In Search of Meadowlarks: Birds, Farms, and Food in Harmony with the Land

[In Search of Meadowlarks] cover

Professor Marzluff sets the scene for his exploration by camping in a cornfield in Illinois to survey birds. After an early morning walk he reports: “It takes me an hour and a half before I hear my first meadowlark—an eastern—belting forth a high-pitched, if simple tingaling from an abandoned grassy field.” After 3 hours he counts only 6 meadowlarks, the lowest count ever on that stretch of road. In North America, in fact, “the estimated population [of meadowlarks] has decreased by 71 percent since 1966.” Yikes! The reasons for the decline are complex, from habitat loss to decrease of prey insects due to pesticides. In Search of Meadowlarks: Birds, Farms, and Food in Harmony with the Land covers case studies and field trips to farms, vineyards and ranches from Montana to Costa Rica and Washington to California in order to discover which agricultural practices sustain birds.

What more can farmers do to help the environment than just avoiding pesticides? I’ve never thought about how farms could provide habitat to wildlife and support birds. I assumed wildlife conservation was something that happened in wilderness areas or abandoned fields. Marzluff points out that creatures also inhabit farms and ranches, albeit in declining numbers. Pasture and fallow fields can resemble natural grasslands while hedges resemble forest edges. Regenerative agriculture is a new buzzword to describe practices on farms and ranches that might build soil health, sequester carbon, prevent storm water pollution or support wildlife. The regenerative practices must also produce food and be economically sustainable. That last part is tricky, but the example farms that Marzluff visits have managed to make it work.

One simple example employed by California vineyard Tres Sabores involved installing bird boxes to house nesting owls. Research shows an owl family consumes more than a thousand rodents over a summer. This saves vineyard managers considerable time and money controlling grape-damaging voles, rats and gophers. Another example that surprised me was how tightly-controlled cattle grazing in Montana improved river ecosystems. Cows eat invasive grasses and compact the ground to allow vernal pools to last longer into early summer, providing habitat to amphibians.

Marzluff explores how some farmers spare land on the margins to support wildlife while others embrace sharing the land, by delaying pasture mowing, for example, to allow birds to fledge their young. The book concludes with a hopeful chapter on actions consumers and policy makers should take to assist the farmers who provide for birds.

In an ideal world, farms and ranches practicing sharing and sparing methods would form networked corridors to wild lands to boost biodiversity and reduce the risk of localized extinction. Readers wanting to dig deeper into the scholarly background of themes revealed in this book should also read Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty by Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer and Angus Wright (2009). In Search of Meadowlarks is enjoyable reading for anyone interested in wildlife conservation or regenerative agriculture.

Published in the Leaflet for Scholars, August 2020, Vol. 7, Issue 8.

Big Lonely Doug

[Big Lonely Doug] cover

Harley Rustad’s Big Lonely Doug is the story of one superlative tree spared from the saw by a forester who recognized its value. Later this tree was named Big Lonely Doug by members of the Ancient Forest Alliance, who hoped to use the 1,000-year-old Douglas fir to inspire a new initiative to preserve Vancouver Island’s remaining old growth forests.

Rustad covers the history of British colonial exploration, including the Scottish botanist named David Douglas. He also compares the development of timber extraction as the foundation of British Columbia’s economy and with the more recent growth of environmental activism trying to save isolated patches of virgin forest.

The author intends to give a complete picture of a complex situation without sentimentality. The reader understands from the start that Rustad sympathizes with the activists and treasures the ancient forests and giant trees. However, his treatment of the loggers is respectful. He represents the loggers’ sensibility as intimately knowledgeable about forests, and he accepts that trees are a resource to be harvested. Cutting down the forests provides jobs and supports communities. The corporate owners don’t get off so easily when Rustad reveals how local sawmills closed down while raw logs got exported and processed in Asia.

Reading about the virgin forests with giant, ancient Western red cedars, Douglas firs and Sitka spruce (Thuja plicata, Pseudotsuga menziesii and Picea sitchensis) made me nostalgic for the times in college when I hiked among equally giant and awe-inspiring redwoods on the Northern California coast. I’ve never understood why all the rare fragments of remaining old growth were not cherished by everyone and preserved in national parks. We know how to log sustainably without leaving a clear-cut wasteland behind, so why are clearcuts permitted?

Celebrity trees like Big Lonely Doug, saved by a logger, capture the public’s imagination. Activists learned over the decades how to harness that celebrity to generate support for increasingly protective logging regulations. And now ecotourism’s beneficial economic impact acts as a counterargument against the reasoning that logging equals jobs so logging must continue unchecked. Harley Rustad documents the story of one remarkable specimen while leaving readers feeling hopeful that ancient forests may finally gain some official appreciation and protection.

Published in the Leaflet for Scholars, July 2020, Vol. 7, Issue &.

Entangled Life : How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

[Entangled Life] cover

Only a few pages into Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, my mind expanded like a puffball, fit to burst from the wildly proliferating spores of ideas. This is so much more than a book about mushrooms, the showy fruiting bodies that tend to dominate our attention to the fungal world. Merlin Sheldrake, son of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, holds a Ph.D. in tropical ecology for research on mycorrhizal relationships. The book should appeal to scientist and layperson alike, as the author excels at communicating complex concepts in lucid and literary prose, while retaining a sense of humor, wonder, and above all, hope. What role does hope play? Reading the book at this time of pandemic and social inequity, the notions of mutualism, symbiosis, and involution (involution—distinct from evolution’s focus on competition–attends to patterns and strategies of cooperation) ramify beyond the realm of mycelial networks, their implications readily extendable to human interaction.

Sheldrake wholeheartedly embraces imagination and creativity in the realm of scientific research. He does not shy away from describing fungal ‘communication,’ and the ability of organisms that do not possess brains to make ‘decisions.’ Conventional science may frown upon anthropomorphism as soft thinking, but if we eschew it entirely, we might close our minds and dismiss observable phenomena. Biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer points out that the Potawatomi language “is rich in verbs that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human-world,” while English offers no alternative way to talk about other living organisms without reducing them to an inanimate ‘it.’ Kimmerer says, “Biological realities are never black and white. Why should the stories and metaphors we use to make sense of the world—our investigative tools—be so?”

The book calls attention to the groundbreaking research of scientists, many of them women (Suzanne Simard’s work on carbon transfer between plants; Katie Field on mycorrhizal solutions to agricultural problems; Lynne Boddy on mycelial networks; Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory once dismissed as “evolutionary speculation”). Sheldrake describes his meetings with Pacific Northwest innovator and fungal theorist Paul Stamets (who has recently been working on fungal antiviral compounds), and mycoenthusiasts and entrepreneurs like Peter McCoy (founder of Radical Mycology, a group that promotes citizen scientist education on things fungal, such as mycoremediation and mycofiltration). Farther afield, in New York, the versatility of fungi is being harnessed to make biodegradable packing and building materials and furnishings as alternatives to plastic. Imagine ordering a grow-your-own-lampshade kit, or sitting on a fungal stool!

Each chapter presents surprising observations that may dismantle and rearrange the reader’s preconceptions. We humans tend to think of ourselves as discrete, separate individuals, but each of us is actually an ecosystem “composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes” that make it possible for us to function (to digest our food and reap nutrients from it, for example). We are not unique in this. Symbiosis is widespread.

An example that reveals the decision-making abilities of organisms without brains is an experiment done in Japan. Scientists set slime mold in petri dishes that replicated the layout of Greater Tokyo, with obstacles represented by bright light. The path the slime mold took was a close match for Tokyo’s rail system. Mycelial networks, too, can function in a brain-like way, responding to electrical, chemical, or other sensory impulses to communicate about surrounding conditions, directing growth accordingly.

Why should truffles (the subterranean fruiting bodies of certain kinds of mycorrhizal fungi) attract humans and other animals with their smell? Because they are underground, they cannot disperse spores without a partner. Their odor coaxes us to dig for and consume them, thereby dispersing their spores above ground. This is an example of mutualism which is beneficial to both partners.

Until reading this book, I did not know that the term ecology, coined by artist and biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, was influenced by observations about lichen. Ecology is the interrelationship of organisms in their environment, and points to nature as an interconnected whole, “a system of active forces.” In 1869, Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener presented a “dual hypothesis of lichens,” showing that lichen is composed of two different entities, a fungus (to offer physical protection and nutrients) and an alga (to harvest light and carbon dioxide). By 1877, German botanist Albert Frank coined the word symbiosis to describe this fungal-algal partnership.

The idea that one organism originates from two different lineages defies the tidy categorization that taxonomy prefers. Trevor Howard, curator of University of British Columbia’s lichen collection, refers to the “lichening rod effect,” whereby lichens strike and splinter apart familiar concepts into new forms. It gives us a new way of thinking about life. Sheldrake points to biologist Lynn Margulis and her visionary theories on the coming together of different organisms, the “intimacy of strangers.” Margulis says: “Lichens are remarkable examples of innovation emerging from partnership. The association is far more than the sum of its parts.” It turns out that lichens may be made up of more than two partners. Lichenologist Toby Spribille discovered by chance that lichen DNA contained several fungal and bacterial partners, so a lichen might be seen both as an individual, and/or as a microbiome. We need perspectives that transcend rigid categories in other spheres of existence, too. Cultural theorist David Griffiths was inspired by lichen symbiosis to write a paper entitled “Queer Theory for Lichens.”

This book is the work of an adult who has retained the his childhood curiosity about the world, who built piles of leaves and embedded himself in them to see if he could experience their decomposition. He continues to be a fungal experimenter, brewing and fermenting, and exploring the many possibilities of partnering with fungi to mend the planet. I highly recommend immersing yourself in this book. Merlin Sheldrake’s enthusiasm is contagious.

Rankafu: Orchid Print Album

Japanese horticulture is known for intense specialization with certain plants; chrysanthemums are an example. Less well known is a more recent – less than one hundred years old – infatuation with orchids. Much of this is due to one man, Shataro Kaga (1888-1954), a banker by trade, who established a major orchid nursery at Oyamazaki near Kyoto in the 1920s.

Kaga hired a business partner who was skilled at orchid cultivation, while he concentrated on the promotion of the orchids grown and the hybrids developed at Oyamazaki. For marketing, he turned to the long practiced Japanese art of wood block printing. He was fortunate to find a skilled artist, Zuigetsu Ikeda (1877-1944) who created many watercolor images that were the basis for these prints.

This story and the art are captured in “Rankafu: Orchid Print Album,” a publication by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew featuring several authors. They argue that the practice of woodblock art, which has an equivalent form in Europe, reached an epitome in Japan. “The quartet of publisher, artist, carver, and printer all contribute to the quality of the woodblock print. It is rare that these four stars are in such perfect alignment that an exceptional example of this art form is created. The Rankafu woodblock print set is such a type example.”

It took long determination by Kaga to achieve his goal with the dangers for his country during World War II (and to himself, for his quiet opposition to the war). The prints were not issued until 1946 but became prized collector items. In “Rankafu,” the complete set of 83 prints are presented together along with many watercolors by Ikeda that were not developed into woodblocks. It is a beautiful book, but also a fascinating story of the intense, collective effort by many to produce lasting beauty.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Japanese Garden Design

Marc Peter Keane has published several books based on his landscape architecture degree from Cornell University and the 18 years he spent in Kyoto designing gardens. “Japanese Garden Design,” his earliest, has stood the test of time.

The first section is a well-illustrated introduction to broad concepts such as Zen gardens, tea gardens, and stroll gardens. The author emphasizes the context that led garden designers to create these “new forms of gardens and, more importantly, new ways of perceiving what a garden is” (author’s emphasis).

The final third of the book is about design: the principles, techniques, and elements. I wouldn’t recommend relying on this book for developing your own garden but rather for understanding the intentions of the creators of established gardens. In those intentions, Keane sees a myriad of perceptions, including the garden “as a living entity with a spirit, or by perceiving the garden as a painting, an object of contemplation, a spiritual passageway, or as a work of religious art.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Flora Japonica

“Flora Japonica,” published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is really two books in one. The first part provides a rarely documented history of Japanese botany with an emphasis on the literature and illustration of the native flora. The oldest surviving example dates from 1274 and surprisingly was intended to identify plants used by veterinary surgeons. It is considered to be very comparable to European works of the same era.

Botanical illustration flourished in Edo period (1603-1868), a time when Japan was politically stable and closed to other cultures. This book includes many beautifully reproduced examples of this era, again with many parallels in style to European publications of the same time, despite very limited interaction.

The main part of this book is a celebration of botanical illustration by Japanese artists of today. The nearly one hundred works were originally commissioned for an exhibit presented at Kew, “chosen to represent the unique richness of the Japanese native flora and the influence of Japanese plants on gardens in the West.” These works are beautiful for the artistry, and the extensive notes provide considerable botanical and horticultural background for the subjects.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Garden Plants of Japan

The four main islands of the Japanese archipelago stretch north to south at the same latitudes as from Portland, Oregon to northern shore of the Gulf of California. This range has given rise to a diverse flora including many species found nowhere else. If you include all the small islands, almost one-third of the 5,600 species found in Japan are endemic.

Unlike European and North American gardeners, the Japanese have historically relied heavily on their native plants for garden plantings. The focus of “Garden Plants of Japan” is on those plants of horticultural importance, including the development of many cultivars and hybrids. Also included are some important and even iconic plants that originated in nearby China and Korea.

The authors, Ran Levy-Yamamori, from Israel, and Gerard Taaffe, who learned horticulture in Ireland, England, and Scotland, bring an international perspective to their work. Both are fluent in Japanese and had long running gardening columns in “The Japan Times”, the most circulated English language newspaper in Japan.

This encyclopedia is, at first glance, much like others on recommended garden plants. It takes reading in depth to recognize the uniqueness of its subjects. What British or America garden encyclopedia would have a whole chapter on garden mosses? In what other book are all woody plants assessed for their suitability as bonsai subjects?

Each entry has the necessary information for successful garden culture and good design choices, but also fascinating reading about traditional uses in Japanese culture. For example, Lycoris radiata (higan bana in Japanese or spider lily in English) is “rarely planted in gardens because the red flowers remind people of the dead. However this flower is frequently found growing around Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

The New Zen Garden: Designing Quiet Spaces

For designing your own space in a Japanese style, consider “The New Zen Garden” by Joseph Cali, an American who lived many years in Japan, using his education as an interior designer. In this book, he urges his readers to treat the garden as an extension of the home’s indoor space, and is very practical and systematic in his advice.

For expertise in specific elements of the garden, Cali includes tutorials by Japanese landscape architects, artisans, and garden designers. Topics include lighting, building walkways and walls in traditional styles, and even how to arrange a dry waterfall.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Japanese Zen Gardens

Yoko Kawaguchi’s book “Japanese Zen Gardens” is excellent source of Japanese gardening history, but with a focus on the dry landscape (kare-sansui) traditions associated with Zen Buddhist temples. These sites bring the history alive with gorgeous photographs by Alex Ramsay and interpretive diagrams. While the dry landscape style may seem static to those outside Japan, Kawaguchi clearly shows an ongoing evolution, including its use for gardens not associated with temples.

This book would be excellent reading for planning or recalling a trip to Japan, especially if centered on Kyoto. While too large for a traveling guide, it is written in an instructive style for a visitor. Kawaguchi was born in Japan, but has lived much of her life in either North America or the UK, and has an ability to interpret and correlate both western and eastern aesthetics.

Kawaguchi focuses the latter half of her book on symbolism. This includes plant selection and, in some cases, removal. At the temple of Tōfuku-ji in Kyoto, all the ornamental cherry trees were chopped down around 1400. All the maples suffered the same fate in 1869, although these have mostly grown back. In both cases, the trees were considered a diversion. “Are they not perhaps too showy for a temple setting, making people think about temporal pleasures rather than reflect on the state of their souls?”

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Niwaki: Pruning, Training and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way

Jake Hobson is a European author who moved to Japan. Although now returned to his native England, he writes “Niwaki: Pruning, Training and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way” from his experience in Japan, including working at an Osaka nursery.

“The reliance on trees and plants is no different from most other gardening cultures in the world, climate permitting. What is [author’s emphasis] different, however, is how the trees look.” These trees, or niwaki in Japanese, are “pruned to fit into the landscape of the garden in a way that is peculiar to Japan.”

Hobson thinks these practices can be adapted for Western gardens, but counsels his readers to not slavishly follow Japanese plant selection. Instead, he urges the gardener to apply the Japanese level of intensity in the care of garden trees, using species that flourish locally.

The author summarizes this intensity as an effort to create a “character of maturity” by “training and pruning branches to give the impression that they are larger and older than they actually are.” He then relates these practices to many of the Western traditions used on fruit trees to increase yields. This requires consistent and on-going pruning.

To illustrate these concepts, Hobson relies on mostly traditional Japanese garden trees but with some English examples. I came to the conclusion that this style might not suit everyone’s taste, but this book gives you an in-depth introduction to the concepts and the process of niwaki, and gave me a greater appreciation of this approach to gardening.

Excerpted from the Summer 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin