Volume 4, Issue 7
Two striking bird books for young nature lovers
reviewed by Priscilla Grundy, Miller Library volunteer

Look Up!: Bird Watching in Your Own Backyard
by Annette LeBlanc Cate

This looks like a comic book with bird commentary, but it packs a barrelful of information for budding bird watchers. Annette LeBlanc Cate lures young readers with wisecracking robins and sparrows (and people). In the page on A Rainbow of Color, for instance, the European starling explains, “I’m covered with colorful speckles . . . like stars. ‘Cuz I’m a STARling. Get it?” Her goal is to encourage young readers to watch carefully, to see details, and to place birds in context. She also urges sketching birds as a way to increase focus and create a personal record. Cate begins the book by saying you don’t really need equipment to begin bird watching, and if you want binoculars, they needn’t be costly. By mid-book, she suggests it’s time for a field guide, and she lists several in the bibliography. So she moves the reader from a boy saying that bird watching “Looks kinda boring” to several pages on rather scientific bird classification at the end. The reader (of any age) who follows the book all the way through will have a solid start on the enjoyment of birding. And if you never go beyond reading the book, you will still have had a good time.

Urban Roosts: Where Birds Nest in the City
by Barbara Bash

After you read this book to a child, go for a walk in the urban landscape and ask, "Where could birds roost?" Children will be eager to look up and around for the kinds of nesting spots described and pictured in Urban Roosts. Barbara Bash has chosen a dozen species and multiple city sites to tell how pigeons, finches, crows, and falcons have adapted to the city, finding tiny but sheltering niches to call home. The colors are soft, mainly pastels, and the bird sketches clearly identifiable. Although this is aimed at the picture book set, adults may find themselves searching for city nests, too, after sharing this book with a child.

Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries
Annual Literature Award winners unveiled,
Brian Thompson reports

The Bauers, a biography of three artist brothers of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, is the winner of the 2017 Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) Annual Literature Award. Author Hans Walter Lack has written a book that celebrates the rise of botanical illustration as both an art and science, and tells a great story.

CBHL also gave an Award of Excellence in Botanical Art and Illustration to Plants from the Woods and Forests of Chile, published by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. This large book is of the caliber of the many fine old florilegia in the Miller Library rare book room – but it’s new!

An Award of Excellence in Gardening was given to Planting Design for Dry Gardens by Olivier Filippi. This very useful book is a detailed and practical study of the options for replacing resource demanding turf grass in summer dry climates like ours.

Finally, an Award of Excellence in Landscape Design and Architecture went to Phyto: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design. A full review of this fine book can be found in this month’s issue of Leaflet for Scholars.

Browse over 200 subscriptions at the Miller Library
by Jessica Anderson

Did you know that the Miller Library has over 200 active periodical subscriptions? Our subscriptions cover a range from magazines for home gardeners to journals for researchers. Over 600 titles include early twentieth century publications and current newsletters from regional garden clubs and arboreta.

Recently the library acquired a CD archive of the Portland Rose Society’s newsletter, The Portland Rose Chatter. We are very excited to get this newsletter as it covers from Volume 9 to present, allowing the library to maintain a historical record of the Portland Rose Society’s newsletter from 1957 to today. We are always interested to learn about local and national gardening and horticultural publications. Please let us know if we are missing an important publication! To see our periodicals collection, search the catalog with “advanced search” limited to periodicals and discover what we hold.

New to the Library