If you live in Arizona, New Mexico, or Nevada, you'll discover the best edible plants for your garden in this beautiful step-by-step how-to guide€ ” and they'll be on your table before you know it.

Jacqueline A. Soule is a botanist and garden writer from Tucson. She has developed strong expertise as a gardener in the Southwest. As a garden writer, Soule has contributed more than a thousand gardening columns for local, regional, and national newspapers and magazines, and she has written or been the technical writer for numerous gardening books. Soule teamed up with the Tierra del Sol Institute to develop its Arizona Gardening Series, consisting of Butterfly Gardening in Southern Arizona (2012) and Success With Succulents (2013). She is the author of SouthwestFruit & Vegetable Gardening (Cool Springs Press). When she's not writing gardening columns or books, Soule is a speaker and educator, offering a wide array of plant-related workshops, classes, and other programs throughout southern Arizona, including through OASIS Tucson. She loves to landscape with plants that require as little care as possible. Many of the plants in her books were test grown in her own yard.

Jacqueline Soule is a longtime Southwestern gardener and award-winning garden writer, her first gardening article appearing in 1983. Of her ten published books, eight are on gardening in our unique climate. She has been a popular columnist for many years with weekly and monthly Gardening With Soule and other regular columns in a number of national, regional and local publications, including Arizona/Nevada Lovin' Life newspaper, Explorer newspaper and Angie's List magazine.

Jacqueline grew up in Tucson, and obtained a B.S. in horticulture and a B.S. in ecology, evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona both with honors and cum laude, then left Tucson to experience life "Back East." Academically she acquired an M.S. in botany from Michigan State University, and a Ph.D. in botany from the University of Texas, while she discovered gardening in various climates. Included in Dr. Soule's "Back East" sojourns were positions in botanical gardens and arboreta including the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia, Chicago Botanic Garden, and the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.

Jacqueline joyously returned to the Southwest in 1997, and has been active in the plant and gardening community ever since, serving in various offices in plant societies, clubs, and organizations both locally and beyond, including the board of the international Desert Legume Program. She hosted the Garden Writers Association National Symposium in Tucson in 2012. Along with Horticultural Therapy programs through the Tucson Botanical Gardens, Jacqueline offers numerous lectures, presentations and community classes on plants and gardening for all ages and in various venues around the region, all while earning a living as a garden writer.