In my first job out of college, I was lucky and proud to work on
an upcoming edition of the Sunset Western Garden Book. In the
works for more than five years, the book that was finally
published in 1967 turned out to be a groundbreaking guide to the
West’s exploding plant palette and its highly localized plant
climates. The book went on to sell millions of copies in various
editions, including the latest in spring 2012. The 1967 book was
ahead of its time in the way it was produced—empirically and
collaboratively. Today we’d call it crowd-sourcing. Sunset
magazine’s garden editor Joe Williamson, who headed the book’s
development (and also was deeply involved with Pacific
Horticulture in its early days), hired me to help out with the
book’s climate section. He said he hired me because I knew what
UC soil mix was—an esoteric bit of knowledge among English
majors and the only thing I had learned from a summer job of
shoveling and lifting at a wholesale grower of fruit trees and
California native plants. I rememb