Senior English major co-authors book — Southwestern style

"If you ask a child to draw a picture of a cactus, they will draw a saguaro. They just won't have a name for it," says Anna Humphreys '02, co-author of a book about those famous cacti that grow in Arizona, Mexico and some parts of California.

"I just wanted to go home for the summer," says Humphreys to explain how she ended up writing the book, "Saguaro: The Desert Giant," in the summer after her sophomore year. Having spent the first summer of her college career in Washington, D.C., Humphreys, a fifth-generation Arizonan, missed her Tucson home.

Her parents said that she could only come home if she worked for her father's publishing company. The job involved editing some books owned by the company as well as creating the text for a book her mother, Susan Lowell '79, was working on.

Humphreys' father owns Rio Nuevo Publishers, a small company based out of Tucson that prints books about the cultural history and environment of the Southwest and distributes them to tourist traps. A rival publisher had released a book about the plants and he felt that they could produce a much better book at a lower cost. Though she is pleased with the end product, Humphreys doesn't deny that it was "hard working not only with your mom, but for your dad."

Humphreys, an English major writing her thesis about the adult works of Francis Hodges Burnett, the author most famous for "A Little Princess" and "The Secret Garden," said it was a big switch to "digest all this boring scientific stuff" involved in researching the cacti.

"All of a sudden, you don't want to impress your professor with a fifty-dollar word anymore," joked Humphreys about her effort to learn the new writing style needed for the book. Half of the book covers the scientific aspects of the saguaro — the parts of the cactus, their process of water conservation, the wildlife that feeds off the plants — and the rest consists of cultural art, Native American myths and stunning photographs.

"People think of them as more than just a cactus," Humphreys notes about the local sentiment toward the plants.

The people of the Southwest have, at times, used the cacti for food products (twelve different edible goods come from the plant, including a type of wine with the alcohol content of beer), lumber, and a trading source. They have also been an important religious symbol to which Native Americans pay respect, burying the placenta of newborn children at its base as a way to bless them.

Though the saguaros are not endangered, they are vulnerable to extremely cold temperatures and other natural elements such as lightning, wind and fire. Humans pose one of the largest threats to the plants.

Yet, in times when the saguaros have been unhealthy — such as the 1940's when the saguaros were infected with Erwinia cacticida, a bacteria transmitted by moth larvae — people have done their best to protect the beloved plants. They have even gone so far as to administer penicillin to the plants by hand.

Though she is uncertain as to her plans following graduation, Humphreys says authoring the book was a positive experience and one she understands is unique to have as an undergraduate. There were 3,000 copies of the book pre-ordered before its release in February. Distributed by Norton publishers with its primary market being tourists to the Southwest, the book is also being sold online.

About her fifteen minutes of fame, Humphreys says, "It's still on the way bottom of the best-seller list, but it's pretty cool to be able to search for your own name on Amazon.com."