If you could live your life over again would you  change anything?  When I was given the  chance to revise my  first book, 100 Best Plants  for the Coastal Garden, I immediately recognized  a wonderful opportunity  to make a good thing  even better.  Which is saying something,  because when 100  Best Plants  first came out in 1998,  it was an overnight hit. It went straight to No.1 in the  B.C. Bestsellers list  and stayed there for 13 weeks. Its success  took me completely  by surprise. So why mess with success?  If it’s not broken,  why fix it?

Where to find all the best plants? Arts Nursery in Surrey carries the entire selection. Click her for more details.       Well, the answer is that over the last six years a lot has changed.  All sorts of new plants have come on the market  and there are also better cultivars of old favorites.  Moreover, my knowledge and gardening  experience has changed. I literally know more now than I did then. I realize that when I wrote100 Best Plants  the first time, many plants that should have  been included were left out. I am also very much a believer in the wise  and comforting words of American poet Maya Angelou who said:  “You did then what you knew how to do. When you knew better, you did better."

The new edition is my attempt to do a better job. As well as being a more thorough and comprehensive work, containing a much more sophisticated and complete selection of plants for coastal gardens, the text has also been honed and refined to present plants in appropriate and useful associations. For instance, when you read about the windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei), which wasn’t in the first book and is part of the general plant palette for a subtropical-style garden, it is only natural to include information about the hardy banana, Tasmanian tree fern, silk tree, monkey puzzle tree, eucalyptus, bamboo and all the rest of it. I applied the same logic to red-flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum), also a new addition to the book. This is a favorite native plant on the West Coast, so it seemed like an obvious extension to include information on other popular and reliable native plants, such as mahonia, vine maple, mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) and evergreen honeysuckle.

Of the 100 entries in the new work, there are a total of 30 new main picks, including forsythia, cotoneaster, ginkgo, katsura, pieris, stewartia, yucca, lilac and crocosmia. These are plants that deserve a prominent listing and have a proven track record. The plants they replaced in the original book have not been lost; they have simply been reworked into the text in association with appropriate main listings. Some of the new additions were not on the market when the last book was

published. Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’, for example, is a superb new perennial that was not available six years ago In addition to the 30 new additions, another 21 best plant picks have been upgraded to feature more attractive or more reliable cultivars.  The top rose picks have been refined to give a more well-rounded and dependable selection and the rhododendron and azalea sections have also been redone to offer better recommendations. The selection of best trees has also been improved and expanded to include stewartia, ginkgo and katsura, while the ornamental grass entry now includes many outstanding varieties not mentioned in the first book. Particularly valuable are the “For Your Collection” and “Good Companion” sections, which now feature a far more complete plant guide and more effective planting combinations.

It is not perfect, but the new edition is a much improved book and one that I hope will not require revising for many years to come. What has not changed is the basic intent of the book. If you’re a new gardener, you will undoubtedly feel overwhelmed by the mind-boggling array of gardening information being thrust at you. There are now more gardening magazines, books and radio and television shows than ever before competing for your attention. It is perfectly natural if you feel bombarded and pressured by it all. But gardening is not supposed to be a tense race to acquire knowledge or a difficult project to undertake or a perpetual goal to achieve. It is not something we do with the calculated precision of a mathematician. It is a life-long adventure with nature -- creative, playful, intuitive -- that often involves a degree of trial and error.

Gardening is all about observation, about looking closely and learning from the physical world around you, noting where the sunlight falls, where shadows are cast, where frost lingers, where rain puddles, where the wind blows. In gardening, we learn from nature to grow healthy, beautiful plants. From doing all this, we end up creating lovely gardens that are not only esthetically pleasing but heavenly places in which we can find a deep refreshment for the soul.   The new edition of 100 Best Plants for the Coastal Garden will be published in the spring of 2005 by Whitecap Books of North Vancouver, B.C.