A Place All Our Own - Is a set of black and white images that were used to illustrate the garden memoir of the same name by writer Mary Irish. Mary is my wife and A Place All Our Own chronicles our experience with the plants, birds, insects, people and even the weather that we shared during a 20 year period in which we built a wonderful garden on a half acre in Scottsdale, Arizona. The first image in the slide show is a slide of the cover of the book, a night time photo of our back patio. A Place All Our Own was written as a piece of garden literature, a genre of writing that is not practiced much today. Mary's thoughtful and often humorous insights distill her gardening experiences in developing and living in a garden in the unique environment of the low Sonoran Desert. For more information on the book visit the University of Arizona Press website page for A Place All Our Own. For more information on on Mary her other writing and consulting work visit her website at MaryIrish.com.

Because A Place All Our Own was conceived as a literary work rather than work that depicted the garden through large numbers of colorful images we wanted to to illustrate it in a way that would compliment the text and not distract the reader from the words. We hoped to capture a sort of early to mid 20th century look in the illustrations; something that would harken back to the many of the great garden literature works done during that period. We had attempted this before with some straight black and white photography in a previous book but the images were plain illustrative shots of plants which ended up being printed on the basic paperback rag paper. Consequently although the book was very well received, we heard about the photography. So we felt that we had missed the mark somewhat at that time. For A Place All Our Own we took a very different approach and included images that were taken for their artistic perspective and then enhanced to try and achieve a very different look. I attempted to create images, in black and white that, while modern in their production, have a somewhat more traditional appearance and one might find in books from earlier eras.