High and Dry
Sometimes our special events, like our fall plant sales, bring us the extra pleasure of seeing our old friends and mentors. It was a pleasure to have a visit from Robert (Bob) Nold (pictured at the top of the Newsletter with a cart full of xeric native plants -– Chilopsis and Brickellia) last weekend. Bob has been both a friend and a mentor for decades, and an influential pioneer of gardening with xeric native plants, many of which were, at that time, unknown to horticulture. Bob also championed gardening on the Front Range with little or no supplemental water.
Together with his wife Cindy Nelson Nold, a prominent botanical illustrator and photographer, Bob created xeric gardens on their property in a Denver suburb, where Bob says it almost never rains. Bob and Cindy also produced three invaluable and beautifully illustrated volumes that were published by Timber Press. The first was Penstemons, a comprehensive classification and
descriptive guide to North America’s largest endemic plant genus. This was followed by Columbines, a similarly rich and important guide to a diverse and garden-worthy genus, and High and Dry: Gardening with Cold-hardy Dryland Plants. In this book, Bob makes us aware of
great plants of the interior west that are accustomed to scorching, dry summers and cold, windy winters without prolonged snow-cover. Many of these plants were not yet available to gardeners and some are still hard to find. From the book jacket: “Leavened with
humor and rueful wisdom, Nold’s pithy descriptions zero in on each plant’s outstanding ornamental characteristics while giving the reader an accurate idea of what to expect from the plant’s performance in the garden.”
Unfortunately, all three of these books are long out-of-print. There may occasionally be used copies of the original publications available at independent book stores, and we highly recommend that you try to acquire them. On-demand, hard-cover printings in black and white are also available from
Hachette Publishing.