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

DIY Mushroom Cultivation: Growing Mushrooms at Home for Food, Medicine, and Soil

Willoughby Arevalo grew up near the redwoods of northern California and developed an interest in mushrooms at an early age. He became so proficient at gathering edible, wild mushroom, that they were an important of his student diet while at Humboldt State University. More recently, he moved to Vancouver, BC, developing his skill at growing his own mushrooms in an indoor space of only 100 square feet.

He shares his expertise in “DIY Mushroom Cultivation,” taking the reader well beyond mushroom growing kits to starting an active hobby that provides a delicious and healthful food source. Intended for those with little space, the author is very thorough in taking the beginner through all the steps of securing or making necessary equipment, acquiring mushroom tissue or spores, and what to use for substrate – including yard waste and even your junk mail! Additional chapters address outdoor culture, and a selection of the best species for home growers.

Excerpted from the Fall 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

The Inspired House Plant

Jen Stearns is the owner of Urban Sprouts, a houseplant specialty nursery in Renton, WA. Her new book, “The Inspired House Plant,” aims to make your indoor space more festive by promoting a great diversity of indoor plants and teaching you to be a good plant parent. The emphasis is on foliage – so no African violets or orchids, but that doesn’t mean the selections are dull.

Successful display is critical for enjoyment and various options are considered, including bowls, terrariums, and plants in containers of water – fish are optional. Vertical and hanging plants are encouraged and one chapter is devoted to using your plants to enhance your overall interior style. Of course, there is some promotion of the author’s business, but the cultural advice is sound and this nicely designed book will encourage your creativity.

Excerpted from the Fall 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Legacy of a Passionate Gardener

Pat Roome has been a gardener for almost all of her 87 years, has lived and gardened at the same Bellevue home for 56 years, and has been a Master Gardener for 45 years. That’s a lot of experience, and she decided it was time to share her accumulated knowledge in a self-published book, “Legacy of a Passionate Gardener.” We are all the beneficiaries.

This is an informal book, with many charts and how-to sheets that I could imagine as handouts for a Master Gardener clinic. Examples include “How to Grow Tomatoes Easily” (in the Seattle area) and a homemade “Soil Composition Test.” The chapters cover a comprehensive list of topics relevant to the home gardener with many examples, all helpful and many amusing.

“Don’t even think of digging out a full-sized Juniper by pulling it out tied to the bumper of a pickup. I have seen this done with disastrous results.” This illustrate one of Roome’s common themes: don’t try to do everything yourself – money to bring in a pro is well spent. I found her chapter on tips for the older gardener to be especially good, with advice relevant to the physical well-being of gardeners of any age.

She freely admits her mistakes and encourages continual learning to make a garden that gives one pleasure without a lot of stress. She takes this advice to heart in concluding “my garden continues to give me a lot of happiness and satisfaction.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden

I had the opportunity to visit the Kubota Garden in southeast Seattle last fall as part of a staff enrichment day for the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. It was my first visit in decades, a time in which I have visited many notable public gardens throughout North America and in parts of Europe. For all my travels, I had been overlooking a garden treasure very close to home.

My enjoyment from that visit was enhanced by learning that a new book, “Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden,” was in production. It is amazing!

A major part of this book is a biography of Fujitarō Kubota (1879-1973) with contributions by several different authors. Growing up in a rice farming family on one of the smaller Japanese islands, he was mostly self-taught in botany and the aesthetics of gardening. His humble background precluded him from being trained in the rigid traditions of designing Japanese gardens.

He left his family and after several stops, he completed his emigration to Seattle in 1910. He eventually purchased five acres in the Rainier Valley but only with help, as a Japanese citizen he was not allowed to own property outright. That was the beginning of the garden he developed and nurtured for the next 50 years. It was also the base for his livelihood as a garden designer and installer, and the site for growing his extensive nursery stock.

Kubota created demonstration gardens along a roadway that allowed customers to drive through and choose their favorites from various garden vignettes, which he would reproduce at their homes. A typical contract included the expected details of construction and landscape materials, but the choice of plantings were at the discretion of Kubota. His story captures much of the history of garden design practices and nurseries in Seattle in the first half of the 20^th century.

Kubota’s garden also became a center for the Issei, or first generation Japanese community, and the many immigrant and minority communities that settled in the Rainier Beach neighborhood. Critical to nurturing this cooperative spirit were Kubota’s spiritual beliefs. He was a practitioner of Konkōkyō, a 19^th century development out of Shinto and Buddhist animistic traditions. From this comes his understanding of the spirited stone of the book’s title. One of the books essayists, Jason Wirth, summarizes this quality: “The garden nourishes and heals because it channels a kind of archaic earth awakening.”

The richness of this book is the mix of essays written in prose or poetry, or expressed in photographs, by many different authors from a variety of backgrounds. Some are by the expected landscape architects and historians, while other chapters reflect personal journeys, influenced by the garden, written by noted members of the Asian-American, African-American, or mixed race communities in the neighborhood or the region.

Many of these stories are stark, including the incarceration of Kubota and his family during World War II and his heartbreak of coming back to a neglected garden. But this story also shows his strength, in designing a garden at the prison camp in Minidoka, Idaho, and tackling the hard work of restoring the Seattle garden upon his return.

It is difficult to select a primary author for this book, but for the excellence of the extensive photographs, the Library of Congress record appropriately gives credit to Gemina Garland-Lewis. Historical photos further enhance the reader’s enjoyment, as do the quiet, black-and-white images by Nathan Wirth. The whole of “Spirited Stone” is best captured by writer Betsy Anderson: “Kubota Garden is a complex palimpsest of culture and nature that merits examination from an almost endless number of perspectives.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest

Tara Austen Weaver became smitten on growing fruit in Seattle after planting raspberries during an extended summer visit. Later, she moved here permanently to a house with nine mature fruit trees and proceeded to add 14 more plus many berry plants. Her new book, “Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest,” is based on that experience and is an excellent choice for the beginning fruit grower in Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia, especially west of the Cascades.

I found the book is especially helpful for cultivating berries by giving recommended varieties and culture methods specific to this region. The emphasis is on the most popular, including strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries, but the author is adventuresome. She maintains a small but controlled (she claims) patch of Himalayan blackberries and recommends trying wild fruit such as our native huckleberries, or even salal. Her definition of “berry” is broad and she also recommends kiwi, lingonberry, currents, and even elderberries.

Excerpted from the Fall 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Wisteria: the Complete Guide

When I was nine, our family moved to a new home in the Sammamish Valley that included a wonderful, if somewhat overgrown, garden that fostered my interest in horticulture. Near the back door, plopped in the middle of the lawn, was a strange, dense thicket of a plant that was a perfect place to hide, mere feet from where my mother was calling for me.

It was some time before I learned this monstrous green blob was a wisteria, left to its own devices with nothing to climb up. The new book, “Wisteria: The Complete Guide” by James Compton and Chris Lane, has enlightened me that wisteria can indeed be grown in a pleasing, shrubby form, but only with careful pruning that the specimen of my childhood never received.

Of course, wisteria are much better known as climbing vines magnificently draping from buildings, arbors, or even large trees. This book walks you through the many selections available, with excellent photographs to distinguish the many close shades of blue, lavender, and purple, and will help you manage one of these labor intensive but oh-so-spectacular prima donnas.

This is the third in a series of excellent Royal Horticultural Society monographs on garden worthy genera and like the others titles the natural history and environmental niche of the plants are extensively examined. “As befits a vigorous and twining climber, Wisteria has a rather tortuous taxonomic history” and includes as principle players the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and Thomas Nuttall after whom Cornus nuttallii, the Pacific dogwood, is named.

The cultural history of wisteria, especially in China and Japan, is another highlight while other chapters profile spectacular specimens – they can live for hundreds of years – from around the world. There is one notable example in Sierra Madre, California. Planted in 1894, it “took over the house it was originally planted on and now spreads through the gardens of two neighbouring houses.” It covers about 1.25 acres and “has entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest blossoming plant.” I never realized the peril that threatened my childhood home!

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Fall 2020