Gardening in the Desert: A Guide to Plant Selection and Care

Very helpful. Lots of needed information.

Excellent beginner's guide to desert gardening. Not surprising, bias is to low desert where she lives. An expanded version to include intermediate and high desert would be welcome, but the priciples as laid out hold throughout the Southwest. Reads well.

Not quite what I was looking for and I am sure it is an interesting reading however I was looking for more concise practical ideas... something more concise and straight to the point. More on the lines of what to plant and where. how much water needed, bug resistance and so forth... and no, no real pictures which can be useful when you can not remember all the Latin names...

This is a very good reference book for selecting the type of plants I will need to landscape a desert setting.

An excellent book that should be in every desert gardener's library. Not only does she offer sound advice she is occasionally, and refreshingly, very candid in her opinions. I have just ordered my second copy as I made the mistake of lending my first copy.

Pros: Lots of useful information on the mechanics of gardening in the desert: how to plant, when to plant, when to water, use of rocks, etc. Cons: The author promotes the use of exotic (non-native) species from South America and Africa, which is neither necessary nor environmentally sound. She doesn't even mention the trade-offs or benefits of using native plants for local wildlife. In addition, the tone of the book is at times snarky, spiteful, and narcissistic. Instead of focusing on how to do things right, she seems to take pleasure in recounting instances in which someone planted a bush or pruned a tree incorrectly, or simply expressed a view different from hers. She also inserts irrelevant personal details, repeating in almost every chapter that she's from central Texas, where they don't have desert, and also lived in New Orleans and Florida, where there wasn't any desert either. These personal digressions have nothing to do with the topic of the book. It's clear that the author is neither a botanist, an educator, nor a naturalist. This book is a useful resource, but it could have been much better.

This is too early for me to review, because I would first, like to know if this book pertains to the Palm Springs desert. I would like to purchase it, if it does, for a Christmas gift for my son. Please answer me. [email protected]

I bought this book because I own the excellent "Agaves Yuccas and Related Plants" by the same author. This book however was underwhelming. She lists a lot of plants either native or suited to deset climate, using very flowery language, but for only a small minority of plants does she mention cultural information such as cold hardiness. Such information is essential for those in colder climates., yet all she says about Opuntia ("prickly pear") is that "most species are also quite cold hardy" (page 134) without specifying which or to what temperature. The discussion of agaves and yuccas is just as vague in spite of her having written a book on agave and yucca published the same year (2000) as this book. Flowery language example: "The spines of firebarrel are so red they appear to be dipped in blood; the plant becomes the burning bush of the Baja when backlit y the fierce Sonoran sun." (page 118)