Late July, August, and September (the dog days of summer with the constellation Sirius high in the night sky) are perhaps the stretch of the year in most climates of the Northern Hemisphere that really show you what your garden and plants are made of (for better or worse) after months of them producing and growing under long hours of sun, high heat, and either humidity or drought. Or smoke.

It’s also the season when many of our most durable and prismatic shrubs are showing off to great advantage in rounded forms, seed, fruit, and foliage colors, certainly in our wildlands. And possibly in our gardens?

This is where Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi of the Denver Botanic Gardens come in. Their new book Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands celebrates the great diversity, incredible beauty, and many gifts and lessons that the wild shrublands of our world have to offer our gardens and cultivated landscapes—environmentally and aesthetically—no matter where you garden.

I want to echo Kevin and Michael’s email greeting when I invited them to be guests on Cultivating Place: Welcome to the Shrub Club! Enjoy.

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.