“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