Intertwined Lives is the delightful tale of creating a very special garden in one of the most extreme climates in the inhabited world. Told with wit and obvious affection, it will appeal to anyone who enjoys the pleasures of gardening—and everyone who enjoys a well-told, true-life nature tale.

Mary Irish is a garden writer, lecturer, and educator who lived in Arizona for 25 years. She is the author of many books, including Gardening in the Desert (also published by the University of Arizona Press). For more than a decade, she served as the Director of Public Horticulture at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. She has been a gardening columnist for the Arizona Republic newspaper and has served as a consultant on many large-scale landscaping projects. She now teaches classes and conducts workshops on a wide variety of topics in desert gardening.

“The writing is exquisite, and I found the descriptions of the weather and plants spot-on, insightful, and occasionally surprising and graceful.”—Scott Calhoun, author of The Gardener’s Guide to Cactus: The 100 Best Paddles, Barrels, Columns, and Globes

“Mary Irish is a desert gardener par excellence. Anyone who prefers native plants to manicured lawns should read her account of how she and her husband turned their home ground into a showcase for a diversity of arid-lands plants, which are vastly more interesting than the typical suburban Bermuda grass.”—John Alcock, author of When the Rains Come: A Naturalist’s Year in the Sonoran Desert