Archives: Book Reviews

This Journal is the account of David Douglas, a Scottish plant explorer in our region during the 1820s and 1830s.  Douglas was famous for introducing several conifers to Europe; however he described all the shrubby and herbaceous species he observed, too.

This transcription was not published until 1914 by the Royal Horticultural Society.  Why the delay?  The secretary of the RHS, W. Wilks, states in the preface that the original was very difficult to decipher as the handwriting was “occasionally almost if not quite impossible” to read.

Reading the results of this effort, I found that he writing style by Douglas is not romantic, but is mostly an accounting of the weather (often in dour terms), his meals (often meager), and the course of his travels.  Animals described are mostly ones he killed.  An exception being mosquitoes with which he was “dreadfully annoyed.”   More interesting are his encounters with indigenous people who sometimes helped him with his exploration, but the real focus was on the plants he found and described.

While most famous for conifers, most of the plants he described are herbaceous species, typically in brief terms, although he sometimes notes the potential ornamental value for gardeners.  This compilation includes other, more formal manuscripts by Douglas.  One gives his impressions of American pines.  This included trees now considered to be spruce (Picea sp.), true firs (Abies sp.), and his eponymous Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii).

Although never lyrical, Douglas comes close as he describes the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) as “highly ornamental” and that “it never grows in nor composes thick forests like the Abies section, but is found on declivities of low hills and undulating grounds in unproductive sandy soils in clumps, belts, or forming open woods, and in low, fertile, moist soils totally disappears.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on February 24, 2025

Excerpted in part from the Spring 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

One of earliest, photographic works on trees is this rare, privately published work by Henry William Clinton-Baker.  This included photographs of the more than 150 conifers in his family’s pinetum at Bayfordbury in Hertfordshire, England, just north of London.

The original three volumes were published between 1909-1913 with life-size photographs.  Each showed a branch with foliage and cones designed to provide identification help for conifers planted in Britain.  Despite limited distribution, these books proved to be very useful, and a fourth volume of additional trees followed in 1936.

The sepia toned, close-up images are of high quality.  Each entry includes the age of the tree and its height and girth.  A century later, these are still a valuable measure of the growth rates for different species.

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on February 24, 2025

Excerpted from the Spring 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

The Silva of North America profiles all the known native trees of Canada and the United States, each species described in the wild by author Charles Sprague Sargent.

This research took over a decade at the turn of the 20th century and was still the authority almost 50 years later when this set was published.  It served as an important reference work for the Arboretum library and is still of value today, especially for the exquisite illustrations by Charles Edward Faxon, who accompanied Sargent on his research trips.

Sargent and Faxon also published “Trees and Shrubs: Illustrations of new or little-known ligneous plants,” shortly after the North American work.  In this 2-volume set, Sargent defined the subjects as “new or little-known trees and shrubs of the northern hemisphere which may be expected to flourish in the gardens of the United States and Europe.”  None overlapped with species profiled in The Silva.  Most were already in the collections at the Arnold Arboretum near Boston, where Sargent was the director, and that was a source of both plants and ideas for our Arboretum.

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on February 24, 2025

Excerpted from the Spring 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Most books on native plants are in the style of a field guide.  These are very practical with entries for each plant in similar formats.  While useful in the field, they are not especially enjoyable for reading cover-to-cover.

Lester Rowntree’s (1879-1979) two books on California native plants from the 1930s are very different – they are fun to read!  The author had a lively and dry sense of humor, and is excellent at pointing out at the distinctive features of each plant.  “Hardy Californians” (published in 1936) and “Flowering Shrubs of California” (1939) successfully introduce the reader to plants from all parts of the state, especially emphasizing their potential as garden subjects.

The author said it the best.  “This is not ‘another garden book.’  Nor is it a handbook of California wild flowers.  What I have tried to do is to convey to those who garden, as well as those who don’t, something of the loveliness and the garden possibilities of certain less familiar hardy native plants of California.”

Rowntree was born in England, but moved with her family as a child to the United States.  She had a marriage and child, and a not very successful native seed business, but ultimately settled in Carmel, California, on her own at age 52.  For the next 20 years, she would spend most of the year traveling throughout the state, timing her visits for the best blooms and weather prospects.  Her car had all seats removed except for the driver’s, to allow room for sleeping and all of her gear.  At higher elevations, she traveled by burro.  She would spend weeks at a time in one location to acquire a more thorough understanding of each plant she studied.

In addition to her native plant books, Rountree wrote four children’s books, and had over 700 articles published, some on topics such as her peripatetic life style.  Her story is well-described in, “About Lester,” a chapter added to the 2006 edition of “Hardy Californias” and written by two of her grandsons.  As she lived a few days past her 100^th birthday, she was a considerable inspiration to all her descendants, and was described by her grandsons as “good company until the end, with a deep interest in current events, a keen wit, and quick laugh.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on December 2, 2024

Excerpted from the Winter 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Most books on native plants are in the style of a field guide.  These are very practical with entries for each plant in similar formats.  While useful in the field, they are not especially enjoyable for reading cover-to-cover.

Lester Rowntree’s (1879-1979) two books on California native plants from the 1930s are very different – they are fun to read!  The author had a lively and dry sense of humor, and is excellent at pointing out at the distinctive features of each plant.  “Hardy Californians” (published in 1936) and “Flowering Shrubs of California” (1939) successfully introduce the reader to plants from all parts of the state, especially emphasizing their potential as garden subjects.

The author said it the best.  “This is not ‘another garden book.’  Nor is it a handbook of California wild flowers.  What I have tried to do is to convey to those who garden, as well as those who don’t, something of the loveliness and the garden possibilities of certain less familiar hardy native plants of California.”

Rowntree was born in England, but moved with her family as a child to the United States.  She had a marriage and child, and a not very successful native seed business, but ultimately settled in Carmel, California, on her own at age 52.  For the next 20 years, she would spend most of the year traveling throughout the state, timing her visits for the best blooms and weather prospects.  Her car had all seats removed except for the driver’s, to allow room for sleeping and all of her gear.  At higher elevations, she traveled by burro.  She would spend weeks at a time in one location to acquire a more thorough understanding of each plant she studied.

In addition to her native plant books, Rountree wrote four children’s books, and had over 700 articles published, some on topics such as her peripatetic life style.  Her story is well-described in, “About Lester,” a chapter added to the 2006 edition of “Hardy Californias” and written by two of her grandsons.  As she lived a few days past her 100^th birthday, she was a considerable inspiration to all her descendants, and was described by her grandsons as “good company until the end, with a deep interest in current events, a keen wit, and quick laugh.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on December 2, 2024

Excerpted from the Winter 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Most books on native plants are in the style of a field guide.  These are very practical with entries for each plant in similar formats.  While useful in the field, they are not especially enjoyable for reading cover-to-cover.

Lester Rowntree’s (1879-1979) two books on California native plants from the 1930s are very different – they are fun to read!  The author had a lively and dry sense of humor, and is excellent at pointing out at the distinctive features of each plant.  “Hardy Californians” (published in 1936) and “Flowering Shrubs of California” (1939) successfully introduce the reader to plants from all parts of the state, especially emphasizing their potential as garden subjects.

The author said it the best.  “This is not ‘another garden book.’  Nor is it a handbook of California wild flowers.  What I have tried to do is to convey to those who garden, as well as those who don’t, something of the loveliness and the garden possibilities of certain less familiar hardy native plants of California.”

Rowntree was born in England, but moved with her family as a child to the United States.  She had a marriage and child, and a not very successful native seed business, but ultimately settled in Carmel, California, on her own at age 52.  For the next 20 years, she would spend most of the year traveling throughout the state, timing her visits for the best blooms and weather prospects.  Her car had all seats removed except for the driver’s, to allow room for sleeping and all of her gear.  At higher elevations, she traveled by burro.  She would spend weeks at a time in one location to acquire a more thorough understanding of each plant she studied.

In addition to her native plant books, Rountree wrote four children’s books, and had over 700 articles published, some on topics such as her peripatetic life style.  Her story is well-described in, “About Lester,” a chapter added to the 2006 edition of “Hardy Californias” and written by two of her grandsons.  As she lived a few days past her 100^th birthday, she was a considerable inspiration to all her descendants, and was described by her grandsons as “good company until the end, with a deep interest in current events, a keen wit, and quick laugh.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on December 2, 2024

Excerpted from the Winter 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Marianne North (1830-1890) was one of the most famous women botanical illustrators of any era.  Born in Britain, she traveled the world, visiting every continent to paint the native plants, many unknown to European science at the time.  She worked in situ with oil paints and often recorded both humans and animals associated with her subject.

A most interesting book in the Miller Library is “Chilean Flora through the eyes of Marianne North 1884.”  Published in Chile in 1999, originally in Spanish, we have the English translation that is an account of the artist’s visit to Chile, the last of her journeys.  As authors Antonia Echenique (a Chilean historian) and María Victoria Legassa (a Chilean sociologist) explain, her work was not previously well-known but, upon her visit, she “attracted the attention of a number of contemporary Chilean intellectuals and scientists.”

An 1884 article by a Chilean official captures the local impact of North’s work, as do her own journal entries.  Essays written in 1999 discuss both the artistic and scientific merit of her work by a British art critic (“its uniqueness that needs to be first recognized and celebrated”) and a Chilean botanist (“once again, art and science unite in the work of a single person”).

North’s main interest in going to Chile was to see the forests of Araucaria araucana, known In Chile as pehuén.  It grows in Britain (and Seattle), but not with the splendor of its native land.  Even North recognized how inappropriate was the use of the common name of “Monkey Puzzle” as it grows “where there are no monkeys.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on December 2, 2024

Excerpted from the Winter 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Marianne North (1830-1890) was one of the most famous women botanical illustrators of any era.  Born in Britain, she traveled the world, visiting every continent to paint the native plants, many unknown to European science at the time.  She worked in situ with oil paints and often recorded both humans and animals associated with her subject.

Her visits were not rushed; staying in one place for a long time, including a year or more each in Brazil, India, and Australasia.  She came near our region in 1875 while painting the coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervivums) in northern California.

North’s most famous legacy is the gallery at Kew Gardens near London devoted exclusively to her work and containing over 800 of her paintings.  This collection is illustrated in the 2019 book “Marianne North: The Kew Collection” that includes the paintings’ captions written by the artist.

I have not seen the gallery, but the book is similarly organized by geographical areas.  This allows the viewer to appreciate the diversity of plants and landscapes on a global scale.  As noted by Christopher Mills in the Introduction, the paintings are “an increasingly important visual record of where many, now rare, plants grew in the past and how landscapes have changed.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on December 2, 2024

Excerpted from the Winter 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

When a non-gardener decides to restore a mountainside meadow to its precontact condition, it’s not surprising that challenges – no, failures – occur. Paula Whyman presents the case for extreme persistence and a willingness to change direction when faced with new information as a substitute for previous experience. Along the way she opens to the reader a vista of what such restoration requires.

Whyman and her husband bought a mountainside in Virginia. Love of nature and a need to escape urban pressures led to the purchase. One part of the property was a former meadow, previously used for growing crops and later for grazing animals. Now it was overgrown and threatened by numerous non-native plants.

With a nice sense of humor, Whyman describes how she worked months and then years, and spent considerable money, to restore the meadow. In her concern for the desirable plants, animals, and insects on her property Whyman at first resisted controlled burns and herbicides. One invasive plant that helped modify her views was the blackberry – wildly invasive here in western Washington, too. She came to accept the burns but continued to limit herbicides to the least amount she could, feeling anguish at every drop applied.

One change in her approach that began early was acceptance of help. She sought out experts who instructed and assisted her, both restoration gurus and experienced workers. She found Celia Vuocolo, from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, for instance, to assess her property and create a plan. After considerable searching she found Brian Morse, an ecological restoration expert, who differed from others in NOT recommending to begin by spraying to kill all the plants in the meadow. It has taken a small army to make the changes Whyman wanted.

Years ago May Watts, a naturalist at the Morton Arboretum near Chicago, made gentle fun of the Arboretum’s development of a restored prairie, now the Schulenberg Prairie. I remember her saying something like, “When you are finished, you won’t have a prairie. You will have a prairie garden.” It will always require tending, unlike a natural prairie. Whyman’s accomplishments are many, but in the end she came to realize that like a garden, her restored meadow will need regular hard work.

Bad Naturalist makes clear the many challenges facing any effort to restore degraded land and the satisfactions of each small success.

Reviewed by: Priscilla Grundy

Excerpted from The Leaflet, Volume 12, Issue 8, August 2025

In most of the sciences, major research is restricted to those who have earned higher level academic degrees.  However in botany, especially in the 19^th and the early 20^th century, there were still opportunities for keen and devoted amateurs to make major contributions to advance the science.

Catherine “Kate” Furbish (1834-1931) was one such botanist.  She did not have a college degree, but was a careful observer of plants and their component parts.  She also recognized the need for a more comprehensive flora of her home state of Maine.

An avid reader of works by professional botanists, she learned many of their techniques, including the practice of creating herbarium specimens.  During her long life, she developed a collection of over 8,000 specimens that are now preserved at institutions in New England.

Furbish brought other important talents to the study of native plants – she was a skilled illustration and a stickler for accuracy, creating over 1,300 detailed and meticulous watercolor illustrations of the Maine flora.  These were donated to Bowdoin College in her hometown of Brunswick, Maine and have been beautifully reproduced at full scale in the 2016 two-volume set “Plants and Flowers of Maine.”  This work includes an extensive biographical introduction by Melissa Dow Cullina, at the time Director of Education for the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

Furbish’s life is also profiled in a 1995 book by Ada Graham and Frank Graham, Jr., “Kate Furbish and the Flora of Maine.”  This is a fascinating read, as in addition to botanical work, Furbish was an avid traveler and had many other interests – challenging for a single woman during this period, but telling of her strong sense of purpose.

An example of this drive can be found in a speech (quoted in the Grahams’ book) that she gave in 1883.  In a wet ravine in what is now Acadia National Park, she described how “the earth gave way burying me to my waist.”  In this she felt fortunate, as the alternative was falling into the ravine.  She continued her narrative with, “I rested, planned and finally extricated myself, secured the tools, climbed the bank, went on my way, found the pond, brought away a new Sedge, and after eleven hours’ absence reached home in safety.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on December 2, 2024

Excerpted from the Winter 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin