Archives: Book Reviews

Bill Terry and Rosemary Bates both had extensive careers in journalism. It shows in the quality of their interviews in “Beauty by Design,” a book about gardeners in a “passionate pursuit of perfection.” These profiles capture in just a few pages the personality of their subjects, and the intimate relationship of gardener to garden.

Every chapter reads like a memoir. All would captivate readers within a wide spectrum of artistic interests as many of the subjects are artists in a different medium, including painters, a potter, and poets. Terry and Bates conclude that “these gardeners, indeed all gardeners, are alchemists of nature, art, and artifice.”

Some of the eleven individuals or couples profiled are familiar names around Seattle, including Dan Hinkley, Linda Cochrane, George Little, and David Lewis. Most are better known in the gardening circles of southwest British Columbia, but a common theme is they have spent a significant part of their lives in other places, and have been strongly influenced by very different climates, traditions, and histories.

An example is Robin Hopper, a potter living in Metchosin, British Columbia, near Victoria. He describes the fusion in his garden as “Anglo-Japanadian.” He is quite familiar with the various styles—he counts five—of Japanese gardening, and acknowledges their impact, but the description of his garden makes it clear that it has its very own style.

“The forest floor is all happy chaos: hostas mingling with hellebores (H. foetidus) in flower, the leaves of hardy cyclamen, bits of iris, various self-seeded woodland wildlings, and, most delightfully, the flowers of the white fawn lily (Erythronium oregonum). Birds and bugs must love this place.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

Roy Forster was the first curator and director of the VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia, designing much of the plantings that help make this one of the outstanding botanical gardens in our region. “For the Love of Trees” is in some ways his autobiography, but in a most unusual format, as he uses his own paintings to tell most of that story.

His life has taken him to many locations, providing a wide range of subjects for the “Arboreal Odyssey” of his sub-title. After making comparisons to Homer, he clarifies that “the giants of my story are not fearsome cyclopean monsters but giant redwood trees, ancient venerable pines, and cedars that ascend to the sky.”

Many of his subjects are found in another gem of the Vancouver landscape, Stanley Park. While the large conifers are well-represented, my favorite piece is of a particularly large red alder (Alnus rubra), shown in winter time “when the red dormant buds, twigs and catkins show on the naked branches, contrasting with the somber green of the coniferous forest.”

Travels have given him many more stories, and the human elements that surround his trees are significant. A hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) is seen in front of the Glastonbury Tor, the legendary burial place for the Holy Grail. A venerable olive tree (Olea europaea) dwarfs the gates of Les Collettes, the garden of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in southern France.

Throughout, Forster shares his philosophy on trees, which is also his philosophy on life. He describes the profits of his life as a tree planter in public landscapes: “The rewards are of a different kind, consisting mainly in the joy of observing the vigorous growth of the trees over the decades of life, knowing they will be there long after the planter is gone. There is a kind of love in that.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

The title of Robert Michael Pyle’s most recent book might fool readers into supposing it a scholarly treatise aimed at the ultra-specialist in the Family Iridaceae. Look inside the cover of Evolution of the Genus Iris and all will become clear: these are poems of everyday life from the particular perspective of a Pacific Northwest naturalist.

The Miller Library has several other books by Pyle (including Wintergreen about the ecology of the Willapa Hills, and The Butterflies of Cascadia : A Field Guide to All the Species of Washington, Oregon, and Surrounding Territories). These plain-spoken poems feature garden perennials, reflections on the Palouse Giant Earthworm, longhorn beetles, butterflies, banana slugs, and how could I resist mentioning a paean to librarians.

One of my favorites in this first collection of poems is “Botany Lesson: Cleome.” It begins, “He called it bee balm, but I heard bee bomb.” The poet and his friend are on a butterfly-collecting trip, encountering specimens of wild Cleome. Pyle points out that Theophrastus’s coinage of Cleome was based on a mistaken notion that the plant was related to mustard, when it is actually “a caper called spider plant, or bee / plant, for the love of honeybees but never bee balm.” It’s a poem of friendship and reminiscence as well as an observation about the complexities and accidental poetry of naming things.

Transforming of perspectives is Jan Kowalczewski Whitner’s greatest strength as a writer and I think it is best illustrated in this, her final book. When I first flipped through the pages (with excellent photographs by Linda Quartman Younker), I thought that Jan had traveled throughout Europe, finding centuries old examples of stonework. I was surprised, upon looking at the captions, that almost all of the gardens are in the United States and many were not very old.

I realized, too, that this is not a book to flip through. It is best understood by allowing Jan to lead you through at her pace and in her order. It begins with a review of various garden styles, from formal to natural, from Asian to English cottage gardens. After your attention is firmly fixed on the role stonework plays in these gardens, she shifts to habitats in stone, such as those found in fissures, screes, outcrops, and in wider settings such as a beach or in the desert. Each of these descriptions comes with a recommended list of plants.

Now the real fun begins. The use of stones as art, as tools, or as symbols of spiritual significance goes beyond the garden setting. Or does it? Jan addresses this with, “What significance do today’s gardeners find in this legacy of using stone in the landscape for spiritual effects? As the following stone features illustrate, gardeners either adapt the traditions of earlier cultures to their own landscape designs or they carry the spirit, rather than their precise form, into modern pieces.”

To finish, Jan features six gardens from across the country, clearly favorites of hers. Mostly beyond the reach of the home gardener, these are realized fantasies of long years or many resources or both. While the following statement was applied to a garden near Miami, it could be used for all, “Because of its sheer size and over-the-top opulence, Vizcaya holds few obvious lessons for the home gardener who contemplates adding a stone feature or two to the back garden, but it remains a compelling place of pilgrimage for those who relish its completely realized vision of stone-driven theatrics.”

Jan traveled extensively outside the Pacific Northwest for this book, but throughout she keeps coming back here for examples, and it’s fitting that she finishes at home with her last two gardens. The first, the Walker Rock Garden in West Seattle, faces an uncertain future at the time of this writing, but for Jan the later work of Milton Walker “…took on some of the fantastical qualities of structures by the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi”—high praise, indeed.

Finally, we visit the Ohme Gardens near Wenatchee. This was described in “Garden Touring” as like “a stage set for The Sound of Music”, and was used as the cover photograph of that book. In “Gardening with Stone”, the description is more thoughtful, “…Ohme Gardens stands as a quintessential example of mountainous, high-desert terrain, whose most characteristic natural features—stone outcrops, wide sloping meadows, and precipitous ravines—have been isolated, highlighted, and arranged to display their best design possibilities.”

Summarizing “Gardening with Stone”, and the blending of the inspirational and the practical that is found in all of Jan’s writing, is the concluding sentence of the Introduction: “Our focus is on those magical, metaphorical stone features that will spark the imagination, as well as on creative design solutions to common landscaping problems.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

Jan Kowalczewski Whitner immediately won my approval in “Northwest Garden Style” by explaining her approach to determining the most common landscaping problems for regional gardeners. She reviewed the reference questions received at the Miller Library over a five year period—brilliant! While I haven’t done the same exhaustive review of more recent questions to the library, I would expect the list of today would be very similar, making this book still very relevant.

Three of the eight topics she found in her research explore some aspect of what Jan dubbed a “natural garden”, specifically creating landscape plans that use native plants, attract wildlife, and conserve water. She begins each topic with examples from local gardens, interviewing the owners and/or designers, and validating the many approaches to reaching the same goal.

As in her other books, both sides of your brain are exercised. The photographs by Linda Quartman Younker suit and expand on the lyrical descriptive prose of the designs very well. Yet each garden is also summarized in a side box with practical elements like topography, soil, lighting, climate, and the impact of surrounding properties; concluding each chapter are businesslike checklists to make sure you achieve your earlier inspirations.

Later chapters delve into the limitations of slopes or very small properties, and with creating special settings using hardscapes or water features. Again, she begins from a very personal perspective: “All gardeners follow different paths to their own, personal epiphanies—those moments of divine illumination…by adding the anarchic element of water to my garden, I was inviting a dash of divine chaos into my soul at the same time.”

The only chapter in “Northwest Garden Style” that seems from a different era is on roses, as today this would most likely be replaced by an essay on kitchen gardens or similar. Roses are not my favorite plant, but after reading the description of informal rose garden in Portland, I had a new perspective. Here, “birds find a welcome in this rose garden year-round, where they can nest and forage in tall thickets, dine on choice aphids and slugs in summer, and pick over nutritious rosehips left on the branches in winter.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

You may wonder why a tour book more than 20 years old would still be useful and of interest. Details such as opening times and admissions are out of date, most of the gardens described have gone through significant changes, and, sadly, some outstanding gardens—like the Berry Botanic Garden in Portland—are gone.

The answer is the quality of the descriptive writing. Jan Kowalczewski Whitner had an ability to bring gardens alive, for example this opening about the Arboretum: “At first glance, it looks simply like a tranquil Northwest woodland garden, but Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum actually contains exotic horticultural treasures around every bend in the path…”

I’ve read a lot of garden touring books and the layout for many is reminiscent of the Yellow Pages. By contrast, this book is a series of vignettes, stylishly inviting you to keep reading, even if the destination is not on your travel itinerary. Her description of the VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia was an excerpt for the Winter 1992/93 issue of the “Bulletin” and includes such descriptive gems as “…the twisting papery branches of the deciduous hydrangeas show off well against the berried hollies in winter…” or “a magical woods…bordering a shallow lake dotted by uprooted snags that look like drowned bonsais.”

Tucked between the major gardens are fascinating bits on minor parks, noteworthy plantings in public places, and private gardens that were—at that time—viewable by the public. If nothing else, this is a walk through garden history, and will leave the reader with a richer sense of our region’s gardening heritage.

Excerpted from the Summer 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.