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

Sempervivum : A Gardener’s Perspective of the Not-So-Humble Hens-and-Chicks

Hens-and-chicks were one of the first garden plants I came to recognize in childhood. However, compared to the brightly colored tulips and glads I favored; I didn’t think much of them. I was amused by the offsets (the “chicks”) that formed easily around the central plant (the “hen”), but the leaves were typically a dull green and the plants only occasionally sent up undistinguished flowers.

At some point in my adult phase of gardening, I took another look. Hybrids now had leaves in amazing colors including deep reds, steely blues, lavenders deepening to purple, red/green bicolors, and, most recently, gold with reddish tips! Even more fascinating, these colors often change at different times of the year.

I was pleased to discover there is a recent guide to this jewel box of choices for gardeners. Sempervivum: A Gardener’s Perspective of the Not-So-Humble Hens-and-Chicks was written by Kevin Vaughn, an Oregon hybridizer, and published in 2018.

The author has a PhD in botany and provides a knowledgeable history of the genus Sempervivum and its taxonomic identities. However, he quickly makes clear his purpose: “I have written this book for gardeners.”

The book is also an homage to the collegial group of enthusiasts who have created and promoted the various hybrids. The core is a catalog of this work. While some can be found at local garden centers, a list of mail order sources is included in the appendix and most are found in our region.

From my interest in this genus, I came to discover several other succulent genera with enticing foliage, including Echeveria, Graptopetalum, and Aeonium. Sadly, all of these need to be treated as annuals or given winter protection in our climate. By comparison, “semps” (as Vaughn calls them) are perfectly hardy in the Pacific Northwest, only needing protection from soggy soils and aggressive plant neighbors.

The author concludes, “The uses of Sempervivum are nearly infinite. Every time I think I have seen every possible use, a new one shows its head.”

Reviewed by Brian Thompson in the Leaflet, Volume 10, Issue 7, July 2023

Julia: A Biography of Julia W. Henshaw

“Julia” is a graphic biography of Julia Henshaw (1869-1937), who published the first book on the wild flowers of the Canadian Rockies in 1906. This was a relatively small aspect of her colorful life and author/illustrator Michael Kluckner chose her later role as an ambulance driver in World War I for his book’s cover.

Henshaw had a passion for the mountains, seeded on a visit to Switzerland from her native England as a young woman. She met both Mary Schäffer Warren and Mary Vaux Walcott on a visit to the Rockies for her journalism work in 1898. Kluckner concludes this visit helped focus her interest in the native plants. It is certain she learned much about the flora from the two American women, as well as the techniques of photography which were used to illustrated her book, “Mountain Wild Flowers of Canada” published in 1906 (the Miller Library has the American edition, which is the same except for the title).

Biographers disagree on the possibility of plagiarism in Henshaw’s book. Letters from Warren much later in life expressed bitterness that her protégé published a year earlier than her own book on the wild flowers. Nonetheless, the two women stayed in contact, as both were founding members of the Alpine Club of Canada, and participated together in some of that organization’s functions. One can only hope that their love of plants helped to mellow their professional rivalry.

The author is very skilled at drawing facial expressions that bring out the emotions of his subject and her companions. The tension between Henshaw and Warren is far stronger as portrayed in this media than in the words I have read in other biographies. Other tactics used by Kluckner include interspersing newspaper clips and occasional photographs from the period. He even put himself in the action, seeking answers from the ghost of Henshaw when more conventional research materials failed.

In one of these exchanges between author and subject, the ghost of Henshaw explains, “It works like this – you rest in peace until someone begins to fiddle with your legacy. That wakes you up and you get a chance to respond. The problem is, some biographers don’t listen.”

Excerpted in part from Brian Thompson’s articles in the Winter 2022 and Summer 2023 issues of the Arboretum Bulletin

Darwin & Hooker: A story of friendship, curiosity and discovery that changed the world

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) were both major figures in 19^th century British biology. Darwin is famous for his work on evolution, and Hooker was an important plant explorer and director of Kew Gardens, following his father William Jackson Hooker in that position.

Less is known about the close friendship between the two men and the important support they gave to each other’s research. That story is told in “Darwin & Hooker: A story of friendship, curiosity and discovery that changed the world”, a delightfully illustrated book by Alexandra Stewart and Joe Todd-Stanton. While marketed as a children’s book, I would easily recommend this to anyone interested in a biography of these two men.

“Both men found their time together useful, stimulating and hugely enjoyable. They learnt a great deal from one another and enjoyed gossiping and teasing each other.” This quote is from a page showing Darwin and Hooker playing in a field with some of their children.

Elsewhere, the illustrations are especially effective at demonstrating scientific concepts that would be challenging if only presented in text. This is especially true in differentiating the 13 species of finches on the Galápagos Islands that all descended from one species found on the South America mainland. These species primarily differ by the size and shape of their beaks. The study of these birds helped Darwin develop the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Excerpted from Brian Thompson’s article in the Summer 2023 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Arboretum

“Arboretum” is a new book this spring in the “Welcome to the Museum” series from Big Picture Press. The Miller Library has three titles in this series, all illustrated by Katie Scott, collaborating with different text authors.

These books are huge! Fifteen inches tall by eleven inches wide and are wonderful for reading both silently and aloud to others. Tony Kirkham, former Head of Arboretum, Gardens & Horticulture Services of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, wrote the text and his wonderment for the vast varieties of trees (over 58,000 species) is very clear.

“At this time of unprecedented change for our planet, it could not be more important to learn how to live alongside these giants. We cannot protect the natural world until we understand it.” To help with this understanding, Kirkham’s descriptions typically fill the left page, while Scott’s illustrations fill the right.

This book is about the global arboretum, including tropical species from both moist and dry forests that sadly wouldn’t survive in the Washington Park Arboretum. But our native trees are represented in a two-page spread featuring the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), including a drawing of “Big Lonely Doug”, a 230-foot-tall survivor of clear-cutting on Vancouver Island. Scott shows the misshaped branches and the enormous (12 feet in diameter), limbless trunk with close-ups of the cones, needles, and even a cross-section of the trunk.

Excerpted from Brian Thompson’s article in the Summer 2023 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin