A Full Life in a Small Place and Other Essays from a Desert Garden

by Janice Emily Bowers

Overview

The frustrations and pleasures of gardening are evident; its implications for life are more subtle, lurking under a leaf or buried in a compost pile. Janice Emily Bowers senses these implications, and communicates them as only a fine writer can. In A Full Life in a Small Place, she shows how backyard gardening opens up a broader appreciation of both life and living. Her observations on organic gardening inspire further meditations on nature and wildlife, and demonstrate how gardens both complicate and enrich our lives. In their entirety, these sixteen essays ask how we shall live, and recognize that "before we can determine how, we need to find out why."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816533244
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	11/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Janice Emily Bowers is a botanist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tucson.

Table of Contents

Contents Preface The Garden and the Desert A Garden Like a Life Stolen Water The Gardener's Shadow Sweet Nourishment Great Expectations Ripeness Is All Ordinary Miracles A Full Life in a Small Place The Mockingbird's Song Transformations Vulnerabilities The Eye of the Dragonfly Just Imagine This The Green Garden of the Heart Acts of Faith Homegrown Of Time and the Garden The Uses of Gardens Notes

Editorial Reviews

Bowers is a botanist--that is, someone who studies plants. She did not consider herself a gardener until recently. Now, however, her passions are compost; the birds, butterflies, and lizards that inhabit her garden; and the food webs they represent. Bowers's essays evoke the fascination of gardens yet accept the contradictions involved in creating a natural world that is, in fact, unnatural, for her vegetables and riotous flowers are unsuited to life in her desert home. Nonetheless, this is a delightful garden journal that all gardeners, especially those in the Southwest, will appreciate. Bowers is also the author of The Mountains Next Door ( LJ 9/1/91).-- Katharine Galloway Garstka, Intergraph Corp., Huntsville, Ala.

Library Journal

Bowers, who cultivates a three-year-old garden in a small suburban plot in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, pens essays reflecting as much of her garden's diversity as possible. The book's first section, "The Garden and the Desert," illustrates what she calls "the fruitful conjunction of biology and organic gardening." The second, "Ordinary Miracles," focuses on garden wildlife--creatures such as a leaf-cutter bee, an orange dragonfly, mockingbirds, a gulf fritillary caterpillar, and toads, whose common lives may provoke uncommon perceptions. The third, "The Green Garden of the Heart," recognizes "that if our gardens immeasurably complicate and enrich our lives, the reverse is also true. Any gardener has lived a lifetime in order to grow her garden." These 16 essays go right to the heart of the matter; all her fellow gardeners will know exactly what Bowers is talking about.

George Cohen

"Bowers's essays evoke the wonder and fascination of gardens. . . . a delightful garden journal that all gardeners, especially those in the Southwest, will appreciate."—Library Journal

"She cogently demystifies some of the organic farmer's seemingly irrational methods. . . . reflective and informed nature writing."—Kirkus Reviews

"The inspiration to be out in the garden is overwhelming, and the book must be set down to be returned to later. Again and again."—Seedhead News

"She writes with the same vigor and grace she brings to the ordering of her garden and to her keen observation and recording of the life, both vegetable and animal, that teems within its suburban Tucson borders....Although there are facts amusing, useful or stimulating aplenty in these essays, there's not one that needs to be dusted before tasting. Each one is as fresh as a sun-warmed tomato straight from the vine."—Arizona Daily Star

"Bowers's 16 essays remind us that paradise can be found in our own back yards and that a lifetime can be spent learning all about it. . . . Enjoyable and thought-provoking."—Audubon Naturalist News

From the Publisher