Sarah Bixby Smith — My Sagebrush Garden and Pasear

Sarah Bixby Smith knew California as inherited ranch land, cultivated garden, family story, civic project, and changing modern landscape. In My Sagebrush Garden and Pasear, mountain weather, eucalyptus, children, roads, rain, remembered servants, and the pressure of development enter a voice that can be playful, grieving, privileged, curious, and sharply observant. The books belong beside her better-known memoir Adobe Days, but they show a different scale: short lyrics built from daily looking. This edition resets the two complete poetry books in the archive, preserving their divisions and sequences. Her later collections, Wind Upon My Face and The Bending Tree, are documented in the bibliography but await authoritative source copies.