At home with nature in the Rocky Mountain garden
Expert guide breaks down soil, climate and the urgent need to plant natives
Expert guide breaks down soil, climate and the urgent need to plant natives
Ethne Clarke is the author of a number of best-selling books on practical gardening, design and landscape history, published in England, the USA and Europe. Since 2016, she’s been a contributing editor for Hartley Botanic’s online magazine, and prior to that was Editor-in-Chief of Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine. Ms. Clarke holds a Master of Philosophy from the faculty of Art and Design, De Montfort University, Leicester, England, and has lectured around the world in her subject areas.
Fort Collins-based author-wizard Ramona Ausubel’s most recent novel, The Last Animal, released in 2023 and out now in paperback, makes leaps of imagination across continents and millennia seem perfectly plausible. The story involves single mother Jane, a frustrated grad student in paleobiology, recently widowed; and her two teenage daughters, Eve and Vera, The Last Animal opens with this codependent family unit on a scientific expedition to Siberia where the girls, on a typically boredom-filled afternoon, stumble upon the bones of a 4,000-year old woolly mammoth. That’s just the beginning. Mother and daughters, through a series of subterfuge-fueled moves, end up at an exotic animal farm in Italy where the DNA of their fossil is implanted into an elephant with the goal of resurrecting an extinct species. What happens beyond that is a series of tender, hilarious, heart-rending and suspenseful moments that testify to the unbreakable ties of family, for better or worse, alongside the loneliness and impossibility of thriving without connection. Smart, beguiling, touching and entertaining, The Last Animal peers into our shared animal souls, at once raising pertinent questions about the limits of bioengineering and taking the reader on a helluva good ride. — Kathryn Eastburn