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1 Introduction building a garden is no different than building a life; often the pieces and parts come together without much conscious effort, creating a recognizable pattern only when you look back on it. A garden in which you live for a long time, just like a life of almost any length, develops around choices little and big, conscious or not: the placement of a path, or a wall, or a plant, sometimes selected with a particular result in mind but just as often a stumbling response to changing circumstances. After a while all the choices you make in a garden run together and a pattern emerges; one day you look around and are stunned to see that the garden has a well-defined look, an ambience that marks it as your own. This is a story about how that happened for me and my husband, Gary, in a garden in the desert city of Scottsdale, Arizona. We did not set out to make such a garden. We simply grow plants the way some people bake cookies—we just gotta do it. But this garden, in this place, taught us a lot, not only about the desert and how it works but also about ways to garden in such a unique and frequently daunting place. It is also a tale about shared lives, human and otherwise, and the inestimable value of living as close to all the other lives as you can. This book is not intended as a manual for designing a garden or growing desert plants. It is a chronicle, a personal recollection of what it took to get this garden this far. While it is an idiosyncratic and personal story, I hope that our experiences and trials prove helpful. Whether what we did works for you or not, we wish all gardeners the best garden they can create. 2 • Introduction People who tend a piece of land, whether expansive like a farm or minute like a patio home, are forced to deal relentlessly with other living things and with the immense variety of twists and turns resulting from their march through the garden. More often than not other lives, invited or not, become the agent of choice and change in the garden. Choosing one style of fencing may be dictated by the need to keep marauders out of the plants, which then leads to the rearrangement of an entire section of the garden. Or an adjustment made to accommodate pets or the preferred nest sites of well-loved birds nearly always runs counter to our own interest in pruning, allowing a plant to grow larger or more prominent than we first intended. Good design principles and their application can help launch a garden. We find such dictums handy for ordering our thoughts and controlling some of our most ridiculous desires—but for us, good design alone won’t make a comfortable garden. Over the years we have come to a humble acknowledgment that a lot, if not most, of the life of the garden is well outside our control, and that it will be best if we let it evolve out of the life we and others live in it. It is our firm belief that a garden allowed to form its own pattern from our whimsical choices and heartfelt desires, so that it gets its true pulse from all the lives that enter and live in it together, is the best garden there is. A truly comfortable garden is one where all the lives with whom we share it become intertwined, a place where most lives are tolerated , indeed welcome, and where a moderate live-and-let-live approach is enough to settle our differences. Every gardener knows that you don’t build a garden all by yourself, just as you don’t build a life or a career or a skill all by yourself. You bring a lot of yourself to it—your experience, talents, interests, and imagination—but numerous teachers, friends, stolen ideas, and captured images lurk in the corners of every life and garden. All of these other lives embed themselves in our daily activities and become integral to our gardens and, like a lot of family members, some of these other lives present great challenges. Some companions offer more than you give in return, while others are greedy and take away too much. But in the end, we cannot escape the knowledge that they all had a part in creating the garden...

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