Braiding Sweetgrass

In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer unfolds a mesmerizing journey through the convergence of nature, Indigenous wisdom, and personal reflection. Kimmerer’s poetic prose beautifully weaves a tapestry of stories, imparting ecological wisdom that transcends its pages and provides a transformative experience for its readers.

In a world rushing with fast-paced living, the book serves as a gentle reminder to slow down, observe, and welcome nature’s wisdom. It goes beyond being a mere book, extending an invitation to explore our intricate ties with our surroundings, all while challenging the confines of Western science. Rather than outright dismissing ideologies rooted in Western science, it encourages a thoughtful reconsideration of alternative ways of knowing, inviting us to embrace a multiplicity of perspectives in our interaction with the world.

As a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer guides readers to perceive the world through reciprocal relationships with the land, seamlessly weaving in the narratives and wisdom of her ancestors. Her narrative gracefully dances between scientific understanding and Indigenous perspectives, creating a harmonious blend that resonates deeply. Each chapter felt like a meditative stroll through nature, with Kimmerer as a wise companion, offering insights that inspired awe, reverence, and a profound love for the world and its non-human inhabitants.

Through such thoughtful and skilled storytelling, Kimmerer prompts reflection on our connection to the environment and fosters a sense of responsibility and gratitude. Braiding Sweetgrass is such an enchanting, enlightening, and inspiring book—a must-read. These stories are not just tales but offerings, gifts that linger in memory, cherished and unforgettable.

Reviewed by Ashlyn Higareda in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 12, December 2023.

Human-plant relationships, Reviews

Five Centuries of Women & Gardens

The National Portrait Gallery in London reopened this June after three years of closure due to Covid (and refurbishing). To celebrate, readers can pick up this excellent book from 2000, written to support an exhibition at the Gallery.

The women and gardens in the title of Sue Bennett’s Five Centuries of Women & Gardens are British women and British gardens, each account supported by elegant portraits and some fine garden views. Bennett manages to include in each brief text biographical information, clear descriptions of the gardens, and just enough social history to place everything in context. The reader learns how gardens changed over the centuries, as well as how women gradually gained legal and social control over their gardens and their lives.

The subjects begin with Queen Elizabeth I and end with Beth Chatto. The Elizabethan gardens were created for and about the Queen, not ordered by her. Nobles currying favor developed gardens symbolically worshipping her as the Virgin Queen, using topiary, fountains, and privet hedges.

Queen Caroline, wife of George II, developed gardens at Hyde Park, Kensington, and especially Richmond Lodge. Each focused on supporting the legitimacy of the Hanoverian kings, recently imported from Germany and not very popular. At Richmond her garden included a hermitage with a live hermit and “Merlin’s Cave,” a thatched cottage and grotto meant to connect the royal family to Merlin’s prophecy. Alas, the public response was ridicule.

In the 20^th century Miriam Rothschild (1908-2005) turned very unlikely fields into meadows full of wildflowers, restoring medieval views. Rothschild, a scientist sometimes called “Queen of the fleas” because of her research into them, also decoded at Bletchley during World War II. In 1970, as a retirement project, she scattered wildflower seeds collected from a derelict airfield over the remnants of a tennis court on her property. In ten years her meadow had nearly 100 species of flowers and grasses She then sent out her seeds for use in other areas of the country. The National Trust adopted some of her ideas, and Prince Charles (now Charles III) worked with her on a wildflower garden at his estate at Highgrove.

“Five Centuries of Women and Gardens” gives surprisingly complete pictures of the connections women have had with their gardens. Each woman appears as a lively personality, accompanied by a dazzling portrait.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 11, November 2023.

Brave the Wild River

Today raft trips through the Grand Canyon are common. Several companies offer choices of a few or many days. One specifies that the client must be at least nine years old. These trips differ greatly from the one Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter took in 1938. One difference is the Hoover Dam. Before the dam, the Colorado River challenged travelers with extreme rapids, rapids now slowed and sometimes covered by the water that rose behind the dam.

Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny recounts how these two women, both affiliated with the University of Michigan botany department, overcame multiple challenges in addition to the river, to map and collect plants in the canyon before many of them were submerged.

Clover, an instructor at the university, was a generation older than Jotter, a graduate student. The trip was Clover’s passion. Opposition came from a chorus of voices proclaiming that the Grand Canyon was “no place for a woman.” She overcame reluctance in the Michigan botany department to approve the project and hesitation by Norman Nevills to guide the trip. He hoped to set up a business floating adventurers through the canyon but was reluctant to take women.

Sevigny takes the reader through the hair-raising trip in boats designed by Nevills, a national media frenzy accompanying the travelers, and Clover’s frustration that no one seemed interested in the plant collecting. She had to harass Nevills to make stops so the women could collect, and the media mostly failed to mention plants as the purpose of the trip.

Sevigny includes the history of the countryside the group passed, as well as biographies of those involved. The book is full of lovely details, like the women’s selection of brown overalls to wear, because Clover thought jeans too masculine. Or the gyrations required to maintain modesty while bathing in the river. (Four men accompanied the women in three boats. The women did the cooking.)

By the end the reader is amazed that any of the collected plants made it back to Michigan and a few to the Smithsonian. Those plants and the carefully detailed descriptions Clovis and Jotter wrote became useful botanic history as scholars have tried to create a picture of flora in the canyon before the dam.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy and published in the Leaflet, November 2023, Volume 10, Issue 11.

Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest

What would it be like to decide one day to visit all the biggest trees in your state, or, in this case, the province of British Columbia? Amanda Lewis takes us with her on this adventure. Tracking Giants blends humorous takes on her own incompetence, lots of information about Big Trees, quotations from multiple nature writers, and thoughtful consideration of personal growth.

The trees she sought are Champions, listed online by the province’s Big Tree Committee. To make the list, a tree must have the highest score for its species in a calculation that combines measurements of its crown, its height, and its diameter at breast height. As Lewis, notes, searching for Champions is like squeezing Jello – trees grow; trees die by natural and human actions. They can be chopped down or simply demoted by discovery of a bigger tree. A Champion one day may be replaced the next.

Lewis is a book editor, but when she told a Big Tree Committee member her search plans, she was asked to report her measurements of each Big Tree she found. She had a lot to learn. At first she measured the diameter by hugging the tree. Later she became more adept.

Interspersed with narratives of the search are quotations from many nature writers, some recent, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. These, like many other of her sources, are part of the Miller Library collection.

Finding a tree, looking at it, and measuring it became over time insufficient for Lewis. She records how she learned to consider the tree’s environment, the history of the surrounding forest, the plants and animals nearby. Eventually she broadened her whole concept of the search itself.

All this is worth reading about. The writing is lively and clear. The parts are well integrated. Champions turn out to be a winning subject.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in the Leaflet, Volume 10, Issue 10, October 2023.

The Container Victory Garden

If you’re new to container gardening, especially edible gardens, start with this book. Maggie Stuckey clearly had a mission in mind when writing this book: to invite people to explore how they can start growing tasty food and to provide them with a resource that is useful, easy to follow, and clearly written.

The crux of The Container Victory Garden is an introduction to taking advantage of small spaces—balconies, patios, or a few steps—and reimaging those spaces as gardens where you can grow and harvest food you like. Stuckey does not assume prior knowledge, gently walking readers through the necessities for container gardens: considering sun and water supply; tools that are especially useful; and advantages and disadvantages to different kinds of containers. She even includes some creative inspiration for reusing furniture or thrift goods to create a container garden that has more personality or better function. She goes through the process of figuring out what kinds of plants to grow with several whole chapters digging more substantially into what’s helpful to know about carrots or tomatoes or basil or pansies.

Janice Minjin Yang and Lee Johnston have also done an excellent job using art to increase the book’s impact. There are three kinds of art used in the book. The first kind is photographs that show readers what the plants look like. The second kind is black-and-white line sketches that illustrate concepts and ideas, making it easier to understand different trellis options or what a root ball looks like. The third kind is paintings depicting scenes of people enjoying their container gardens. I particularly enjoy the last because the paintings help show a wide array of styles when it comes to setting up container gardens and they make it easier for a reader to envision what they might want their garden to be like.

Woven throughout this book are threads about the history of victory gardens. Common during times of war or pandemic, victory gardens have come to occupy a strong space in our cultural imagination for the idea that we can do something to take care of us and those around us in times of profound stress by growing our own tasty, healthy food. As a historian of food and cultural ideas about what we eat, I really enjoyed these threads in Stuckey’s book. She includes historical information, documents and photographs, and recollections from about 20 individuals about their experiences with victory gardens. I feel this dimension of the book helps support the mission of inviting new people into the world of gardening by showing them how they can be part of this bigger, fascinating picture.

While this book is substantial and very helpful, it is not intended to be comprehensive. For readers wanting a more comprehensive book on container gardening, I couldn’t do better than to recommend McGee & Stuckey’s The Bountiful Container, by Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey. But for an introductory book on the subject, Stuckey’s The Container Victory Garden is definitely top-notch.

Reviewed by Nick Williams in The Leaflet, Volume 10, Issue 9, September 2023

The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium

The National Herbarium of New South Wales, Australia, acts as setting and springboard for Prudence Gibson’s narratives about and descriptions of preserved plants. Gibson holds in admirable tension the wonders of the herbarium and the troubling colonialism that assumed authority over Australia’s plants, collecting them without permission, naming and organizing them by European standards. The question of who owns plants hovers in the background.

Gibson spent three years seeking “to find out what plant-human relations really are and what they mean. And what that meaning tells us about the herbarium” (p. xvi).

The chapter on Joseph Banks, for instance, dwells on the irony of Banksia, a widespread tree in Australia, being named for the famous English plant collector. Yes, he was an amazing collector, but the plant was there long before he arrived. Gibson describes some current efforts to add plant names used by Indigenous people to the herbarium descriptions. The task is challenging in part because the many Aboriginal groups have different names for the same plants.

The National Herbarium moved to a new site during the years Gibson was working on this project. The Plant Thieves includes some lively conversations between Gibson and local women artists creating art for the new building. Throughout Gibson expresses awe at the care given the plant samples in the herbarium.

One chapter recounts a collaboration between botanists and Indigenous Elders to solve a mystery about black beans. These large seeds (also called bogum or Moreton Bay chestnuts, also known as Castanospermum australe) are toxic, but Indigenous people process them for use in a bread called damper. (I used Google frequently to translate Australian terms.) Somehow the plant had spread hundreds of miles, puzzling scientists, because this plant does not spread easily. European settlers believed Indigenous people were not organized enough to establish long trade routes, a logical way the plant could have traveled. The Elders told a Songline story of an ancestral spirit carrying a bag of beans many miles. When scientists examined plants along the route described in the story, they found bean plants everywhere. This evidence supports the presence of a highly developed Indigenous social organization.

The Plant Thieves reads very easily. Gibson brings to life the many people she meets and provides much intriguing information about plants and their ties to the herbarium.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 9, September 2023

The Weeds

It’s hard to imagine a more botanical novel than Katy Simpson-Smith’s The Weeds, which takes its narrative structure from Richard Deakin’s 1855 book Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, or, Illustrations and Descriptions of Four Hundred and Twenty Plants Growing Spontaneously upon the Ruins of the Colosseum of Rome. The primary characters are two intentionally unnamed women, one in 2018 and the other in 1854, and the occasional refrain of a ghost, the unsettled spirit of Richard Deakin hovering over the Colosseum.

The contemporary woman is a graduate student from Mississippi, gathering plant observations for her thesis advisor. She is a keen observer of plants and people, and we soon learn she has recently lost her mother (who also had a strong connection with plants). As she works on the Rome Colosseum project, she develops an idea for a thesis exploring climate change through the plant life in Jackson’s Mississippi Coliseum. The 19th century woman has transgressed the norms of society: she is eager to avoid an arranged marriage and takes up petty thievery to make herself unmarriageable. The “you” addressed in her narrative is her lover, a woman. She works as Deakin’s indentured assistant, observing and describing the plants.

Both women consider the wild plants in context (how are they used by humans and animals, how they fit in an ecosystem, how climate affects them). For this, both are rebuked. The thesis advisor is dismissive, telling his student she has “an anecdotal mind,” whereas true scientists (men) are rational, and do not allow sentiment to intrude. Her role is to record and learn, his role is to interpret and author. The fictional Deakin tells his assistant that science is knowledge freed from emotion, and she wonders “how many days or centuries it will take for him to be proven wrong.” Whenever either woman mentions mystical, medical, or agricultural associations of the plants, they are told these things are irrelevant. But the 19th century woman believes “there is a bias against time here, and I must fault science for its disregard of history. Does it think knowledge is not accumulated but sudden?”

By turns furious, hilarious, and botanically erudite, this deeply feminist novel shines a light on the relative invisibility of women’s contributions to botany in particular and science in general. The women characters are never named because that has so often been the case in real life. Nothing in the historical record suggests a resemblance between the fictional Richard Deakin and the real one, but there are undoubtedly many instances of women overlooked and omitted as co-authors and researchers, whose contributions to the pool of knowledge remain unrecognized. Their absence from the record is a ghost that should haunt us.

The book includes a dozen exquisite graphite drawings by Kathy Schermer-Gramm, depicting selected plants of the character’s proposed Flora Colisea Mississippiana. If you want to explore Deakin’s book, a digitized copy is linked here and in the catalog record.

Reviewed by Rebecca Alexander, published in the Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 10, October 2023.

Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden

One of my favorite books in the Miller Library collection is Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden. Published in 2000, it recounts the development of a formerly grassy parking area into a garden with gravel used as mulch, and no irrigation once plantings were established.

I visited the Chatto garden in August 2000 when the garden was in its eighth season. I was charmed with the concept and especially the look of the garden. When I learned a book was coming out, it was a must not only for the Miller collection, but also for my home library.

Beth Chatto (1923-2018) was an early proponent of the concept of “right plant, right place,” choosing plants with needs that match the conditions of their garden setting. Gravel Garden is a careful study of what plants have worked in this new garden, and those that have not.

Your mental image of England may be of green meadows and lush gardens nurtured by gentle summer rains. However, this garden is in Essex, one of the driest counties, and averages only 20” inches of rain per year. By contrast, Seattle has nearly twice that amount. One key difference is the rainfall is distributed evenly through the months, so that the long, droughty summers we experience are not typical there.

Sadly, this may be changing. In June 2023, I attended the Hardy Plant Study Weekend at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. John Grimshaw, noted author and director of the Yorkshire Arboretum, reported that precipitation throughout the eastern part of England has been diminishing, and summers are drying out.

Last summer was especially bad and the Beth Chatto Garden blog reported that as of mid-August 2022, it had been two months without any rain. A similar drought occurred in 1995. In the book, Chatto describes at the end of that summer “a dry look to this area, but not a dead look.” She continues, “I am often thankful to see how many plants not only survive but look good after this testing period of drought.” A list of the successes, and the few failures, follows. I consult it frequently.

Reviewed by Brian Thompson.

Teaming with Bacteria

Jeff Lowenfels was immersed in gardening and small-scale farming as a child in upstate New York. He completed an undergraduate degree at Harvard in Geology, and later earned a law degree at Northeastern University focused on environmental law. With this background, it is perhaps surprising that he has lived most of his adult life in Anchorage, Alaska. Now retired from practicing law, he continues to write a long-running (over 45 years) gardening column in the “Anchorage Daily News.”

I recently attended a study weekend on hardy plants at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver where Lowenfels was a speaker. His presentation was fast-paced, with lots of humor, while succinctly telling his personal evolution in understanding garden ecology. He now promotes sustainable gardens that are part of their environment, rather than being artificially separated from nature through practices such as rototilling and the use of synthetic fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides. This is reflected in the four books he has published.

The first, “Teaming with Microbes,” was co-written with Wayne Lewis (published in 2006, revised edition in 2010), and describes the intricate network of organisms in soils. Gardeners are encouraged to promote and protect these networks. “Teaming with Nutrients” (2013) followed with a detailed look at how plants intake necessary sustenance from soils. “Teaming with Fungi” (2017) illustrates that most plants get additional nutritional help through mycorrhizal associations between roots and fungi. Much of the presentation in Vancouver was about his most recent book, “Teaming with Bacteria” (2022), that analyzes a third method of plant feeding using endophytic bacteria. This topic is based on research that is very recent and still developing.

I recommend all of these books, as Lowenfels is skilled at presenting scientific concepts and necessary terminology in an easy to grasp manner without being overly simplistic. He is also adept at encouragement. In “Teaming with Bacteria” he writes, “I implore you to pause while gardening every now and then, lean on your winged weeder or push mower, and just contemplate the presence of endophytes in your plants. Think about all they do.”

Reviewed by Brian Thompson.

Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada

In the nineteenth century, Canadian women got their hands dirty in lots of botanical projects. Flora’s Fieldworkers, edited by Ann Shteir, fills some gaps in the history of these women’s work. The book grew out of a 2017 workshop, “Women, Men, and Plants in nineteenth-century Canada,” at York University in Toronto.

Some women in this volume collected plants. A few sent plant samples to William Jackson Hooker at Kew Gardens in England for his Flora Boreali–Americana and to other plant seekers. Several women established or participated in organizations promoting or educating about botany and horticulture. Others produced botanic or floral art – paintings, albums, quilts. Nearly all gardened.

Flora’s Fieldworkers describes these endeavors, often placing them in a context of pushing the boundaries of the roles socially prescribed for women. Gardening and floral art were women’s work. Everything else in botany required women skillfully to insert themselves into the male-dominated establishment.

Christian Ramsay (1786-1839), the Countess of Dalhousie, amassed great quantities of plant specimens in Canada (and India and Scotland). Some are still preserved in several herbaria. She sent samples to Hooker, which he used. Like almost all the women in this volume, Lady Dalhousie taught herself botany, and she became expert. Her collecting opportunities came as she followed her husband’s diplomatic career. In her case, as in others, the author reminds us that England’s empire-building hovered in the background.

Catherine Parr Traill (1802-1899) was the most famous woman in this collection, though much of her fame grew from her work as a children’s author and natural historian. Plants played a large role in such works as her The Backwoods of Canada, along with the birds and small animals. She combined careful and accurate plant descriptions with the context of her own sense of connection. If she could not find a new plant described in her small botanical library, she happily invented her own name for it.

Traill began collecting plants soon after her arrival in Canada from England in 1832, continuing for seven decades and writing detailed descriptions of each. With the help of her niece, Agnes Fitzgibbon, Traill published two volumes (both using standard nomenclature), Canadian Wild Flowers (in the Miller Library’s Tall Shelves) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada , in the rare book collection. Both titles are digitized and available online.

Ramsay, Fitzgibbon, and Traill join numerous others in this enlightening volume on early women botanists up north.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 7, July 2023