The Tree Hunters

Beginning in the 18th century, collecting exotic trees became a national passion in Britain. Country gentlemen (yes, male landowners) strove to outdo each other in assembling trees from faraway sources. In The Tree Hunters, Thomas Pakenham takes the reader to visit the resulting arboreta and to accompany the tree hunters on the sometimes perilous expeditions to collect the seeds that grew into those arboreta.

Kew Gardens earns a substantial notice as an early site. Princess Augusta and her son George III supported efforts to make Kew a center for multiple varieties of trees. The first arboretum open to the public was not Kew but Glasnevin in Dublin. The Dublin Society opened the site by 1800. It included representatives of Linnaeus’s 23 botanical classes, as was thought appropriate, and in addition some examples of attractive variations of each, such as “all kinds of oddities among the fruit trees” (p. 126). Walter Wade, who selected them may have shocked purists by these choices, “but Wade knew when it was time to play to the gallery.”

Of the many tree hunters in this book, David Douglas may be the most amazing. He collected in South America, in the U.S. on both coasts, and finally in Hawaii. His seeds gave Britain the Douglas fir and the noble fir among many dozens of others. In searching he drove himself to exhaustion repeatedly. In the end, in Hawaii, he died by falling into a hidden pit designed to trap cattle. Or was he murdered? Pakenham tells stories well.

The Tree Hunters recounts many fascinating adventures; it also includes much specific information. The excellent index, for instance, has 19 subtopics under “oak.”

Pakenham lists several reasons for this competition to create arboreta– a change in landscape design to one that popularized variety in trees; huge growth in the number of plant nurseries in Britain; the development and growth of horticultural societies. Surely the dominance of the British empire in the 19th century helped the impulse as well. Something in the atmosphere must also fostered that Victorian love of collecting things, of which these arboreta were a happy part.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 12, Issue 2, February 2025.

The Tree Collectors

Amy Stewart has written several books that are in the Miller Library, covering a wide-range of plant-related topics. She is also an author of historical novels, and she brings that skill of writing narratives to all her books. Her latest, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession, showcases two additional talents: her ability to conduct insightful interviews and to draw illustrations of both people and plants.

This book represents the author’s process of discovery about the many ways people relate to trees. The results are much more varied than Stewart guessed when she began. Some were expected, such as an individual with sufficient land planting all the species in a genus, or all the trees associated together for some other reason.

Others document all the trees of a place. Some plantings are memorials; others are to promote sustainable forestry. Using trees for bonsai or topiary describes the passion of two collectors, while another has amassed no live trees but nearly 7,000 wood samples.

I found the work of Kenneth Høech of Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland especially fascinating. He has researched trees that survive near the arctic tree line and has begun an arboretum to give this otherwise treeless island arboreal plant life.

Sam Van Aken of Syracuse, New York engaged in a project called Tree of 40 Fruit. He grafted stone fruits, including plums, cherries, apricots, almonds, and peaches, onto a single tree, and planted these at suitable locations throughout the country. Each of the typically historical varieties is documented in his archive of botanical illustrations and herbarium specimens of the leaves and flowers.

I recommend this book for its many fascinating stories. As Amy Stewart concludes in her introduction, “if this book accomplishes anything, I hope it inspires you to plant a tree. Or two. Or maybe a dozen. Watch out, though—trees can be addictive.”

Published by Brian Thompson in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 12, Issue 1, January 2025.

Arboretum

“Arboretum” is a new book this spring in the “Welcome to the Museum” series from Big Picture Press. The Miller Library has three titles in this series, all illustrated by Katie Scott, collaborating with different text authors.

These books are huge! Fifteen inches tall by eleven inches wide and are wonderful for reading both silently and aloud to others. Tony Kirkham, former Head of Arboretum, Gardens & Horticulture Services of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, wrote the text and his wonderment for the vast varieties of trees (over 58,000 species) is very clear.

“At this time of unprecedented change for our planet, it could not be more important to learn how to live alongside these giants. We cannot protect the natural world until we understand it.” To help with this understanding, Kirkham’s descriptions typically fill the left page, while Scott’s illustrations fill the right.

This book is about the global arboretum, including tropical species from both moist and dry forests that sadly wouldn’t survive in the Washington Park Arboretum. But our native trees are represented in a two-page spread featuring the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), including a drawing of “Big Lonely Doug”, a 230-foot-tall survivor of clear-cutting on Vancouver Island. Scott shows the misshaped branches and the enormous (12 feet in diameter), limbless trunk with close-ups of the cones, needles, and even a cross-section of the trunk.

Excerpted from Brian Thompson’s article in the Summer 2023 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Versed in Living Nature: Wordsworth’s Trees

In the preface of Versed in Living Nature, Peter Dale and Brandon Chao-Chi Yen describe the contents: “We visit many of Wordsworth’s trees and explore their meanings and implications, personal, physical, cultural, religious, historical and political.” To their great credit, they do all of that in 320 pages.

The index under “trees” lists 58 varieties, with multiple pages for many, especially the oak and yew. Each tree is located in William Wordsworth’s poems. (It helps to have a little knowledge of the poems, but it’s not necessary).

The trees are also connected to the poet’s activities, his schooling, his years in the Lake District of England, his travels. Special attention goes to the people in his life, chief among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy. Dale and Yen quote her often, reinforcing her importance to his poetry.

Among others they meet, the novelist Sir Walter Scott appears almost as a side note during a visit to Scotland. The book is quite a literary Who’s Who of the British literary scene.

Adding to the breadth of the book are references to Dale and Yen’s visits to Wordsworth sites. In commenting on a scene with four yews in “A Tradition of Darley Dale, Derbyshire,” for instance, they note that only three survive today, and they are hard to find.

Very helpful are the contexts in which all these trees are placed. Some are political (e.g., the Napoleonic war), some economic (the Highland Clearances), some literary (the controversy over the Ossian poems).

Wordsworth was also a gardener. At Dove Cottage he “began to learn about gardens not as a gentleman dilettante but as someone who would supply cabbages for the kitchen” (p. 132). He learned enough to gain a reputation as a garden guru, someone sought for advice on horticultural matters.

Building on all the above, the authors develop Wordsworth’s ideas and how his trees connect to his understanding of Nature as both physical and transcendent. It’s a very impressive accomplishment.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in the Leaflet, Volume 10, Issue 5, May 2023

The Great British Tree Biography

Read this book to have fun with tales, myths, legends, and historical facts about British trees. Mark Hooper says the book aims “to explore the space where social history meets natural history” (p. 9). Along the way he ties events familiar and unfamiliar to many individual trees.

The first short section consists of superstitions and symbolism associated with various types of trees. The birch, for instance, is associated with witchcraft, apparently because household brooms were made of birch twigs bundled with a handle of hazel or hawthorn. Brooms, witches – they go together.

The main body of the book is “An A-Z of British Trees,” one- or two-page accounts of fifty individual (or sometimes multiple) trees in England, Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland. Most are English. Many of the trees are very long-lived. The Ankerwycke Yew has survived since King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, supposedly under its branches. Later Henry VIII is rumored to have courted Anne Boleyn in the same spot.

Lest you think these associations are all from long ago, the Bolan Tree, “an unprepossessing sycamore” (p, 42) in London, was the site of a 1977 car crash that killed T. Rex lead singer Marc Bolan when his car collided with it. A statue and a plaque serve as a memorial.

Of the fifty entries on trees, 19 are oaks and nine are yews. Some individual trees are identifiable; some are not. In “The Knole Oak and the Strawberry Fields Tree,” an oak on the Knole estate in Kent can only be described as a likely candidate for the oak featured in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. But definitely known is the specific oak on the same estate used in a promotional video for the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields.”

Some entries include multiple trees. The account “The ‘Trees to Remain’” explains the many curves in the A303 highway by way of a 1969 hand drawn plan for a bypass marked “trees to remain.” The builders just had to bend the highway around the trees. No species names are given.

These sample summaries are enough to whet the reader’s appetite. Amy Grimes has illustrated the tales with impressionistic art in saturated hues, adding to the liveliness of these stories.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy for The Leaflet, August 2022, Volume 9, Issue 8.

To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest

For several of her teenage years in Ireland, Diana Beresford-Kroeger lived in fear of being sent by the government to one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries, where orphans like her and unwed mothers suffered abuse and maltreatment. Her second parent died when she was thirteen, and at first it seemed no one would care for her. Then Uncle Pat relented, leading to wonderful summers in the Irish countryside.

Numerous aged women there chose her as a vessel to receive beliefs, stories, and especially ways of healing, that went back to the Druids. Much of this knowledge had been hidden from the ruling British during what the author calls the penal period. In the process, Beresford-Kroeger learned to affirm herself after her traumatic childhood, and to love and honor nature, especially trees.

Beresford-Kroeger writes winningly about this period of her life. Especially given that her parents had not paid much attention to her when they were alive, she makes clear how much these women were responsible for enabling her to develop into the respected scientist and author she became.

After college in Ireland, Beresford-Kroeger came first to the U.S. for a few years, and then settled in Canada. There she completed at Ph.D. but opted out of an academic career after experiencing much discrimination because she was a woman. Instead, she found success as an independent scholar, though she says she fears the word “success” as associated with greed.

The first 186 pages of this 284-page book tell the above story. It brings together her own amazing history, her botanist’s outlook, and the often mystical understanding of the Druids. The final section is a Celtic alphabet of trees. The Celts assigned trees’ names to each letter of their Ogham alphabet. For example, the letter H was called “Huath,” and the tree is the hawthorn. A drawing of each letter is included, plus a description of the letter:” H is designated as a vertical line met by a single horizontal line to the left” (p. 227).

Along with each letter, Beresford-Kroeger gives information about the tree, the healing properties assigned to it by the Celts, and often, how modern scientists have discovered its medicinal value – sometimes the same as the Celts’, sometimes different. The ancients used extracts from hawthorns for “unspecified weakness.” Today medicines developed from that tree are used for hypertension associated with various heart problems.

Two of Beresford-Kroeger’s previous books – Arboretum America and The Global Forest – are also available at the Miller Library. This one adds background and context to them. About a year after her parents died, she remembers standing outside one of those Magdalene Laundries and smelling fear. This book shows how she channeled that fear into a powerful advocacy.

Published in the Leaflet, June 2022, Volume 9, Issue 6.

Growing Conifers: the complete illustrated gardening and landscaping guide

John Albers has highlighted his garden of 20 years in Bremerton and his passion for sustainable gardening practices in two previous books. Now, he turns his attention to a favorite plant group: conifers, especially dwarf and small cultivars. He is very clear in his reasons for writing the book. “Given the horticultural and ecological importance of urban conifers, it is vital that all of us do our part to restore conifers to our urban environment.”

More than just a gardening book, “Growing Conifers” is a good introduction to the botany of conifers. The narrative description of each genus and species gives clues to help with identification, as do the excellent photographs by David Perry. It also explains the origins of the beloved dwarf forms, including many found in the Pacific Northwest, either as mutations in the wild or in nurseries.

The author walks the reader through the process of assessing a garden and developing a design, with the liberal use of suitable conifers. But he doesn’t stop there. He also gives careful instructions for planting and sustainable care of these long-lived plants, and even the basics of propagation.

The design elements also include good companion plants. An example being clematis, especially if they are species that come from lean soil, as Albers believes neighboring plants should share the water needs. However, “sometimes rules can be broken for the sake of a greater good […] for the sake of creating a beautiful garden vignette that warms the heart and soothes the soul.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand and Supplement

Audrey Lily Eagle (born 1925) was born in New Zealand, but spent her adolescent years in Oxfordshire, England. There she learned a love of plants and began to draw and paint them. She also took training in engineering drafting, a skill that is apparent in the precision of her later work. When she returned to New Zealand, it became her passion to illustrate almost all of the woody flora of New Zealand, “over 800 species, subspecies, and unnamed plants. It is assumed that the number of any new finds is certain to be small.”

This passion took 54 years to complete. During that time, samples of her work were published in smaller books, but the project culminated in “Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand. Published in 2006, this two-volume work plus a supplement, was a gift to the Miller Library by the Seattle-Christchurch Sister City Association.

Initially she used her art as a way of learning plants, figuring that the time it took to paint a plant would fix the name and its distinctive features in her memory. She also studied botany and wrote the painstaking descriptions and sources for her subjects that accompany her illustrations. She insisted on painting live specimens, often done on family camping trips with her husband and two children throughout the North and South Islands. “My children, Alison and Paul, have endured my preoccupation with painting all their lives: ‘Don’t jog the table’, ‘stop the car I want to look at a plant’, even to the present time.”

The illustrations are almost all of natural size, with separate, enlarged illustrations of tiny flowers. Maori names are included when known. The native ranges, often given in both latitude and altitude, create an appreciation for New Zealand topography. For most entries, there are bibliographic references for more information.

The supplement is especially fascinating, showcasing Eagle’s keen interest in her subjects through years of networking with the botanical organizations and individual botanists of New Zealand. Here are the notes that wouldn’t fit in the illustrated volumes. For example, the habitat of Fuchsia procumbens, an easily grown groundcover in Seattle gardens, is described from a personal communication with one of her colleagues: “On beach terraces, banks, small gullies, and creek beds behind the beach and at base of pohutukawa trees (Metrosideros excelsa). It also grows in the coastal forest, estuary margins and scrubland, preferring dampness or some shelter.”

Excerpted from the Winter 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

The Tree Book: Superior Selections for Landscapes, Streetscapes, and Gardens

Michael Dirr is the guru of woody plants. Beginning in 1975, his “Manual of Woody Landscape Plants” – through six editions as of 2009 – has been required reading for any horticultural student. These books are very technical and rely on line drawings to illustrate their subjects.

Working with Timber Press, Dirr changed directions in 1997 with the publication of “Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs.” Described by the author as “a photographic essay that profiles and highlights the most common woody landscape plants,” this proved an excellent way to reach a more general gardening audience. This style continued with “Dirr’s Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs” (2012).

While this last book will remain an important reference because of its inclusion of shrubs and helpful lists of selection criteria, the photographic essay approach reached a new height with the publication of “The Tree Book.” For the first time, it is written with a co-author, Keith Warren. While Dirr is from the southeast, spending his academic career at the University of Georgia, Warren is a retired tree breeder and nurseryman from Oregon. His voice makes this new book especially valuable to gardeners in the Pacific Northwest.

Photographs are still the eye-grabbers of this huge book (940 pages!), but the text has been expanded to achieve the right balance of being informative without excess detail, and is often very funny. Reading about Sourwood (Oxydendrum arboretum), I learned that in its native Georgia it can reach 60’, but “in the dry summers of the West, a 20’ height is a big tree.” The authors claim this as a favorite species, looking good in all seasons, with the best in the fall: “Like a drum roll, the fall color comes on slowly and intensifies, finally reaching a crescendo.”

The authors do an excellent job of highlighting the best of new cultivars or selections of their subjects. For example, I learned of nine cultivars of one my favorite trees, the Persian Ironwood (Parrotia persica) – I only knew of one! There is even a newly available species, Parrotia subaequalis, which in Oregon has fall color that “is consistently brilliant red, brighter than P. persica.”

This is a reference book and not available to check out from the Miller Library. However, if you are planting new trees, or want to learn more about trees, I recommend visiting the library and seeking out this book.

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Fall 2019

The Trees of North America

Trees of North America book cover “The Trees of North America” is an excellent new book and winner of one of the three book awards given by the AHS in 2018. Who is the author? It’s complicated.

The short answer is François-André Michaux (1770-1855) and Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859) with considerable help from skilled engravers, the most famous being Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). Their collective publications span the first half of the 19th century, produced in both France and the United States, and first in French and later in English. The full bibliographic story is in the preface of this new book.

The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in their LuEsther T. Mertz Library has perhaps the most complete collection of the (at least) 16 different editions by Michaux and Nuttall. Mertz Library staff have produced this new book, using faithful reproductions of the plates. The horticulture staff for NYBG add notes with current updates of nomenclature, ranges, and horticultural uses.

Enough words. This is mostly a picture book, but what a glorious one it is. We are fortunate to have an 1857-1865 original in the Miller Library rare book collection. While a reprint can never quite match a hand-colored original, this comes very close.

These accurate images made the original the standard reference book for North America trees until the early 20th century. A concluding essay by David Allen Sibley explains the process of making the reprinted images – a process as complex as the authorship. Sibley declares, “The end results are beautiful, and the prints are true works of art on their own, but they are different from the originals.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.