Kim Nelson. A Desert Gardener’s Companion. Tucson, Arizona. Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2001. 328 pages.
Gardening in a desert isn’t easy, but in A DESERT GARDENER’S COMPANION, Kim Nelson offers helpful advice about how to tend trees, flowers, vegetables, and herbs in the arid southwest. Written from her Arizonan perspective, it’s nonetheless valuable to those who live throughout the region. There’s not much that Nelson doesn’t cover, including loads of information on how to buy seeds, when and how to plant, how to irrigate, how to arrange plants for maximum aesthetic appeal, and pests to watch for (and how to counter them).
The book is laid out chronologically, starting with the first week in January and ending in the last week of December. Nelson provides week-by-week guidelines for what to sow, what to plant, and what to cut back. As a cover-to-cover read, the mass of information that Nelson presents might be overwhelming–and intimidating to novice gardeners. It’s particularly disquieting to learn just how much can go wrong, from root rot to fungal diseases to insect herbivores. If your plants can survive this Biblical onslaught, however, you get the sense that you’ll have a pleasant, productive garden.
In addition to supplying the nuts-and-bolts details of selecting and cultivating plants in the desert, Nelson shares her passion for gardening with the reader. This might be the best part of the book–feeling the excitement that soil, plants, and sunlight can stir in someone. If I get a tenth of what Nelson gets out of gardening, the reader might think, I’m going to love this.
Considering you could easily spend more than the cost of this book on a terra cotta planter, A DESERT GARDENER’S COMPANION is a wise purchase for anyone looking to grow a desert garden. You’ll be much better informed and more confident buying plants at the nursery and shepherding them to full growth, and probably save a great deal of costly trial and error. I look forward to letting Nelson guide me as I work with my own modest corner of the desert over the next year.