Saguaro

How do you pronounce SAGUARO? How tall do saguaros grow? How much do saguaros weigh? Learn the answer to these and many other questions in Frequently Asked Questions About the Saguaro. This easy-to-read book provides brief well researched answers to the questions most asked about these giants of the Sonoran Desert. Readers will learn about the climate that best fosters saguaro growth. They'll see how birds and other critters use saguaros for their homes. And they'll also find fascinating information about the plant's flowers and fruits, including the best time of year to see their magnificent bloom and how native people make the fruit into a delicious syrup. Vividly illustrated with drawings and color photography, Frequently Asked Questions About the Saguaro is a great resource on an important and beautiful cactus.

The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The largest and tallest cactus in the United States, it is both familiar and an object of fascination and curiosity. This book offers a complete natural history of this enduring and iconic desert plant. Gathering everything from the saguaro’s role in Sonoran Desert ecology to its adaptations to the desert climate and its sacred place in Indigenous culture, this book shares precolonial through current scientific findings. The saguaro is charismatic and readily accessible but also decidedly different from other desert flora. The essays in this book bear witness to our ongoing fascination with the great cactus and the plant’s unusual characteristics, covering the saguaro’s: history of discovery, place in the cactus family, ecology, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and ethnobotany. The Saguaro Cactus offers testimony to the cactus’s prominence as a symbol, the perceptions it inspires, its role in human society, and its importance in desert ecology.

Introduces visitors to this Sonoran Desert preserve in southern Arizona, where diverse plant and animal communities thrive in a challenging land of little rain and torrid summers. Photos by George H. H. Huey, C. Allan Morgan, Edward McCain, and others.

Mark Klett has been photographing the deserts of the American West, in particular the beauties of the Sonoran landscape--a desert that sprawls across southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Along with coyotes and tumbleweeds, saguaro cacti are one of the most recognizable (and stereotypical) features of this region. Klett's portraits of these giant desert plants are straightforward and frontal. Klett is known for teasing out the implications of man's presence in the environment: here, vital young saguaros, middle-aged contenders with gunshot wounds and wizened elders are treated as worthy inhabitants. This beautifully produced volume, featuring 40 deluxe tritone images, presents a selection of Klett's most evocative portraits with an essay by acclaimed writer Gregory McNamee.