“Wildflowers of Southern Oregon” was written by John Kemper, a natural history writer who settled in Medford, and recognized the need for a simple guide to the native and naturalized flowers of the region. He’s also a skilled photographer, and even though each entry has only a single image, this will work well for most readers. Plants are divided by color and by families within colors.
In the forward, Frank Lane, retired chairman of the Biology Department at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, writes that until this book was written, “there was no book for beginners covering all of Southern Oregon.” The author includes a short list of best hikes and to help with planning, each image includes a description of the location and time of year when the photograph was taken.
Excerpted from the Winter 2016 Arboretum Bulletin.
Intrigued by all those Irish gardens with lyrical names? The beauty and glory of these can be found in The Irish Garden, a new, coffee table-worthy book from Jane Powers (writer) and her husband Jonathan Hession (photographer). While its majestic cover and heft will impress your friends, don’t just leave it on the table unopened, because it’s one of the best books on the gardens of a particular region that I know, with the writing, photography, and publication values all top notch.
The grand gardens are here, but so are the very personal, including Helen Dillon’s place in Dublin. Other gardens are more for a ramble, while most unexpected is a chapter devoted to food gardens. Best of all, these are not formulaic descriptions; Powers wisely leaves the clutter of the often-changing practical details for an Internet search. This book draws you in with both words and images, intrigues you, and makes you want to quit your job and go spend several months in Ireland visiting them all.
Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Winter 2016
As a new graduate of the University of Washington’s Library and Information Science Master’s program, I began volunteering at the Miller Library in July 2011. I had some experience in academic libraries, and had worked as a student assistant in the UW’s Natural Sciences Library. After I began volunteering, I started reading and checking out several books on fruit and vegetable gardening. The books were great, and really helped me learn how to grow food.
I decided to add chickens to my urban garden, making it a small urban farm. One of the best books that helped me prepare for my chickens was “Reinventing the Chicken Coop” by Kevin McElroy and Matthew Wolpe. The book contains 14 coop designs. It covers chicken coop essentials including space requirements, roosts, ventilation, and nesting boxes. This information was very helpful to me as I was learning what it would take to keep chickens in my yard. In the Coop-Building Basics chapter the authors explained, “One of our goals for this book was to keep things simple, using ordinary shop tools and building with similar materials and repeatable processes as much as possible” (p. 21). In the end, my husband and I built our coop using their design, SYM, which is “much more than a chicken coop; it’s a symbiotic urban farming system” (p. 106). This was exactly what we needed. The step by step instructions were easy to follow and it didn’t take too long to build this simple yet stable coop for our new flock. “Reinventing the Chicken Coop” is a great resource for building chicken houses with ease and low cost. Most pre-built coops cost twice as much as the materials used for building your own coop. I enjoyed the collection of contemporary designs and my chickens love their little home in my city backyard.
Now, I am a librarian at the Miller Library, with two years of experience in chicken husbandry and a growing knowledge of year-round vegetable and fruit gardening. I take pleasure in being knowledgeable on these subjects and plan to continue learning, expanding my understanding of urban farming.
Published in the November 2015 Leaflet Volume 2, Issue 11.
Grass Valley, California is on the outer rim of our region, but the resident gardening columnist Carolyn Singer is worth knowing about, especially for gardeners in the foothills of the Cascades. She is very experienced with the ravages of deer, and address this concern in two books. “Deer in My Garden” (2006), was largely written while the author spent the summer of 2005 in Seattle and focuses on perennials and subshrubs. “Deer in My Garden: Volume 2” (2008) considers the impact on groundcovers and garden edge plants.
Both books are part of “The Yucky Flower Series,” honoring the advice of her then 3-year-old grandson: “The deer wouldn’t eat yucky flowers!” So that is what she planted. Her deer-resistant recommendations are based on her own experience, or those of gardeners who grew trial plants for her, knowing that in the interest of science (or cervid consumer selection), the trial plants might disappear.
While yucky to deer, the selected plants are all quite lovely to gardeners and would make many other recommended plant lists. Most are drought tolerant and adapted to a wide temperature range. Best of all, the author enthusiastically rates the maintenance requirements of most as “EASY!” to “VERY, VERY EASY!” Deer or no deer, these are great garden plants.
Excerpted from the Spring 2015 Arboretum Bulletin
The three books by Constance Sidles about her experiences with birding in the Montlake Fill (also known as the Union Bay Natural Area) have been amongst the most circulated titles from the Miller Library. All are filled with her careful observations of the life in this urban wetland and her philosophical observations to broader life. In “Forty-Six Views of Montlake Fill” she takes a different linguistic approach: poetry.
The poems are distilled observations of this ecosystem throughout the seasons. Hiroko Seki, an accomplished artist of sumi-e, the Japanese style of ink wash or literati painting, has created paintings to accompany each poem, making for a simple but profound combination.
“In the pond,
A female Cinnamon Teal paddles with her babies,
Mother ship followed by seven little tugboats,
Fueled with green algae.”
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.
Thor Hanson’s son Noah became fascinated with seeds at an early age. After reading “The Triumph of Seeds”, this is not surprising. Having a father who could tell such compelling stories could make the commonplace imprint on almost any child.
Adults will find Hanson’s stories equally engaging. He is an excellent researcher, interweaving the importance of seeds in botany, ecology, and natural history with their significance in both human history and what you are serving for dinner. Why are the seeds of chili peppers hot? What’s in it for the coffee bean to be full of caffeine?
These questions have chapter-long answers that introduce a wealth of characters, ranging from Christopher Columbus to Johann Sebastian Bach to a barista in Ballard. Through both history and modern culture the relationships between humans and plants (and animals) are very deep, on-going, and ever-developing.
As his son ages, Hanson involves him in his experiments, but the end results are often about more than just the research. Describing the flight of the seed of a Javan cucumber, with its six inch wing, he recalls, “We watched that seed fly for the simple joy of seeing something beautiful doing what it is meant to do. Standing there together, heads tilted skyward, we laughed and laughed until it disappeared from view—a papery wisp at the edge of visions, still rising.”
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.
If your exploration of native trees takes you on a trip farther afield, consider bringing “Conifers of the Pacific Slope” by Michael Edward Kauffmann. Inspired as a youth by a family visit to the forests of California, this Virginia native returned to work amongst the majestic trees that stirred his younger self. This field guide is a product of that passion and is designed for easy packing.
The scope is all of the native conifer species of the Pacific Coast from northern Baja California to well into British Columbia, and eastward to the Rockies. This includes some very impressive trees. In addition to the familiar Pacific Northwest conifers highlighted in the previous book, there are the many cypresses, junipers, and pines of California plus representatives from a few other genera, including the most impressive of them all, the coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)and giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum).
While intended as a field guide, the author provides lots of interesting bits of natural history with his descriptions and some wonderful maps that group related species together, including areas of hybridization. These, along with essays at the front and back, make this a book easily readable from cover-to-cover.
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.
“Native Trees of Western Washington” is accurately described in the sub-title as “A Photographic Guide” to trees that can be found west of the Cascade Crest. Each entry has several photos, and include close-ups of all the parts you will need to help with identification.
The author, Kevin Zobrist, is an associate professor of Extension Forestry for Washington State University but grew up and is based in western Washington, and is a Husky by schooling. He leads the WSU extension program in Forestry for the counties of the northern Puget Sound.
While the forestry background is evident in his descriptions of habitats and growth characteristics, his descriptions are well-rounded and engaging. An example is his interest in the production of syrup from bigleaf maples (Acer macrophyllum): “…it produces an exceptional syrup that has rich maple flavor with hints of vanilla and can hold its own against anything the Northeast has to offer.”
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.
What is Permaculture? The authors of “Practical Permaculture” go to considerable effort to define the evolving meaning of this term, while emphasizing the ethics and principles on which proponents mostly agree. The most important are care for the earth and the care of people.
The introduction continues with the basics of nature and how the earth “works,” and then the principles of design, using co-author Jessi Bloom’s house as a case study. After that a wide range of topics are considered, and options discussed for sites from the tropics to mild temperate zones – all ways to illustrate how working with our environment instead of against it has proven successful in many different settings and with many different peoples.
The book goes far beyond gardening to consider energy sources and their alternatives, the design and construction of homes, even the processing of human waste – essentially a handbook to all physical aspects of life, including our social structures. Near the end is a list of fifty plants that they consider useful for permaculture landscapes. The list was not what I expected – many of the plants were unfamiliar, especially those that will only thrive or in some cases survive in a tropical climate.
Does this all work? This certainly is a book for generating ideas. I would want to vet the list of the recommended plants carefully. Will they survive? Will they become invasive? If nothing else, this book will make you realize there’s much to consider in all of your gardening decisions.
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.
Richard Haag’s life story, as told in “The Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag”, a new biography by Thaïsa Way, has many twists and turns before he arrived in the Pacific Northwest. Growing up on a family nursery and farm near Louisville, Kentucky, he studied and was mentored on both coasts and in Midwest, but a two year visit to Japan, as one of the first recipients of a Fulbright scholarship to visit that country, he later claimed “changed my whole life.” Here he learned “conservation and economy…[and] working with what you have.”
He came to Seattle in 1958 to develop what became the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Washington. One of the core courses, “Theory and Perception”, Haag taught from 1959 to 1996, “using it to articulate his vision of landscape architecture as a melding of the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, a means of stewardship of the earth and its cultures.”
He continued his private practice as well, and it is from this that he has his greatest fame today, primarily through two projects. The first, Gas Works Park, is the result of a nearly 20-year public debate. Haag’s ability as a designer is almost overshadowed by his ability as a political operator. His techniques for transforming a highly toxic site into a safe place for the public, all with the minimum of soil removal, is also a remarkable. He certainly mastered “working with what you have.”
The story of his work at the Bloedel Reserve is not quite as unqualified a success. Some of his designs, most notably the Garden of Planes, were later removed. Other plans were altered despite the notable accolades they received. A thread throughout this book is the challenges Haag faced to be honored in his profession, and—since he is now in his 90s—to see his projects live on as he intended.
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.