CITY NATURE

Retallick explores her passions for bicycle touring, water management, gardening, birdwatching, and photography in this illustrated miscellany.

The author (who has had an eclectic career in publishing, commercial photography, bicycle repair and maintenance, and web design) here expounds on a number of interests and adventures, starting with her love affair with bike riding, which took her on long tours around the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River, and eventually through all 50 states during her 20s. She finally settled down in Tucson, where she landscaped her yard with cacti, mesquite trees, and other native desert plants; installed swales, mulched basins, and berms to absorb water and avoid flooding during occasional rainstorms; installed a 1,500-gallon cistern to collect rain running off her roof, and saved greywater from her laundry and dishwashing, using all of this stored water to irrigate her vegetable garden and fruit trees. (Retallick incorporates the food she grows into a number of offbeat dishes for which she provides recipes, including salsa dip and cookies made from mesquite flour.) From this catalogue of intriguing projects, the author emerges as an endlessly inquisitive Renaissance woman who is raptly attuned to the world. The book includes brief, engaging tutorials on everything from hydrology to photographic technique; Retallick also observes the rhythms of nature in droll, evocative prose. (“He was picking up twigs, dropping them, choosing different twigs, and, man, this is exhausting,” she writes of the male in a white-winged dove nesting pair. “I couldn’t help thinking that this guy married the birdie equivalent of Martha Stewart. Because he couldn’t fly up to the nest with just any twig. It had to be the perfect twig.”) Retallick’s color photos, mostly taken in her yard, are full of homely but vibrant images: delicate cilantro leaves glowing deep green beneath dew-drops; ripening pomegranates vomiting their lurid red innards through an opening; a curve-billed thrasher perched insolently on a rusty fence, lean and hungry, its arcing proboscis ready to dig.

A beguiling ramble full of captivating DIY information and arresting visuals of flora and fauna.