Ana Maria Spagna uses her skill with essays to tell us what it’s like trying to make a home on the fringe of wilderness, in “Now Go Home” (Oregon State University Press, 176 pages, soft cover, $17.95),

Spagna lives in Stehekin, Wash., where she works on a National Park Service trail crew.

She earns her living with a crosscut saw – a harder task than it might sound to anyone who’s used to a power saw. Just attack a big wet hemlock with a two-person crosscut saw and a world of muscle aches will open in front of you. The experience could make one question the wisdom of forbidding power tools in the wilderness.

Subtitled “Wilderness, Belonging and the Crosscut Saw,” Spagna’s book introduces us to the world of the North Cascades. This is her first book, and I hope we will see others. She’s alive with the apocalyptic desperation that makes people feel all of the natural wonders will be gone soon. She’s been on tour promoting the book, and will appear next at Powell’s on Hawthorne in Portland, May 20.

Naturalistic

Wild landscapes inspire noted garden writer Keith Wiley who distills them into a single garden with what his fans call “breath-taking success.”

You can learn about it in his new book, “On the Wild Side – Experiments in New Naturalism” (Timber Press, 256 pages, hard cover, $34.95).

Wiley says he has been inspired by the world’s deserts, coastlines, mountains and woodlands, from the landscapes of Colorado to the coasts of South Africa. He blends natural plants and the environment into pleasing combinations.

“Going with the flow” is how he describes the creation of gardens that range from bulb meadows to prairie, scrub and grasslands, from semi-arid landscapes to woodland floor.

Gardeners will enjoy this book and its 202 color photos as they learn how to put the wild back into gardens.

Photos and the West

A new medium and a new place came together in the 19th century in the American West.

Martha A. Sandweiss tells the story in “Print the Legend” Photography and the American West” (Yale University Press, 416 pages, soft cover, $25).

This is a new paperback edition of the book that won major awards as 2003’s best book on aspects of American frontier history.

The maverick

If ever a word suited a personality, it’s “maverick” for Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, a giant among the state’s political figures.

Read about him in the new paperback edition of Mason Drukman’s “Wayne Morse-A Political Biography” (Oregon Historical Society Press, 557 pages, paperback, $18). The book was originally published in 1997.