The Rocky Mountain Native Plant Primer - by Lauren Springer & Bryan Fischer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Bring Your Garden to Life--and Life to Your Garden

From two of the Rocky Mountain Region's leading horticulturists and native plant experts, this accessible and colorful guide to planting and designing with natives will help gardeners at every level of experience bring beneficial creatures into their home gardens. The Rocky Mountain Native Plant Primer introduces 225 wildflowers, grasses, cacti, shrubs, and trees across a broad range, including: northern New Mexico, northern Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, much of Idaho and Montana, the Texas Panhandle, and the western halves of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. As the Rocky Mountains and High Plains grow in population, temperatures rise, and water becomes scarce, this book focuses on the role that native plants and water-wise planting can have in fostering sustainability for all life in the region.

About the Author

Lauren Springer jumpstarted her career with the book The Undaunted Garden, her waterwise hellstrips, and the WaterSmart Garden she designed at Denver Botanic Gardens. She recently received the 2025 American Horticultural Society Landscape Design award. Other designs of note are at Denver Botanic Gardens' Chatfield Farms, Santa Fe Botanical Garden, and the Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins. Also a propagator, she holds a master's degree in horticulture and has introduced numerous plants to the nursery trade. Her work is featured regularly in national and international books, programs, and magazines. Through her plantings, writing, speaking, and plant introductions, Lauren continues to help move the Rocky Mountain region toward a more plant-rich, creature-supportive, beautiful and resilient future.

A gardener since he could hold a shovel, Bryan Fischer holds a BS in horticulture and an interdisciplinary minor in organic agriculture from Colorado State University. Now he is Curator of Plant Collections for the Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, where he designed a half-acre Prairie Garden that has garnered national and international attention. Outside of the public garden realm, Bryan breeds and selects especially garden-worthy forms of native plants that retain their wildlife value, botanizes in wild spaces, and writes, speaks, and teaches regionally and nationally. Bryan is a regular contributor to Fine Gardening. He keeps an intensive personal garden where he trials both design concepts and his new plant introductions.