Coauthor Event with Cricket Riley & Alice Kitajima

A must-have guide to dry garden design inspired by the legendary Ruth Bancroft Garden.

The Ruth Bancroft Garden, known as one of the finest dry gardens in the world, is a pioneering example of resilient design with a focus on water conservation. Ruth Bancroft (1908-2017) was a self-taught gardener and designer whose eclectic methods encourage richly textured, bold, and colorful layers of regionally climate-appropriate flowers, shrubs, trees, and succulents. These include her favorite aloes, agaves, yuccas, and echeverias that she collected and experimented with for over 60 years, and which the garden has continued to steward. Designing the Lush Dry Garden is the first guide to lay out Ruth Bancroft’s methods for the home gardener and designer.

Cricket Riley is the co-owner of Lush Dry Gardens (www.lushdrygardens.com), a landscape design firm  specializing in low-water garden design. She worked at The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek from 2017 to 2025. There she held a variety of positions, including Director of the Design Services department, which she created in 2019. She was also the primary instructor for RBG’s Dry Garden Design Certificate Program, which she co-created with Alice Kitajima in 2020.

Alice Kitajima’s profound connection to gardens and landscape design began at an early age, inspired by her father, who immigrated to Los Angeles to install Japanese-style gardens. After completing studies in forestry and music at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked at botanical gardens and arboreta across the United States. As Program Director at the Ruth Bancroft Garden, where she oversaw the education department, her greatest passion was fostering meaningful, lasting connections between people and plants.

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