Pam Peirce has never lacked vision about what gardening can mean for Bay Area residents.

From her initially startling idea of growing something year-round in the nation’s most singular climate to her newest push to create a plant-based food culture, the longtime garden writer and teacher has viewed gardening as practical, but also emotional and philosophical.

The seasonal swing of what’s in the garden can be pleasurable compared to our culture of on-demand commodities, she says.

“At a certain point, something is gone and you don’t have any more of it, and that’s dramatic. Or you are waiting for something, and then it happens,” she said.

In the new 30th anniversary edition of “Golden Gate Gardening,” her guide to growing vegetables and ornamental plants in the San Francisco Bay Area, Peirce calls for a regional food culture. As before, this fourth edition of the book covers the basics of determining microclimates, readying the soil, finding seeds and choosing what to grow, fighting pests, and watering and weeding effectively — and includes recipes.

Her book has become a bible for San Francisco gardeners in particular, following in the path of the “Sunset Western Garden Book,” which developed the notion of climate zones for Western U.S. gardeners in 1954.

Peirce divides the city into seven microclimates and zeroes in on the particular conditions in each. In her previous edition, she added two planting calendars for warmer areas of the S.F. Bay rim and inland to Walnut Creek.

She recently met two generations of a Moraga family inspired by her book to grow their own food and raise chickens. “The wonderful thing about ‘Golden Gate Gardening’ is that it has been helping people for 30 years,” she said.

In this edition, she cements her years of activism and teaching into a philosophy she hopes will actually bring about the change she sought when she ventured into her first community garden plot in the 1970s.

Gardening, she believes, offers many things: a challenge to the corporate food system, a reminder of the importance of a plant-based diet, a sense of community, a close connection with nature and an awareness of the practice as fulfilling in itself. She maintains we still recognize our past relationship with seasonal cycles, calling it “emotional archaeology.”

A regional food culture would, naturally, rely on eating plants, grown locally from the wide variety that can be adapted from all over the world. The American diet, she points out, relies heavily on a Northern European tradition of meat, dairy and root vegetables, which remains true here despite the decades-long influences of Asian and Italian cuisines. Many North African and South American vegetables do well in the Bay Area and should become dietary staples, she suggests. Peirce grows runner beans, a sweet pepper called Peridot and a tuber related to sunchokes called Yacon, all plants from higher altitudes in tropical climes.

“We have made a revolution in growing Mediterranean ornamentals because they are drought-tolerant and beautiful. We have not made a transition to Mediterranean food in our diet,” she said.

皮尔斯在1967年旧金山希望become a literary bohemian, but found and embraced a world of radical politics. She began to write a critique of the U.S. food system for Turnover, a newsletter produced by the People’s Food System. In their heyday, these counterculture activists ran a dozen stores, bakeries and support collectives in the Bay Area, but didn’t survive years of political struggle.

Disillusioned, Peirce recalled the large, productive garden of her Indianapolis childhood and her father’s farm-boy wisdom, and gravitated toward the idea of teaching gardening.

Lacking a decent space of her own, she discovered the Dearborn Community Garden in the Mission District, where she still maintains her main plot. She founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners to teach and support city gardeners. Her experimentation and research led to her first book on controlling pests and then, in 1993, the first edition of “Golden Gate Gardening.”

The book quickly became a standard in classes run by SLUG and its successor, the Garden for the Environment. Former teacher Carey Craddock said, “From the beginning, I always had it in my classes. It’s so well-researched. You could read it from front to back. I use it as a reference.”

Peirce had a regular column in the Chronicle for many years, and also taught at San Francisco City College for 30 years, where “she was our best horticulture instructor,” according to environmental horticulture professor Malcolm Hillan. “She is a scientist at heart. There is nothing she teaches or passes on that is not supported in some manner. Her information is unassailable.”

At the same time, “she transcends the nuts and bolts of gardening,” he said. “She integrates life into what she writes.”

Despite her scientific approach, Peirce has few answers at present for what the specter of climate change may mean for Bay Area gardeners. But given the Bay Area’s many microclimates, she said, her book has never offered the perfect prescription for any given place.

“Just plant and experiment,” she suggests. “There’s no new normal.”

Laura Thomas is a freelance writer.