Guest Review by Patricia West-Barker

Gardening
Gardens of Santa Fe
By Anne Hillerman, Photography by Don Strel
Gibbs Smith
192 pages, hardcover, $30

At first glance, Santa Fe resident Anne Hillerman’s eighth book, Gardens of Santa Fe, may appear to be outside her usual beat. Best known as the longtime dining critic for the Albuquerque Journal, Hillerman has written several guides to the City Different, including Santa Fe Flavors: Best Restaurants and Recipes (Gibbs Smith, 2009). Tony Hillerman’s Landscape: On the Road with Chee and Leaphorn (Harper, 2009), also in collaboration with husband and photographer Don Strel, is Hillerman’s tribute to the vast, open spaces of the Four Corners region, which dominated her late father’s work. Hillerman credits the spot-on tone of her most recent book to language learned from her mother, a master gardener, and her own journalist’s interest in interviewing people who are passionate about their pursuits—whether they’re in the kitchen, on the reservation, or digging in their own backyard

“Gardening in Santa Fe is not for sissies,” Hillerman writes in her introduction, “nor for the faint of heart.” It’s a lesson the more than 30 hands-on gardeners featured in Gardens of Santa Fe learned well. They took on drought, wind, hail, extreme fluctuations of temperature, and marauding wildlife, as well as the poor, rock-hard soil—if the clay and caliche found there can even be called soil—and prevailed. Each chapter visits one of these gardens and explores, in detail, the diverse landscaping strategies and specific plantings that have allowed it to thrive in Santa Fe’s challenging altitude and climate.

The private gardens that dominate the book are organized into six sections: “Old-Style Santa Fe Charm,” “Water-Wise and Critter Friendly,” “Graceful and Glorious,” “Passionately Playful,” “Artists’ Gardens,” and “Patios and Courtyards.” Although some of these gardens are occasional stops on the tours conducted by the Santa Fe Garden Club and the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, Strel’s exquisite images are as close as many of us will get to these stunning mini-landscapes. To offer readers glimpses of featured gardens they can easily visit themselves, Hillerman devotes the last section of the book to gardens accessible to all who live in or visit Santa Fe—those found in the city’s parks, preserves, museums, hotels, and galleries. The appendix gathers all the tips that Hillerman gleaned from the successful gardeners featured in the book into an easily referenced list that includes everything from altitude and planning to soil, water, and plants—even knee pads and sunscreen.

With 160 color photographs, Gardens of Santa Fe is beautiful and inspiring enough to brighten the bookshelf of any home gardener. Its greatest service, though, may be to offer hope to despairing gardeners new to the high desert—and glimpses of hard-won glory to visitors who wonder what grows behind all these adobe walls.

Formerly food and real estate editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican, Patricia West-Barker has had her own struggles with Santa Fe’s dry climate, short growing season, and sandy soil.

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Book Briefs by Ashley M. Biggers

Cooking
Taco Table
By Lois Ellen Frank
Western National Parks Association
64 pages, spiral-bound, $9.95

Chef, author, photo-grapher, and New Mexico Magazine contributor Lois Ellen Frank brings you Taco Table, a handbook for creating these Southwestern staples. “Tacos are a food that brings people and families together; they create a taco table that is nutritious, healthy, and warming to the soul,” says Frank. Taco Table provides easy-to-prepare recipes, from homemade tortillas to meat, poultry, seafood, and vegetarian fillings, to salsas that top off the tasty dishes. Standout recipes include tacos containing shredded pork with New Mexico red-chile sauce, wild-caught salmon, and calabacitas (squash). Of course, many of the recipes are accompanied by Frank’s classic—and mouth-watering—photographs. All of the recipes come straight from Frank’s kitchen, where she combines her many experiences—as an adjunct professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), an instructor at the Santa Fe School of Cooking, and as head of Red Mesa Cuisine, which specializes in preparing local, sustainable meals incorporating traditional Native American ingredients. ¡Bien provecho!

 

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Poetry
The Welcome Table
By Jay Udall, Foreword by V.B. Price
University of New Mexico Press
104 pages, hardcover, $21.95

“There is a fugue-like quality to [Jay] Udall’s images and evocations,” writes V. B. Price in his foreword to The Welcome Table. “Udall gives readers poems within poems, dreams within dreams, the fragrances of the lives within his life, the bewilderments of his younger self snagged within the solitudes of being an adult never old enough to want to outgrow who he has been all his life.” Price’s observation rings true: Udall doesn’t arrive with all the answers, but is gutsy enough to ask questions and, on the page, to work toward answers—if any are to be found for the heady issues he tackles. He writes with a raw vulnerability, and through his meditations arrives at universal truths about life, death, sexuality, and human relationships. An example, from “Kinship”: “My loneliness is told / by the severed neck of a guitar / at the edge of a parking lot, / . . . But loneliness taught me the kinship of weeds / and how to receive the cottonwood’s reachings.” Although he currently lives in Nevada, Udall has taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and is the author of four earlier books of poetry. This collection won the 2009 New Mexico Book Award for Poetry.

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Romance
Teacup: A Love Story
By Sheryl Baca
Publish America
239 pages, softcover, $24.95

It’s one of the oldest stories: Two star-crossed lovers promised to each other by the fates are kept apart by worldly circumstances. In Teacup, Albuquerque-based author Sheryl Baca presents a modern take on this classic theme with the stories of Shell, who spends her life chasing her dream of a first love, and Ze, a pop star who finds his muse in a woman’s image he glimpses in a teacup. Separated by time, space, and false loves, the two reach middle age before the true meanings of their dreams and imaginings begin to emerge. But will the fates deliver? You’ll find out only in the final pages of this breathy tale. Baca, a counselor with the Albuquerque Public Schools, occasionally reveals that this is her first novel in forced dialogue and a few clichés. However, the heart of Teacup always rings true, and Baca hits on the longing in each of us to find a true love for the ages. This is a true romance novel, complete with descriptions of loving embraces, of a single tear trickling down a cheek—fans addicted to the genre will enjoy it.

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Children's
The Tale of the Pronghorned Cantaloupe
By Sabra Brown Steinsiek, Illustrated by Noel Dora Chilton
Rio Grande Books
48 pages, paperback, $17.95

Anyone who’s seen the herds of curious pronghorns roaming New Mexico’s plains probably has a notion of what inspired Albuquerquean and longtime librarian Sabra Brown Steinsiek to write this fantastical tale about a herd of “cantaloupe.” These days, cantaloupe may just be simple fruits, but in this story set in days of yore, a more ornery and pronghorned variety roamed the land.

The tale is delightfully imaginative: A boy and his fearless hunting dog try, with little success, to get past the cantaloupes’ wicked horns to a bit of their sweet fruit. Luckily, cantaloupe punchers and their “melon collies” bravely gather each year for a roundup, and all are finally rewarded with a juicy snack. This tale is best suited for children ages four to eight.

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Fantasy
Five Odd Honors
By Jane Lindskold
Tor Books
368 pages, hardcover, $27.99

Albuquerque-based author Jane Lindskold is back with the third entry in her fast-paced Breaking the Wall series of urban fantasies. In Five Odd Honors, the Thirteen Orphans—humans with magical powers drawn from such Chinese zodiacal creatures as the Horse and the Rat—have opened a pathway into a mystical realm: the Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice. The scouting party that travels there quickly discovers that the Lands have been destroyed, and that their original home is now uninhabitable. As the orphans try to resurrect their world, they are captured and tortured. Back on Earth, another of their allies falls under magical attack, raising the question of whether the Orphans are as loyal as they first appear. Protagonist Brenda Morris, the newest member of the group, is gaining confidence in her powers, and puts on the line all that she has learned to help those in need, in a tale of redemption and bravery. Like the previous novels in this series, Thirteen Orphans (2008) and Nine Gates (2009), Lindskold’s newest will appeal to fans of such popular fantasy writers as Charles de Lint and Jim Butcher.

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