About this book:

"Climate-Resilient Native Plants" offers a comprehensive guide to adapting landscapes to the challenges of a warming world through the strategic selection and management of native species. The book emphasizes that resilience is not about stasis, but about a landscape's capacity to absorb shocks, maintain essential functions, and reorganize in the face of warming temperatures, extreme weather, and altered disturbance regimes. It moves beyond simple plant lists to focus on functional traits—such as rooting depth, water-use efficiency, phenological flexibility, fire adaptations, and tolerance to flooding and salinity—that allow plants to survive and thrive under various forms of stress.

A central theme is the dynamic interplay between plants and their environment, including the critical role of soil health, microbiomes, and mycorrhizal partnerships in buffering stress. The book also delves into complex topics like genetic diversity, local adaptation, and controversial strategies such as climate-smart provenancing and assisted migration. These interventions aim to introduce genetic variation or move species to new locations to match future climatic conditions, while carefully weighing the ecological and ethical risks against the perils of inaction. It stresses that robust design often involves creating diverse plant communities with staggered responses to spread risk across different stress scenarios.

The book applies these principles to diverse contexts, from the extreme conditions of urban heat islands, compacted soils, and pollution to the working landscapes of rural fields, forests, and rangelands, and specialized green infrastructure like bioswales and living shorelines. It provides practical guidance on establishment under extremes, water-wise irrigation, and maintenance strategies, including pruning and the deliberate use of fire, to foster long-term resilience. The final chapters broaden the discussion to include the crucial roles of equity, culture, Indigenous knowledge, and supportive policy frameworks in creating landscapes that are not only ecologically sound but also socially just and enduring.

Ultimately, "Climate-Resilient Native Plants" argues for a paradigm shift in how we approach landscape design and management. It moves away from rigid blueprints and toward an adaptive, observational, and community-engaged process that treats landscapes as living experiments. By integrating scientific understanding with local knowledge and historical context, the book empowers practitioners to create dynamic, diverse, and place-appropriate plant communities that can absorb shocks, adapt, and continue to provide vital ecosystem services, beauty, and cultural meaning in an uncertain future.