California Riches!

Here at Larner Seeds in Bolinas, California, we seek to promote the riches of our native California flora through supplying our customers with California's native seeds and plants, books, advice, and landscaping services for their own backyard restoration project. To inspire you, we supplement these seeds, plants and books with occasional newsletters, talks, workshops, open houses, our Demonstration Garden, and this website.

It is our goal to bring to the California gardener the perspectives and information of the whole humming world of natural history, as it applies to the California landscape. Our Demonstration Garden is our 35 year old example and model. We can't turn back the clock, but we can give back territory to the native plants that evolved to support the insects, the soil, the birds, the watersheds, and the unique and varied natural beauty of California.

  

We enjoy all ways of interacting with our native flora, from propagation, seed collection, and planting, to eating, natural dyes, hardwood spoons, and bath oil made from meadowfoam seed. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (the term used by ethnobotanists to refer to the knowledge of indigenous peoples) combined with the latest research, informs our actions and our point of view.

How to begin? Start by taking a walk a outside! Discover local floras through personal observation. Engage in local field trips with naturalists and biologists, join the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society and slowly build your vision of your own, site-specific California backyard restoration garden. We hope that our catalog, books, seeds, and plants will be part of the adventure. 

Celebrate this place by helping the native flora find its way back into the land surrounding our homes, for gardens that are full of life, the life of California. Shaded and sheltered by native trees and shrubs, delighted and renewed by our California wildflowers, nourished by our native fruits, greens, and nuts, we as gardeners become ever more deeply "home."

This we can promise - there will be no end to the learning and the delights.