Archives: Book Reviews

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.

Two traits stand out in Jan Kowalczewski Whitner’s collected writings: her passion for stonework and her considerable skill at using words to describe a garden. Both are apparent in her first book from 1992, “Stonescaping.” Also apparent is her training as an historian as she expertly traces the history of stone in gardens as it has been used in Chinese, Japanese, and European traditions. She then presents simple but engaging descriptions of home-scale gardens that adapt and meld these traditions.

This would be plenty to fill the first book by most authors, but Jan had more to offer. She continued with an extensive practicum on building everything from stone hardscapes to rock gardens and even hypertufa birdbaths. This combination of history, design, and construction is what makes this book so unusual.

One paragraph from the chapter on rock gardens demonstrates this synergy. “If you have a flat site on which you wish to build a rock garden, use a construction technique first developed by ancient Chinese gardeners to introduce different levels to the composition by digging out low areas and then mounding the excavated earth into ridges and plateaus above them. Use half-buried, weathered stones to replicate outcrops, and work from the bottom of the rock garden toward the top.”

Excerpted from the Summer 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

“The Professional Designer’s Guide to Garden Furnishings” by Portland Landscape Designer Vanessa Gardner Nagel identifies its primary audience in the title, but there’s much here for the discriminating homeowner, too. Especially valuable are the detailed, chapter-length analyses of the many materials that can be used in furnishings, including wood, metal, textiles, and even wicker, glass, or stone. Each chapter includes the industry standards for high quality, finishing options, best maintenance practices, and the sustainability of each material.

The author is at her best when—after carefully presenting a concept—she explains how she will bend the rules. In a section from “Furnishings” on Scale and Proportion, she states, “The old concept of small things in a small space simply isn’t true. A couple of large objects in a small space can work splendidly…” and she goes on to explain why this works.

Excerpted from the Spring 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

“Understanding Garden Design,” by Portland-based landscape designer Vanessa Gardner Nagel(published in 2010) is so well organized and structured it could easily be used as a textbook, but that may unfortunately imply dullness to what is a very readable and engaging book.

To get the best out of this book, however, the author does expect work on the part of the reader, leading you through the steps that a professional designer would follow. Much of this work is required before you reach the fun part of choosing plants. These aren’t discussed until Chapter 8, and then only as elements of structure, using the analogy of punctuation to describe the different selections (some plants are commas, others are parentheses, etc.).

Building with each chapter is a hypothetical garden design using the principles discussed that effectively ties all the concepts together. Even if you decide to hire a designer, this book will help you speak and understand the language and be better at expressing your desires. You will also find very useful a whole chapter on working with contractors.

Excerpted from the Spring 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

As a boy, I did not embrace the hobby of making models. Yes, I had a train set, but no desire to create a world of villages, forests, and the like to surround the tracks. Instead, I wanted to be outside in the garden and working with full-sized plants.

This makes me feel a bit inadequate to review “Gardening in Miniature” by Seattleite Janit Calvo. However it turns out that at its heart, this is a gardening book, with sound design advice and cultural tips, just all at 1:12 (one inch = one foot) scale, or even smaller.

“Using the basic garden tenets of anchor point, balance, layers, texture, color, and focal point, you can plan your miniature garden with confidence,” the author states encouragingly. Step-by-step, fully planned projects provide lots of guidance for the beginner. I worried that plants would not stay to scale, and indeed they might not, but it’s easy to swap plants in and out.

I learned from this that while there is some overlap in principles and techniques between miniature gardening and bonsai, they are largely distinct pursuits. However, they can be combined by making a bonsai the centerpiece of your miniature garden. Will I take up miniature gardening? Probably not. But my eyes have been opened to a whole new–and quite small–world.

Excerpted from the Spring 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.

Constance Sidles has written her third book of essays and observations on the Union Bay Natural Area titled “Fill of Joy: More Tales from Montlake Fill”. Like her previous books, this includes many excellent photographs and other artistic interpretations of the site (in paintings, poetry, and even dance) and an updated bird list, now counting 255 species recorded since the 1890s.

The heart of the book remains Connie’s self-deprecating humor and philosophies about life. While the bird life is her focus, she spots humans and other visitors, too. “When the joggers wheeze by they smile and say hello. I don’t know their names, but I know them. The dog walkers who keep their dogs leashed stop to chat while I ruffle their friends’ ears; the dog walkers who let their dogs run free usually head the other way “my gimlet eyes are giving them the Look.”

“Backyard Roots” is a collection of vignettes about urban dwellers motivated to have a closer connection to their food and their communities. There are many ways to do this, and the strength of this book is its breadth of inspiring ideas that have already been realized. Making it even better, the individuals and families profiled all live on the West Coast, from British Columbia to northern California.

Author/photographer Lori Eanes has a career in food photography and her original intent was a photo essay but, she says in her introduction, “as I learned people’s stories their dedication inspired me to write about them too.” While the writing is good, her camera is particularly effective at bringing out her subjects’ personalities–both human and animal.

While some of the topics, such as raising ducks or goats, are addressed in detail in other books, there are several more adventuresome projects. These include raising tilapia in an aquaponic garden and grafting food fruits onto ornamental street trees, guerrilla style. I gave a copy as a Christmas gift and I recommend it highly, especially to anyone with the spirit and resourcefulness of a homesteader.

Excerpted from the Winter 2014 Arboretum Bulletin.