuaded to plant natives yet, bring them to a monthly Gardening with Natives group or give a CNPS membership. For a giftee interested in adventurous women, give the book Hardy Californians and don't miss the May 12 lecture about its author, Lester Rowntree, at the Western Horticultural Society meeting in Los Altos.
Mindful that each dollar you spend is a vote for what you want to see more of in the world, your time and your support for organizations are usually better choices than “stuff.”
Still, stuff that gardeners appreciate includes hand lotion (a good one without mineral oil, and cruelty-free), gloves that come in sizes (Atlas and West County Gardener make good ones), sun protection (Sunday Afternoons hats, sungear with SPF values), knee pads (the simplest ones work well), seed-saving envelopes or vials, and seed-starting mix.
Or give a gardening recovery kit with a jar of Tiger Balm for sore muscles and a book to help gardeners stay limber, such as Gardener's Fitness, Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness, or Gardener's Yoga.
© 2009 Tanya Kucak