Iwígara

The earliest gardeners in North America were not European settlers but the peoples of the indigenous nations, especially in our region. “All native peoples of the West Coast engaged in some form of complex and sophisticated ‘gardening’ of their homelands.”

This observation is by Enrique Salmón, the author of a new book on American Indian ethnobotanical traditions. The book’s title tells part of the story. “Iwígara” (i-WEE-jah-rah) is the concept that humans are no greater than other forms of life in the natural world, including both plants and animals.

Ethnobotany, the study of the use of plants by human cultures, is an important way to understand different civilizations. Sadly, much of the existing literature can bog down in academic minutiae. Not so with “Iwígara” and Salmón’s excellent story-telling! This is a lively and thoroughly readable account of eighty plants significant to the indigenous nations of North America, told using delightful legends and the common practices that have bonded peoples and the plants of their local landscape.

Salmón is an accomplished scientist and an active collaborator with others in his field and he used that network to help determine the plants to include. He also brings a more personal viewpoint. As a member of the Rarámuri (rah-RAH-mer-ree) nation of northwestern Mexico, he learned the plant traditions from his mother, grandmother and other family members “who were living libraries of indigenous plant knowledge that has been collected, revised, and tested for millennia.”

An example is the entry on cedar. “Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest tell a story about a good man who gave unceasingly to his community.” After his death, “the Creator, so impressed with the life this man had led, decided that a great useful tree would grow from the man’s burial site.” According to this legend, this was the first western red cedar (Thuja plicata).

Indeed, this is a useful tree to many regional cultures for buildings, canoes, tools, clothing, and medicines. Throughout “Iwígara,” well-chosen photographs, both old and new, enhance the stories. “Cedar” is highlighted by an impressive 1914 photograph of Kwakiutl cedar mask dancers.

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Summer 2021

Flora of Oregon, Volume 2: Dicots A-F

The second volume of “Flora of Oregon” continues the excellent work of volume 1, released in 2015, by focusing on the families of dicots from A to F. The third and final volume, in preparation, will be about the remaining dicot families.

While the keys and botanical descriptions are the core of this work, like the previous volume there are some excellent additions. An introductory essay discusses the many considerations and importance of native plant gardens. An appendix provides a long list of native plants adaptable to gardens and their cultural needs. Maps show the most suitable regions within Oregon for each species, and these recommendations could easily be extrapolated to Washington.

Another essay – “Insects as Plant Taxonomists” – deeply dives into the interrelations between plant families and insect families, and how they have evolved together. The authors hope “to inspire curiosity and enlightenment about the many different insect activities that can be observed while outdoors.” A final essay introduces the process for creating herbarium specimens and their importance to taxonomists.

Excerpted from the Spring 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Fearless Gardening: Be Bold, Break the Rules, Grow What You Love

“Gardening is not a straight line. There are many detours along the way, and thankfully, you never actually arrive at the finish.” This is a motto of Loree Bohl, a Portland gardener and author of “Fearless Gardening.”

Bohl’s garden typifies this thinking with many, quite non-traditional plants for a Pacific Northwest garden. She is not afraid to try new things and regards the failures as lessons to be learned, and perhaps to be tried again. It might work this time!

Among her favorite plants are Agave, Yucca, and Opuntia. She is another big advocate for using pots: on the ground, amongst the garden plantings, and hanging off walls or the rafters of a covered, outdoor seating area.

She credits her inspiration in part to two noteworthy and innovative West Coast, women gardeners of the past: Ruth Bancroft, who lived to be 109, and Ganna Walska, who lived to be 96. Each crafted gardens very unlike their neighbors, starting at an age when many would be beyond new projects. They are models of how the creative energy of gardening can lead to a long and happy life.

Bohl also profiles several Washington and Oregon gardens that have stretched the plant palette. These include the McMenamins Anderson School garden in Bothell, the Point Defiance Zoo garden in Tacoma, and the Amazon Spheres in Seattle.

Her own garden is another fine example. I was part of a tour led by the Northwest Horticultural Society in 2017 to Portland area gardens that included hers. In an essay titled “Successful Gardeners Kill Plants and So Will You,” she describes how the day before we arrived, despite it being late July, a large, established Grevillea victoriae ‘Murray Queen’ suddenly died. She was horrified, but what could she do. For us visitors, committed gardeners all, it was an excellent lesson and opportunity to commiserate.

Excerpted from the Spring 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Oregon Big Tree & Shrub Measurements

The world champion Douglas-fir in height is found in Coos County, Oregon. But what if your interest lies in smaller trees? For example, the tallest vine maple (Acer circinatum) in the country is 46’ high and found in Clatsop County, Oregon. This detail, along with many, many others can be found in “Oregon: Big Tree & Shrub Measurements” by Jack Black.

At first glance, this book may seem like a curiosity, one person’s obsession with finding, measuring, and photographing (typically with a convenient human standing nearby for scale) the largest and tallest of the Oregon flora. However, the charts and especially the photographs gave me strong admiration of the diversity of woody plants in both wild and managed settings.

The roughly 200 species considered are almost evenly divided between natives and introduced species. Short vignettes give the back story for some of the more remarkable examples. Although Black compiled and published this book, his endnotes document the work of many individuals and organizations in finding, measuring, and recording these special trees. It represents a real labor of love by all involved. A new, larger edition was published in 2021.

Excerpted from the Spring 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Windcliff: A Story of People, Plants, and Gardens

Dan Hinkley newest book, “Windcliff: A Story of People, Plants, and Gardens,” is largely about that garden, his residence of the last 20 years with his husband, Robert Jones. As hinted at in the sub-title, the book is also a memoir about Hinkley’s youth in a small, Michigan town and the world-wide network of friends and colleagues he has developed through horticulture and plant exploration.

Windcliff is divided into several broad areas based on the types of plantings, and Hinkley uses these areas as a structure for the book. Both endpapers show a helpful plan of the property to help you keep track. Within each chapter, a series of essays explore specific plantings, design challenges and solutions, and an intimate view into the various successes and failures, often with correlations to the author’s personal life.

My impression of the book is shaped by a handful of visits I’ve made to Windcliff, with my most vivid memories being of the bluff. Not surprisingly, this is the centerpiece of the book. A large open space with vast views is very different from the garden at Heronswood where Hinkley and Jones lived previously. The design challenges were equally immense, but they pulled it off magnificently.

The photography of Claire Takacs well captures the feeling of the bluff and its plantings, while the writing explains the why and how those plantings in that space were achieved. I found the essays on the large grasses, the agapanthus, and other South African natives especially engaging.

While the bluff was an unqualified success, the meadow near the entry drive was not. As gardeners, the most fun is to read about another’s failures, especially by an eminent plantsperson such as Hinkley. In brief, he discovered that his deepest affinity is with woody plants, and so an arboretum of trees and shrubs, many found on his plant exploration trips, are gradually taking over the meadow.

Other setbacks, such as a neighbor’s large, ugly house on the property line, will also resonate with readers, but so will the re-discovery of the joys of a vegetable garden. Gardeners without vast acreage will find value in the extensive section on potted plants placed near the house. After reading that chapter, I will definitely try Eucomis in a container this year.

The area around the house is where the visions of Hinkley and architect Jones intersect. The give-and-take will amuse and inform couples that have a similar dynamic. Throughout the writing, Hinkley’s wry sense of humor and deep sensibilities of the emotional importance of gardens is very clear. “There are more approaches, more tricks to the trade, undoubtedly as many as there are good gardeners. Yet the yearning for beauty, whatever that may be, is the same. It is not intentional nor is it fully accidental. There is no endpoint or possession.”

Excerpted from the Spring 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Complete Container Herb Gardening: Design and Grow Beautiful, Bountiful Herb-Filled Pots

If your garden doesn’t have much space for growing herbs, a container garden might be the answer. I recommend a new book on this topic by western Washington writer, Sue Goetz.

I approached her “Complete Container Herb Gardening” in two ways. First, it is a very basic but detailed guide to using pots to host a significant part of your garden, or even the whole thing. “Growing in any type of container affords the opportunity to plant a garden almost anywhere.” This includes inside a home, on a balcony, or in a small corner of a yard devoted mostly to boisterous activities by children and pets. Hanging baskets or vertical planting walls provide other options.

The second focus of my reading was on the herb plants she recommends. Defining herbs broadly, she include all plants with essential oils and other parts for use in cooking, cleaning, body care, and many treatments for well-being.

Goetz is a teacher at heart, and her lesson plan for this book is well thought out. In addition to how to choose a container, she provides detailed projects that teach how to design, combine, and maintain your plantings. By using various herbs, these plant combinations have benefits beyond their beauty. Even if your goal was only for pretty flowers, you may realize that these primarily foliage plants are also very ornamental, and suddenly you, too, are an herb gardener.

Excerpted from the Spring 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Douglas Fir: The Story of the West’s Most Remarkable Tree

There are many rare and unusual trees and shrubs in the Washington Park Arboretum. Standing aside (and sometimes out-competing) these wonderful exotics is the native matrix of trees, especially tall conifers. Perhaps the most iconic of these is the Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). “Douglas Fir: The Story of the West’s Most Remarkable Tree” is a comprehensive new book by Stephen Arno and Carl Fiedler about this tree native from northern British Columbia to the high mountains of Mexico.

There two distinct varieties of the Douglas-fir. The coastal tree (P. m. var. menziesii) that we are familiar with in Seattle and is found along the coast south to the California Bay Area. The inland variety (P. m. var. glauca) has an even wider distribution east of the coastal ranges and into the Rocky Mountains. The ecological success of both varieties highlights their adaptability, supported by an extra set of chromosomes when compared to most of the other West Coast conifers. In simple terms, this means the “Douglas-fir is nature’s all-purpose tree.”

This malleable nature has caused more than its share of nomenclature issues. Is it a fir? A pine? A spruce? The answer is none of the above. The genera Pseudotsuga translates as “false hemlock” – a rather unfortunate compromise. Even the common name has varied, although the Seventh International Botanical Congress in 1950 settled on “Douglas-fir” and that form is used throughout this book (although the hyphen is oddly missing from the book’s title).

The coast Douglas-fir is one of the tallest plant species in the world. Its loftiest example (at 327’) currently ranks number three behind the height champions of the Coast Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens at 380.3’) and Eucalyptus regnans (329.7’) of southeastern Australia. An especially engaging part of this book discusses the credible possibility of historical Douglas-fir specimens, taken down for lumber one hundred or more years ago, that likely exceeded 400’ in height.

While Euro-Americans quickly recognized the value of Douglas-fir wood for building, the indigenous people throughout the tree’s vast range were the first to use its timber this way, but they had many other uses, too. All parts of the tree are valuable and were used for preserving and flavoring food, for medicine, for crafting tools, in sacred ceremonies, and most importantly, providing heat. “Both varieties of Douglas-fir historically fulfilled myriad roles for native peoples and were the overwhelming choice for one critical daily need: fuel for their fires.”

Excerpted from the Spring 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

[Braiding Sweetgrass] cover

Braiding Sweetgrass makes for good reading about all of the topics listed in the subtitle. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes engagingly, drawing the reader in. The book is full of information about Native American connections to plants. Because the author is a biologist, the scientific relationship to her Indigenous background is always made clear. Kimmerer is a member of the Potawatomi nation and a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

She weaves the title elements together with her life as the mother of two daughters in a series of loosely connected essays. Her main themes are gratitude and responsibility, qualities valued highly among Native American peoples, values she argues are necessary if we are to save our planet from climate change and especially from our own greed. No one will find saving plants important enough to make sacrifices, she insists, unless they have a relationship with those plants.

Each chapter combines essay with narration. For instance, in “Maple Sugar Moon” she begins by telling an Anishinaabe creation story about Nanabohzo, the Original Man, diluting the sap of the maple tree, which originally had come directly from the tree as syrup. Now many hours of boiling down are required to make the same syrup. He did so as punishment after people became lazy and had not expressed gratitude or acted responsibly toward nature’s gifts.

Then Kimmerer tells how she had her daughters collect many buckets of maple sap and spend hours boiling them down, using Native American methods – a lot of very hard work. She believes part of being a good mother was teaching the girls their heritage through this work. Mixed into her narrative Kimmerer explains scientifically how the tree creates sap and how the process benefits the tree. She is blending the elements of gratitude, to the tree for producing sap, and responsibility, the work of making the syrup for people to enjoy.

Kimmerer doesn’t expect her non-Indigenous readers to follow her own practices of asking plants’ permission before harvest or giving them a tobacco offering in gratitude. By including these practices, she does illustrate ways of developing human-plant relationships. With her students, described in other chapters, as with her daughters, she shows that by taking them into nature she can help them make those connections. The rest of us will have to find our own paths, perhaps using her examples as models. This book makes a convincing case that those connections are necessary for the future of the plant world and therefore of our own.

Published in The Leaflet, March 2021, Volume 8, Issue 3.

The Sakura Obsession

[The Sakura Obsession] cover

In Japan, “the sakura, or cherry-blossom, culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries revolved around the flower’s short life and swift, predictable death. The cherry blossom was ephemeral, like life itself.”

Naoko Abe wrote about this tradition in her native Japanese in a book published in 2016. It was very well received and there was immediate interest in an English translation. She decided instead to do further research, especially on the British roots of her story. In 2019 she published the largely newly-written Sakura Obsession, the source of the quotation above, in English. For this more global audience, she included the history of many societal practices likely unknown outside of Japan.

She also describes the wild species and the many cultivars and selections of Prunus made over the centuries in Japan. By the late 1800s, these had largely been pushed aside from gardens by Prunus x yedoensis ‘Somei-yoshino’ that as a clone, provided the uniformity desired for Japanese ceremonies. This is the cherry tree of the University of Washington Quad and the dominant variety planted at the Washington, D.C. Tidal Basin.

In a parallel storyline, Abe writes the biography of Collingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram (1880-1981), who rescued many out-of-favor cherry selections by bringing them from Japan to his English garden, later reintroducing them to their home country. It is also the study of the close relationship between two island nations and colonizing powers, Japan and Britain, and how horticulture was a common language.

There is a somber side to this history. As is possible in any culture, the symbolism of the flowers changed, especially for Japanese children, including Abe’s father, in the 1930s. “Rather than focusing on cherry blossom as a symbol of life, the songs, plays and school textbooks now focused more on death.” During World War II, branches of cherry blossoms were used to wave farewell to kamikaze pilots as they took off in their planes, going to their deaths.

On the whole, however, this is a book of hope and international goodwill. I didn’t expect to get hooked by this story but I did, and recommend it for the engaging narrative of intellectual exchange and horticultural history.

Published in the Leaflet for Scholars, February 2021, Volume 8, Issue 2.

Nature Obscura

[Nature Obscura] cover

In this second year of seemingly never-ending plague, Nature Obscura by Kelly Brenner speaks directly to our condition. What better time to learn the pleasures of urban nature? Even now with some formidable restrictions, we can walk in our neighborhoods and look closely. The book focuses on Seattle, but most of the species described can be found in any city.

Each chapter builds a biography of a different life form, some more obvious, like Anna’s hummingbird, and others harder to see, or to see as wondrous, like the algae and insects in Brenner’s backyard pond. She even makes slime mold appealing. For that example and several others, the budding urban naturalist will need a hand lens, or in some cases a microscope, to discovery the intricacy and beauty of the subject.

In the chapter on dragonflies, Brenner begins by describing an adult emerging slowly from the larva. The description takes you right in: “Then the yellow eyes, still a muted brownish through the skin, begin to move like marbles sliding under a piece of tissue paper. . . . Next the adult slides out of the skin as if being squeezed from a tube of toothpaste.” The chapter includes the author’s visits to wetlands in Eugene OR, discussion of the distressing loss of wetlands in the Puget Sound area, which dragonflies require, and more adventures with these insects at the constructed wetlands at Magnuson Park in Seattle.

Brenner urges readers to pay close attention to what they see around them, to “get their eyes in” to focus on nature. Dr. Seuss’s first picture book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, begins with a boy instructed to watch carefully for surprising things every day on his walk home from school. Seuss’s boy imagines fantastic rather than real discoveries. Kelly Brenner wants you to see the amazing in what is there in front of your eyes.

The book’s cover and a few well done but unlabeled black and white illustrations help the reader visualize Brenner’s subjects. Many more would be helpful. Instead, blossoming urban naturalists will need to pursue the excellent bibliography to find images and more information. Each of the sixteen life forms described in the book has its own list of reference works – a gold mine indeed.

Published in The Leaflet, February 2021, Volume 8, Issue 2.