Home and garden books to savor by local authors

Winter is a time for dreaming. For the gardener, homeowner or architecture-lover on your Christmas list there are a number of gift books to savor during the cold rainy months when you can only dream of the projects ahead. Here is a selection of good picks, all by local authors.

‘The Alcatraz Rose’

Lawrence Kingston, the botanist and professor who always seems to find himself boots deep in horticultural mysteries, is back.

Sonoma writer Anthony Eglin this time brings his erudite sleuth to San Francisco to investigate an extinct English rose inexplicably found growing on Alcatraz island. Of course his curiosity leads him to another murder.

“The Alcatraz Rose” is the sixth in a series of English Garden mysteries by the British-born Eglin. His first entry, “The Blue Rose” won the Prix Arsene Lupin, France’s top award for mystery novels.

Eglin said he was inspired by a true story about the Alcatraz rose. Gregg Lowery, a renowned rosarian and heritage rose rustler, who for many years had “Vintage Gardens Antique and Extraordinary Roses” in Sebastopol, spotted the rare Bardou Job rose stubbornly surviving amid the weeds of a long neglected garden on Alcatraz. It was believed to be extinct, but Lowery rescued the rose and began cultivating it, even sending one back to the historical rose garden at St. Fagan’s Castle in Cardiff, Wales, where it had grown before World War I.

For this latest book Eglin has amicably parted ways with his longtime publisher, Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, in favor of publishing himself through his own Larkspur House of Sonoma. The mystery retails for $15.95.

‘Heritage Salvage?Reclaimed Stories’

Sonoma County’s King of Salvage, Michael “Bug” Deakins, has come out with a book that is part memoir, part personal scrapbook and part portfolio of the singular restaurants, bars and winery projects made with his reclaimed materials.

Featuring a forward by environmental activist and famed redwood tree occupier Julia Butterfly Hill, “Heritage Salvage Reclaimed Stories” traces Deakins’ story back 40 years to the Mudflats, an artist’s and squatter’s colony on a shallow coastal bay in North Vancouver. There he built his first reclaimed house, a four-bedroom cantilevered loft structure on two large discarded driftwood logs.

Deakins is a big believer in re-purposing resources from old growth redwood to Douglas fir bleacher boards to cedar and hardwoods as well as door,s windows and other architectural salvage.

The book details where some of his best salvage has wound up. Bleacher board used in Hop Monk Sonoma. Corrugated metal from a chicken barn in Penngrove and redwood from the changing rooms at Spring Lake Park that all went into the patio at The Girl and the Fig restaurant in Sonoma.

The book retails for $24.95 but can be bought at a discount for $20 at heritagesalvage.com.

‘Frank Lloyd Wright ?On The West Coast’

Most North Coast dwellers can name one local landmark designed by the 20th century’s most esteemed architect - The Marin Civic Center.

But Frank Lloyd Wright, whose most familiar buildings were in the Midwest and on the East Coast, also designed 36 structures on the West Coast from Seattle to L.A.

Architectural historian Mark Wilson, who has taught Art History at Santa Rosa Junior College for 18 years, documents some of these lesser-known works from the master architect in “Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast,” featuring lavish illustrations by San Francisco photographer Joel Puliatti.

Published by Gibbs-Smith ($50), the book is not just a photo survey of Wright’s work.

“It tells the untold stories behind each building, including Wright’s ‘other women,’ strong-minded female clients who were able to get him to make changes in his designs for their homes, which he rarely did for clients,” said Wilson, who has also published previous books on California architects Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck.

Among the buildings close to home include The Buehler House in Orinda, the largest of Wright’s Usonian homes, a series of 60 single-story residences built for more middle-class clients.

You can direct home and garden news to Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.