Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants

Helen Fowler O’Gorman (1904-1984) grew up in Wisconsin but graduated in fine arts and architecture from the University of Washington. She began her career as sculptor and went to Mexico in 1940 to continue her studies with painter Diego Rivera. He encouraged her to concentrate on painting and over the next two decades, she developed a passion for illustrating the native and garden plants of her adopted country, leading to the publication of “Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants” in 1961.

At the time of their meeting, Rivera was married to painter Frida Kahlo. Together, they lived in a house designed by the Irish-Mexican architect (and painter) Juan O’Gorman, Helen’s future husband. Together, the O’Gormans designed and built Casa Cueva, their home and landscape that partially encompassed a natural cave.

Helen O’Gorman’s book demonstrates not only her skill as a painter, but in the text her knowledge of Mexican botany and horticulture. She was particularly interested in the gardening heritage of the Aztecs and other pre-Hispanic peoples. “Innumerable plants were sacred to the Aztecs and certain flowers were set aside by the priests for religious rituals.”

While she includes the ethnobotanical uses of plants for food, medicines, and dyes, she emphasizes the passion these civilizations had to grow flowers for ornamental purposes and as perfumes. The latter use was considered especially important for reducing fatigue or providing a mild stimulant. This practice was picked up by the conquering Spanish, a fact O’Gorman discovered in a surviving administration document on the “treatment of the weary office holder of the 16^th Century.”

The author regards this book as an attempt to introduce “the most noticeable flowering plants” to her readers. Most are natives, while a few are popular introductions. Each entry includes some botanically distinguishing features, but this is less a field guide and more an invitation to share the appreciation and various uses of these plants across the breadth of Mexico.

For example, most species of cosmos are native to Mexico. Referring to our common garden cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus), she describes: “In the state of Michoacán one sees a breathtaking sight: solid pink fields of them, often bordered with the yellow of wild mustard.” She also highlights how a decoction of another species found in North American gardens, C. sulphureus, “is employed to fight the effects of the sting of the scorpion” with small cup given the sting victim every hour.

Excerpted from the Winter 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

When Emily Carr met Woo

Emily Carr was known for her menagerie of animals. She bred dogs, had several cats, a parrot, and a pet rat, but she is perhaps most remember for the Javanese macaque she found at a Victoria pet shop in 1923. This story is captured in the Youth collection book “When Emily Carr Met Woo” by Monica Kulling and illustrated by Dean Griffiths. While tragedy nearly befell Woo in this story, in life he was a muse for Carr for some 15 years.

She named the monkey “Woo” after the sound he made while riding on Carr’s shoulders as she strolled the Victoria harborside, typically pushing an old pram filled with puppies and other pets. This scene is permanently captured in a 2010 sculpture of Carr, Woo, and the dog Billie by Barbara Paterson, sited prominently near the harbor.

Excerpted from the Winter 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People

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How did the chrysanthemum move through history, associated in its native China as an elixir of youth to symbolizing Japanese imperial power, and then transform into an invitation to join a protest march against the Vietnam war in 1967? Read the delightful Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People to find out.

Blooming Flowers is a work that documents how horticulture permeates society with both symbolism and literal enthusiasm for colorful displays. Author Kasia Boddy, professor of American literature at the University of Cambridge, takes a deep dive on the historic, cultural, literary, culinary, medicinal, and scientific background on common garden flowers, such as geraniums, and marigolds. She also includes a few less commonly grown flowers like saffron, almond, and lotus. Boddy relates why flowers are so significant to human culture:
“One reason we love flowers is because they help us talk to each other about the big and small questions of life: about love, death, class, fashion, the weather, art, disease, an allegiance to a nation, religion or political cause, the challenges of space and the passage of time.”

Divided into four seasons, each with four representative flowers, Boddy’s book entertains us with literary quotations and color images of flowers in famous paintings and illustrations. She unearths the earliest mentions of each flower and traces how the symbolism of some flowers changed over the centuries in Asian and European cultures. The sheer breadth of her knowledge is engaging, and the pace is steady. Just as she starts to get into details on one example in art history she moves smoothly on to the next example in art or politics. The chapter on the winter blooming almond starts with words from D. H. Lawrence while he lived in Tuscany: “pink houses, pink almond, pink peach and purply apricot, pink asphodels”. Also included is van Gogh’s painting of a blooming almond twig in a glass inside his modest room in Arles, France. The chapter concludes with observations of how much water California’s million acres of almond orchards require and notes that despite how toxic bitter almonds are to human health, internet quacks peddle the poison as a cancer cure.

I’ve grown twelve of the sixteen flowers explored in Boddy’s book and I now appreciate the hidden meanings and cultural connections lurking in my garden. I found Blooming Flowers pleasurable reading that provides many interesting tidbits of lore.

Published in The Leaflet for Scholars, December 2020, Volume 7, Issue 12

Spirit of Place: The Making of a New England Garden

[Spirit of Place] cover

Why did the Miller Library add a new book about a private garden in Vermont? Partly because the author and garden creator, Bill Noble, has several connections to the Pacific Northwest. However, I primarily recommend this book as an engaging memoir.

Spirit of Place: The Making of a New England Garden is Noble’s almost 30-year story of the property he and his partner, James Tatum, own in the Connecticut River Valley. This was not a new garden; the previous owners had formed its design for 60 years.

The challenge that the author faced was retaining the garden’s historical character while shaping his own vision. “Much of what gardening is about is the feeling of being connected to a place, fostering a sense of belonging, and becoming familiar with the natural rhythms and cycles of a particular piece of the earth.”

Many famous gardens and their designers in North America and Europe influenced the author, including the artists of the nearby Cornish Art Colony. However, his long-time role as director of preservation for the Garden Conservancy had the biggest impact. This included his work with the Chase Garden in Orting, Washington.

He credits Ione Chase with helping him to understand the value of designing a garden to incorporate its view: Mount Rainier in her case, the foothills of the White Mountains of New Hampshire in his garden. She also taught him the value of using familiar or common plants “to created refined garden beauty.”

Plants in Noble’s garden include a blue willow (Salix irrorata) he discovered in the Witt Winter Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum, and Berberis × ottawensis ‘Royal Cloak’ found at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. Three plants of the latter came home in his carry-on luggage and are now “part of the garden’s backbone.” Heronswood and Forestfarm (Williams, Oregon) Nurseries were important sources for other plants.

Vermont has long and cold (USDA zone 4b) winters with snow often lasting well into April. While Seattle is much milder, this is the perfect book to read for inspiration while staying out of the grey and gloom of our winter!

Published in The Leaflet, December 2020, Vol. 7, Issue 12.

Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water

[Just the Tonic] cover

The Miller Library has other books on cinchona (the plant source of quinine), gin (from juniper), and various plant-based spirits, but Just the Tonic focuses on the evolution of this effervescent beverage, a journey from cinchona-derived medicinal preparations to treat fever, purportedly healthful restoratives for a host of ailments (the kombucha and CBD of earlier eras!), to a recreational beverage we still consume with or without spirits. Along the way, the authors touch on the history of malaria and its treatment, the effects of conquest and imperialism, how humans have harvested and stored ice since Mesopotamia’s tamarisk-lined icehouses of nearly 4,000 years ago, and so many other fascinating morsels of information. The book is profusely illustrated and captivatingly written by Kim Walker (a medical herbalist and historian of plant medicines) and Mark Nesbitt (curator of the Economic Botany Collection at Kew).

The Cinchona tree is native to the high-altitude cloud forests of the Andes, from Colombia south to Peru and Chile. It is a medium-sized evergreen tree with cinnamon-colored bark and loose flower clusters said to have a fragrance similar to lilac. It is the bark which was sought for its anti-malarial properties. However, malaria was not a documented ailment in South America until the Spanish conquest, which added population density to damp lowlands where mosquitoes thrive. 1633 marks the first known reference to use of the bark of the ‘fever tree'(arbol de calenturas) in the writing of a Peru-based Spanish priest, who noted that the bark could be dried, pulverized, and dissolved in a drink that would treat the fevers malaria causes. Eventually, the medicinal use of cinchona bark reached Europe. We tend to think of malaria as a tropical ailment, but marshy regions of western Europe harbor a less severe strain of the illness.

Cinchona bark is intensely bitter, so it was made palatable with port wine, herbs, treacle or syrup, citrus peel, and occasionally opium, in an assortment of proprietary formulations. (Advertisements for these are among the colorful illustrations in the book.) Where there is a market for a plant-based remedy, there is a motive for plant exploration, and this led to overharvesting and worker exploitation in South America. Plantations were also created in Java. But the amount of quinine present in the many species of Cinchona varies, and botanists had a challenge in telling species apart based on their dried bark. In the early 19th century, French chemists isolated two of the alkaloids found in the bark—cinchonine and quinine. This facilitated dosage measurement, an important thing, because too little is ineffective and too much is dangerous (even today there are instances of avid homebrewers developing cinchonism from an overdose of quinine).

Because of quinine’s toxicity and decreasing efficacy (the parasites were becoming resistant to it), there was a shift in the 20th century toward synthetic antimalaria drugs such as chloroquine (a name that may have a recent familiar ring to it!). Still, tonic water—like the Schweppes Bitter Lemon I remember drinking on hot days in Israel—remains associated with the eradication of malaria (though the amount of quinine in such drinks is minimal). For me, it conjured the history of Jewish immigrants draining swamps in the valleys and coastal plains of British Mandate Palestine. (By 1968, Israel was deemed malaria-free.)

The tonic water we know today was inspired by the popularity of visiting natural mineral springs, beginning in the times of the Roman Empire. Scientists in the 18th century strove to come up with a way to simulate this effervescence associated with healthful benefits by contrast with turbid swamp water), and gradually refined their devices for creating “bubbling scintillation” (see the illustration of an apparatus for “impregnating water with fixed air”) in a laboratory setting. Eventually, soda water became ubiquitous in soda fountains and grocery stores. These days, one can even make sparkling soda at the touch of a button, at home. Kew has created its own Royal Botanic Tonic and organic gin, and the book’s final chapter includes recipes for cocktails and mocktails. Bottoms up!

Eden Revisited: A Garden In Northern Morocco

The October 2020 Northwest Horticultural Society Symposium, Gardening for the Future: Diversity and Ecology in the Urban Landscape, helped raise my awareness of the complex and wide-ranging network, both human and natural, that foster the creation of our gardens. Several recent books have helped me in that learning process, too.

One such book, about a garden in Morocco, wouldn’t have normally crossed my desk except for a recommendation by a librarian colleague. Books about private gardens can be breathtaking in their beauty, but being a bit jaded, I often find that after one flip-through, I’m done.

Not so with “Eden Revisited: A Garden in Northern Morocco.” Author Umberto Pasti writes novels, non-fiction, and memoirs, typically in his native Italian but his works are widely translated. In some ways, this book is a blend of all three types of writing and is equally engaging for its text as the exquisite photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo.

This garden is very much of its place. It won’t guide you to specific plants for your Pacific Northwest garden, but it is full of design ideas, and may cause you to ponder the purpose of your garden and its place in a bigger world. Even better, this book gives a strong validation of the place of all gardens and gardeners in giving back to their communities by honoring and remembering local traditions and local landscapes.

Here’s the tricky part. Pasti perceives his garden as an extension of his being. He doesn’t hesitate to attribute human or spiritual qualities to his plants. For example, a wild gladiolus is content with its setting, and smiles. While this may sound off-putting, this gentle animism provides an engaging rhythm and insight into an unfamiliar cultural and world view.

Even stronger is the spirit Pasti’s perceives in the people of his small community, all which are welcomed in his garden. “I am proud of the love for plants that grows stronger every day in our young gardeners. In loving those plants, they love their country, its history, its beauty and culture.”

Looking for a different gardening book? This is it, and it’s perfect for wintertime inspiration.

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Winter 2021

Wild Child: Coming Home to Nature

[Wild Child] cover

Patrick Barkham’s Wild Child: Coming Home to Nature chronicles his year as a parent volunteer at the his children’s forest school, interwoven with memories of his own childhood and musings on the role of nature in our lives, especially while we are young. Childhood has changed since Barkham’s youth in 1980s Norfolk (UK), when he and neighboring kids roamed every day, inventing outdoor diversions. Most parents today feel a responsibility to provide constant supervision, or at least keep kids in out of the weather. Something has been lost, Barkham believes, and enrolling his three children at Dandelion outdoor nursery helps to restore it, grounding them in the natural world around them. As he says, “Formative experiences resonate throughout our lives.”

For me, one of the highlights of this book was the opportunity to learn new words and new usages. Some, like “reception year” (which refers to the first year of primary school), “clodgy,” “gubber,” and “slub” (all words for mud), and “sallow” (another word for the pussywillow tree), are new words for known concepts. Others are novel concepts for me. Soft fascination, which describes the power of forests and other natural environments to keep our senses gently engaged without wearing out our attention spans or tiring us, was a revelation to me. Coined by environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in 1989, soft fascination is a hallmark of restorative environments, distinct from a state of “directed attention” such as listening to a lecture or watching TV. Environments rich in soft fascination help to recharge us, making them ideal for learning. Some educators in the UK have taken advantage of this fact by offering some outdoor lessons to upper primary school students who struggle in the classroom. The author is impressed with what he learns visiting two of these outdoor experience programs. In one forest school program for English language learners, many of them refugees, students who participated had improved test scores and attendance as well as harder-to-quantify improvements in confidence and attentiveness.

As an appendix, Barkham provides plenty of fresh ideas for outdoor engagement, including hapa-zome (a Japanese method of transferring leaf colors and patterns to fabric with a hammer) and seaweed cyanotypes. He reminds parents and teachers that it’s not knowledge but love of nature we need to impart. Young people will gather their own knowledge, once they have a chance to get outdoor experiences.

Published in the November 2020 Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 7, Issue 11.

The Scentual Garden: Exploring the World of Botanical Fragrance

[The Scentual Garden] cover

“Green, resinous, camphorous, nutmeg, a scant suggestion of lemon rind.” Ken Druse has a very keen nose. In The Scentual Garden, he undertakes an adventure, as he puts it, to classify botanical fragrance. Druse wants to give gardeners and designers an expanded lexicon for scent that equals the rich vocabulary we already have for color, texture and form. It won’t surprise anyone familiar with his other books that The Scentual Garden is ‘coffee table’ quality, with heavy paper, lots of color photographs of plants in the landscape and of composed portraits of plants on a solid color background. It’s pleasurable to simply flip through the pages for Ellen Hoverkamp’s photography alone. However, once you start reading the text of this reference book you will ask yourself, do I get “nutmeg and a scant suggestion of lemon rind” from my rosemary shrub?

Druse devised 12 “botanical fragrance categories.” Most are obvious and self-explanatory, such as fruity, medicinal, spice and forest. Others are more esoteric and mysterious, like heavy or indolic, which is described as “mothballs, hot garbage, overripe fruit, excrement…” Eww! Apparently some pleasant-smelling flowers, like gardenia, can have a secondary background scent of indole. I say “apparently” because when I smelled my own gardenia in flower just now I didn’t get anything indolic. But smell is deeply personal, as Druse fully explains in the opening chapters. I grew two varieties of heliotrope this past summer. One smelled like delicious vanilla/cherry pie as expected while the other smelled like the horrible synthetic fragrance used to clean public restrooms. My husband thought of urinal cake. I’ll not grow that cultivar again!

Each category includes an explanation with sample plants, followed by encyclopedia entries for more plants in the category. Plant entries describe the scent, use in the garden, cultivation tips, sometimes a bit of history, and sometimes recommended cultivars. Druse writes with honesty and insight, from personal experience of decades of knowing plants. After reading The Scentual Garden, I’m more likely to sniff my plants and ponder in which category they belong and whether there is a hint of indole in my star jasmine.

Published in the November 2020 Leaflet, Volume 7, Issue 11.

Corn: A Global History

[Corn: A Global History] cover

Do you ever wonder where the ingredients in your tamale came from? Each volume in Reaktion Books’ Edible series explores the global history and culture of a type of food. These little books pack in several chapters on various cultural histories around the crop they explore. It is essentially a food memoir and at the end of the each book, recipes are provided.

In Corn: A Global History, readers learn it is hard to determine how corn originated, due to its need for humans to cultivate it. Corn cannot grow wild. We also learn that maize is classified based on the grain’s appearance and starch content. The book contains a large section on Indigenous foods based on corn.

In Tomato: A Global History, by Clarissa Hyman, we learn that the word derived from the Nahuatl ‘tomatl,’ a generic term for a globose fruit or berry with seeds and watery flesh sometimes enclosed in a membrane. This ambitious memoir explores the tomato’s migration throughout the New World to the Old World, including Italy. One of my favorite pizzas, the Margherita, was created in 1889 in Naples to honor the Italian queen of the same name. The book investigates tomato cultivation today, including how scientific advances are changing the fruit, while conservation of heirloom varieties continues.

Avocado: A Global History, by Jeff Miller, explores the history and current social media craze of the fruit and describes how it has been grown on every continent except Antarctica. What I found the most intriguing is how avocados are in the laurel family, the oldest group of flowering plants, with the term laurels denoting excellence. Like corn, beans, and tomatoes, the avocado’s history can be traced back to the ecological conditions of the Neogene period, which created the Mesoamerican land-bridge that joined the continents of North and South America, creating a habitat for these foods to evolve into what we know today.

Beans: A Global History, by Natalie Rachel Morris, explores the staple food’s humble beginnings over 9,000 years ago. The diverse genus includes many different varieties and the food can be used in many forms: dried, frozen, or canned. The substantial nutritional benefit of the food led to the people of Tuscany being known as “bean-eaters.” I especially enjoyed the chapter on the lore and literature of beans.

Together, the books are a feast of knowledge. They are best enjoyed before a meal.

Written by Jessica Moskowitz and published in the Leaflet for Scholars, October 2020, Vol. 7, Issue 10.

Kenga Kuma: Portland Japanese Garden

I recently visited the Portland Japanese Garden after many years away, taking a tour in June 2019 as part of a Hardy Plant Society of Oregon study weekend. The focus was the new part of the garden, the Cultural Village, which opened in 2017, but I also made time to explore the earlier areas that date from 1967.

In June 2020, I enjoyed a keynote presentation by Stephen Bloom, the CEO of the Portland Japanese Garden as part of the virtual American Public Garden Association annual meeting. He stressed that the garden is a cultural entity and much more than just a horticultural collection. The Cultural Village, that includes a café, gallery, library, and learning center, is one expression of that vision, allowing the visitor to experience a broad range of Japanese arts and culture.

“Kengo Kuma: Portland Japanese Garden” is a substantial new book that tells the story of the Portland Japanese Garden, both old and new, that is written by Botond and Balázs Bognár, father and son Hungarian-American architects. Kengo Kuma is the noted Japanese architect and professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo who was hired to design the Cultural Village.

The authors begin with excellent recounting and appreciation of the original garden, and one of the best summarization I’ve read of both the Shinto and later Buddhist religions in Japan and their impact on Japanese art and design. “The symbiotic relationship between the new and the old alters them both and arguably for the better.”

The older site includes five different styles of Japanese garden design, an unusual trait as gardens in Japan are typically in a single style. These five designs are widely spaced, so that each has its own integrity – qualities well-captured by the images of several photographers.

This book is also the story of how the scope of the garden has grown. CEO Bloom, who was hired in 2005, brought an unusual background as a music educator and non-profit manager. He recognized it is easy to get caught up with the horticulture, the politics, the science – but the garden is really all about people. To hone this focus, he restructured the management, upgrading the Garden Director to Garden Curator, and creating a peer Curator of Culture, Art, and Education.

This made the Cultural Village possible. Kuma writes in his introduction: “I wanted to create a special architecture and place that also did not belong solely to either culture; it would be neither entirely American nor completely Japanese.” This approach is illustrated by the choice of building materials for the new buildings. The interiors are primarily the wood of Port Orford cedar (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana), an Oregon native, crafted by Portland builders, but as “a symbolic counterbalance,” the main doors were made from Japanese wood, constructed in Japan.

Another example of synergy was solving the need for a retaining wall in the courtyard to keep the steep hillside in place. The project team asked the question, why settle for a utilitarian solution? Castle walls are an ancient tradition in Japan, but new castles are rarely built and artisans who maintain existing walls are few. However, Bloom was able to find a stonemason, who was of the 15^th generation of a stonemason family, and able to build a new wall in the old tradition, creating a delightful feature that serves a necessary function.

Excerpted from the Fall 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin