Janice Emily Bowers

The Rincon Mountains east of Tucson are a small and seemingly undistinguished range; rounded and arid, they are more a site for foothill walks than serious exploring. Yet, upon close inspection, these unassuming mountains disclose many wonders and curiosities, as Janice Emily Bowers discovered while conducting a botanical study there. Over the course of two years, she made thirty-eight excursions into the Rincons—some for two or three days at a time—and garnered not only plant specimens but thoughts along the way. The Mountains Next Door is the first book to describe and celebrate the natural history of these mountains that even longtime Arizonans may often take for granted. "I watched the seasons march through the canyons," writes Bowers, "followed the wildflower parade from February through November, and throughout it all realized that I could travel in the Rincon Mountains forever and never learn all they contained." It is also a book of meditations, as Bowers reflects upon the meaning of nature, the similarities between the scientific and creative processes, the value of wilderness in the face of urban encroachment, and other ideas. Participating in the long tradition of reflective natural history writing, she has produced a memorable book that depicts the delights and dilemmas of field botany as it explores the perennial struggle between science and mysticism that tugs at every naturalist's heart.

Jan Bowers lives in the right place. A lover of nature and the outdoors, an avid hiker and backpacker, she is surrounded by mountain ridges, peaks, and canyons of almost every description. In this book, she invites us to come along and find out why some of these places are special, why some of them stay in her mind long after she has returned to the workaday world of the city. Readers have come to expect the best from this writer, termed "a rare talent...uncommonly good at the craft" by Wilderness magazine. Her new book is filled with creeks and meadows, tiny ferns and towering oaks, bears and butterflies and Red-tailed Hawks. We see gray clouds clogging the sky in a canyon, "wildly, almost tastelessly romantic, as full of clouds as a tea kettle with steam," and we startle a female grouse and her half-dozen fuzzy chicks "exploding from underfoot like billiard balls scattered with a cue stick." Faced with the prospect of moving to another place, Bowers finds herself thinking about the familiar world in new and unfamiliar ways. Through her eyes, too, we see how an interest in nature and the outdoors developed from early childhood and how simple curiosity has led her to the most surprising discoveries. At odd and unexpected moments, her work also seems to bring new insights into herself and her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother. These pages promise a new adventure at every turn in the trail. For sheer terror, there's a climb up the face of Baboquivari, for laughs, there's the great bagworm caper, and for some quiet truths, there are themes of gain and loss, of connection and reconcilliation. Crunching through winter snow or sweating under summer sun, we know we're in the hands of an experienced guide. And we know we couldn't ask for a better companion.

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."

The Rincon Mountains east of Tucson are a small and seemingly undistinguished range; rounded and arid, they are more a site for foothill walks than serious exploring. Yet these unassuming mountains disclose many wonders and curiosities upon close inspection, as Janice Emily Bowers discovered while conducting a botanical study there. Over the course of two years she made 38 excursions into the Rincons some for two or three days at a time and garnered not only plant specimens but thoughts along the way. The Mountains Next Door is the first book to describe and celebrate the natural history of these mountains that even longtime Arizonans may often take for granted. ""I watched the seasons march through the canyons,"" writes Bowers, ""followed the wildflower parade from February through November, and throughout it all realized that I could travel in the Rincon Mountains forever and never learn all they contained."" It is also a book of meditations, as Bowers reflects upon the meaning of nature, the similarities between the scientific and creative processes, the value of wilderness in the face of urban encroachment, and other ideas. Participating in the long tradition of reflective natural history writing, she has produced a memorable book that depicts the delights and dilemmas of field botany as it explores the perennial struggle between science and mysticism that tugs at every naturalist's heart.

Forrest Shreve (1878-1950) was an internationally known plant ecologist who spent most of his career at the Carnegie Institution's Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. Shreve's contributions to the study of plant ecology laid the groundwork for modern studies and several of his works came to be regarded as classics by ecologists worldwide. This first full-length study of Shreve's life and work demonstrates that he was more than a desert ecologist. His early work in Maryland and Jamaica gave him a breadth of expertise matched by few of his ecological contemporaries, and his studies of desert plant demography, the physiological ecology of rain-forest plants, and vegetational gradients on southwestern mountain ranges anticipated by decades recent trends in ecology. Tracing Shreve's development from student to scientist, Bowers evokes the rigors and delights of fieldwork in the first half of this century and shows how Shreve's sense of place informed his scientific thought making him, in his own words, ""not an exile from some better place, but a man at home in an environment to which his life can be adjusted without physical or intellectual loss.