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Elisabeth C. Miller Library

Archives: Book Reviews

Reviews of recommended books by Miller Library staff and volunteers.

The Tree Collectors

Amy Stewart has written several books that are in the Miller Library, covering a wide-range of plant-related topics. She is also an author of historical novels, and she brings that skill of writing narratives to all her books. Her latest, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession, showcases two additional talents: her ability to conduct insightful interviews and to draw illustrations of both people and plants.

This book represents the author’s process of discovery about the many ways people relate to trees. The results are much more varied than Stewart guessed when she began. Some were expected, such as an individual with sufficient land planting all the species in a genus, or all the trees associated together for some other reason.

Others document all the trees of a place. Some plantings are memorials; others are to promote sustainable forestry. Using trees for bonsai or topiary describes the passion of two collectors, while another has amassed no live trees but nearly 7,000 wood samples.

I found the work of Kenneth Høech of Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland especially fascinating. He has researched trees that survive near the arctic tree line and has begun an arboretum to give this otherwise treeless island arboreal plant life.

Sam Van Aken of Syracuse, New York engaged in a project called Tree of 40 Fruit. He grafted stone fruits, including plums, cherries, apricots, almonds, and peaches, onto a single tree, and planted these at suitable locations throughout the country. Each of the typically historical varieties is documented in his archive of botanical illustrations and herbarium specimens of the leaves and flowers.

I recommend this book for its many fascinating stories. As Amy Stewart concludes in her introduction, “if this book accomplishes anything, I hope it inspires you to plant a tree. Or two. Or maybe a dozen. Watch out, though—trees can be addictive.”

Published by Brian Thompson in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 12, Issue 1, January 2025.

A Kid’s Guide to Plants of the Pacific Northwest

Did you know that skunk cabbage roots look like pale, ropy space aliens? Would you like to learn to make maple syrup from bigleaf maple sap? How about some rose-petal honey for your next tea party?

The author of A Kid’s Guide to Plants of the Pacific Northwest shares knowledge gleaned from years in the field, working with young people at her outdoor school on Denman Island, British Columbia.

The book opens with an acknowledgment of the Indigenous peoples of the coast from Alaska to northern California, and the vital relationships that Indigenous people have formed with this land and its plants since time immemorial. The author revisits this topic throughout the book, highlighting Indigenous stewardship of specific plants, from cattail to camas.

Subsequent chapters introduce readers to plant names (Indigenous, common, and scientific), the ethics of gathering, plant families, plant guilds (also known as plant communities), poisonous plants, and invasive plants.

The groundwork in place, Joly presents a dazzling array of plant profiles, arranged seasonally for ease of use. Each profile includes surprising facts about the plant, an activity or recipe to try, and a mix of photographs and sketches that reflect the joy and wonder she and her students feel as they get to know these plants better.

This book is on my gift list for any young person in the region, but it’s not just for kids and families. Anyone who loves plants is likely to be charmed by this book and learn something in the process.

Reviewed by Laura Blumhagen in The Leaflet, December 2024, Volume 11, Issue 12.

 

 

The Garden Against Time : In Search of a Common Paradise

The Garden Against Time offers pleasures on multiple fronts. Olivia Laing weaves together elegantly a narrative of reviving her English garden originally designed by Mark Rumary, a well-known landscape designer; numerous accounts of other gardens and gardeners, some literary and some real; and a thread of deep searching into the exclusion underlying nearly all these gardens.

Although Laing had yearned for a garden of her own since early childhood, she was in her forties when she and her husband Ian found the right neglected garden to restore – in January 2020. It was only a third of an acre, “so cunningly divided that you could never see the entirety at once . . .” (p. 5). Then came Covid, and everything shut down. Three million people in Britain began gardening, and Olivia and Ian moved into their new home in August.

Preparing the soil with huge amounts of manure, waiting impatiently for a year to see which of Rumary’s original plants had survived, then laboring many months to put her plans in place – the story makes one ache in sympathy but feel inspired as well.

The other gardens in the book begin with Eden in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and the poems of John Clare bewailing the enclosure of once public land. They include real English and Italian gardeners and gardens, especially Shrubland Hall.

William Morris receives much attention. One of this book’s great pleasures is Laing’s writing style. Her description of Morris shows that style nicely: “It’s true he was a dynamo, a spinning top, who compulsively taught himself to master a dozen crafts, who could weave a tapestry and dye a chintz, embroider a wall-hanging, construct a stained-glass window, write a poem (often on a bus and often too at the astounding rate of a thousand lines a day), illuminate a manuscript, bind and print a book, perhaps translating Homer or Virgil as an evening’s respite from the more exacting work” (p. 161). This book could be used in advanced writing classes as an example of how to play with the English language as if it were a musical instrument.

The subtitle, “In Search of a Common Paradise,” refers to the book’s underlying theme of unease about the unsavory underpinnings of many gardens – certainly all those Laing visits in this book. Do only rich people get to have gardens? Why can’t everyone have access to that soul satisfying pleasure Laing found in hers? Her research led to the slave trade behind Shrubland Hall’s wealth. On the other hand, Morris hoped for the opposite, a utopia where gardens (and all properties) are held in common.

Instead, Laing opts for a combination of public and private ownership: “We need gardens and the life they support established everywhere, if we are to survive” (p. 284). We do.

Many additional delicious nooks and crannies await the reader of “Gardens Against Time.” Run, do not walk, to the nearest library (ours). Don’t miss this book.

Reviews by Priscilla Grundy in The Leaflet, Volume 11, Issue 11, November 2024.

The Backyard Bird Chronicles

The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a winsome account of six years in Amy Tan’s obsession (her word) with the birds behind her house. Mostly she stays indoors, watching the action in her yard. She describes what she sees each day (not all days are included) and sketches bird portraits for each entry. Yes, Tan the best-selling novelist has learned to create attractive art as well as lively avian episodes. She first took drawing lessons at age 64 (now she is 72) and has here produced some accurate and attractive bird portraits.

She convinced a hummingbird to drink from a tiny feeder she held in her hand. As someone excited to see a hummingbird hover just once over my apartment window box geraniums, I’m awed – and a little jealous.

Tan chronicles the many tactics she uses to attract birds to her yard – the bird houses, perches, and especially the feeders. Finding something the squirrels could not figure out took many tries. What foods work best was also a challenge, and discovering that some birds eat only on the ground added complications.

Tan’s entries often describe an encounter and then ask questions about it, often questions she does not or cannot answer. Her entry for October 29, 2019 begins with a quotation from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: “Hermit Thrushes rarely visit backyards and generally do not visit feeders” (p. 89). Then she tells how a Hermit Thrush spent three and a half hours trying to find a way into three of her feeders. It kept trying even when the same food was easily available in a flowerpot on the ground below the feeder. Tan then asks five questions about why the bird acted this way. For example, was it young? Migrating? Just curious? She ends by deciding that Hermit Thrushes are not shy, but “solitary nonconformists.”

The May 6, 2019 entry describes an Oak Titmouse encountering live mealworms where it was expecting to find suet balls. The three drawings show stages of the bird’s bafflement and eventual acceptance, each with an imagined bird comment in a cartoon balloon: “What?! No suet balls? It’s alive!” “The food keeps moving.” And eventually, when it accepts the mealworm, “What are you looking at?” Then Tan reports the bird ate many mealworms and carried many more back to the nest.

Tan says her obsession with birds has some similarities to her work as a writer: She regards herself as an observer who asks questions about the lives, deaths, and surroundings of what she sees. Add that to her success in attracting dozens of birds to her backyard, and this book emerges in full feather.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in The Leaflet, Volume 11, Issue 10, October 2024

Down-to-Earth Women: Those Who Care for the Soil


A charming caricature by Sir Edwin Lutyens of Gertrude Jekyll with a spade adorns the cover of Down-to-Earth Women. It attracts the reader and suggests the tone of this 1982 collection of stories about British women gardeners. Dawn MacLeod announces in the preface that “gardens were of little interest to me unless they were personal and subjective” (p. ix), and “Certain gardens could only be made by women” (p. x).

Of the book’s eight chapters, two deal with earlier periods and six with the twentieth century. MacLeod knew personally a number of her later subjects. The book places women in groups, such as medieval nuns, herb gardeners, and flower gardeners. Several of her subjects are known mainly for their writing about plants, but MacLeod assures the reader that she included none unless she was convinced they got their hands dirty in the soil.

MacLeod provides a variety of information about her down-to-earth women. Some had art school training and adapted it, some learned from hired gardeners, many from family members. Ellen Willmott had eighty-six gardeners before she lost her fortune due to German investments before World War I.

MacLeod includes character traits: Gertrude Jekyll was an “ideal aunt,” but “Poor Miss Willmott. It is so hard to find anybody who has said nice things about her” (p. 55). Margery Fish found “clearing bindweed . . . far more exciting than golf or fishing” with a reward of “a barrow-load of obscene twisting white roots and the joy of burning them” (p. 122) .

Perhaps MacLeod’s greatest skill is in describing the gardens the women created. Not only does she name plants, but she explains garden designs, often with comparisons to painting and textiles – very helpful in a book with no design illustrations. She also includes the garden’s environment and its history, as it developed and, sadly, often declined or disappeared. Black and white photos support some of the descriptions.

Down-to-Earth Women contains lots of intriguing information. Like its cover, it is lively and very reflective of its creator’s enthusiastic personality.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in The Leaflet, Volume 11, Number 9, August 2024.

A Forest of Your Own: The Pacific Northwest Handbook of Ecological Forestry

Marianne North’s Travel Writing by Michelle Payne

The life and work of Marianne North, the eminent Victorian botanical artist, is well documented. Do we need another book about her? Michelle Payne provides a positive answer in this well-illustrated volume. She aims to modify the dominant image of North as an intrepid lone traveler to the many sites of her art, to show us a different, fuller picture. North always had a cast of helpers around her and benefited from her colonial connections.

Between 1871 and 1885 North traveled to 15 countries in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. The book presents her trips in chronological order, using substantial excerpts from North’s journals. Along with a few examples of the stunning botanical art North is famous for, Payne includes many of North’s impressionistic paintings of landscapes, cities, and buildings she visited, and a few photographs of the journal pages themselves.

The journals record North’s interactions with the many people who hosted her, and her reactions, sometimes amused. Here she describes a formal dinner for fifty in India: “. . . Lady L. herself so hung with artificial flowers that she made quite a crushing sound whenever she sat down” [p. 169].

She also tells of her less comfortable accommodations, this one in Tenerife: “A great barn-like room was given up to me, with heaps of potatoes and corn swept up into the corners of it. I had a stretcher-bed at one end, on which I got a very large allowance of good sleep. The cocks and hens roosted on the beams overhead and I heard my donkey and other beasts munching their food and snoring below” [p.84].

Often she describes plants with the precision one would expect of this woman who painted them so accurately. Here she describes her first view of Sparaxis pendula in South Africa: “Its almost invisible stalks stood four or five feet high, waving in the wind. These were weighed down by strings of lovely pink bells, with yellow calyx, and buds; they followed the winding marsh, and looked like a pink snake in the distance” [p. 217]. Close observation plus context, including a familiar image – very impressive.

Back home in England, North gives the reader an afternoon with Charles Darwin a few months before his death: “He sat on the grass under a shady tree, and talked deliciously on every subject to us all for hours together, or turned over and over again the collection of Australian paintings I brought down for him to see, showing in a few words how much more he knew about the subjects than anyone else, myself included, though I had seen them and he had not” [p. 257].

This reader came away from  Travel Writing wishing she could spend an evening with this brilliant, multitalented woman – just the result Michelle Payne was hoping for.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in the Leaflet, volume 11, issue 8, August 2024

Chatsworth: The Gardens and the People Who Made Them

“There is an indefinable quality about the setting of the ‘Palace of the Peaks’ which has always exerted a hold over me and caused my spirits to rise and my heart to flutter” (p.17). Alan Titchmarsh begins his tour of the gardens and people of Chatsworth with this personal response and then compares it to that of Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice on first seeing Pemberley, the vast estate of the man she eventually marries.

Both Chatsworth and the fictional Pemberley are in Derbyshire in central England. Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, consists of 35,000 acres, 105 of which are gardens. Titchmarsh combines a history of the gardens and the gardeners who created them – including famous landscape designers like ‘Capability’ Brown and Joseph Paxton – with accounts of the owners’ family over the centuries. Luscious photographs and historically accurate pictures of family members combine to excellent effect.

Interestingly, the women of the family seem to have been a major, if not the predominant, influence on the gardens. From Bess of Hardwick, who convinced her husband to buy the property in 1549, to Deborah Devonshire in the 21st century, a number of decisions about gardens have been made by women. Titchmarsh tells good stories about all these characters. He enjoys a personal friendship with the current family, calling Deborah “Debo” in the text.

Each of the estate gardens receives a chapter, noting its planting history and challenges over many years. The formal gardens, the rock garden, Arcadia, the arboretum and pinetum, the maze, the glass houses (several!), the follies, and the sculptures all receive admiring descriptions. Titchmarsh also shows how the family has maintained solvency by inviting in the public for carefully chosen events, such as art exhibitions and fairs.

Mostly this book is a work of admiration for both the gardens and the people. Titchmarsh very rarely gives a less than completely positive opinion. Of the monkey puzzle trees, one originally introduced by Paxton, he notes, “Victorian plant collectors . . . seemed to prize oddity as much as beauty” (p. 192). Monkey puzzle trees here in Seattle may reflect the same taste.

Descriptions of visiting royalty and historic cricket matches add variety to this very engaging, as well as beautiful, book.
Review by Priscilla Grundy published in Leaflet for Scholars, volume 11, issue 7, July 2024.

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children is an innovative book by writer Jamaica Kincaid and artist Kara Walker. Despite the title, it is not for the youngest of readers, and the word ‘colored’ is a pointed, satirical use of an antiquated term. The second half of the title indicates the book’s purpose: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World. In form, the book calls to mind children’s books of centuries past, which were meant as vehicles of moral education. This aim is true here, too, but the content is distinctive for its intense focus on plant discovery and naming in the historical context of conquest, colonial exploitation, and slavery. This book is a necessary counter-narrative to traditional white Eurocentric perspectives on botany and human-plant relationships.

Kincaid is known for her literary style and her deep botanical knowledge; Walker is best known for her silhouettes and large art installations that both employ and transform racist imagery of past eras. Though each alphabetical entry is brief, all are dense with layers of meaning. Kincaid’s sentences twist and turn as they disentangle a plant’s context. Here are excerpts from the Amaranth entry:

“When the Spaniards were not committing genocide against the peoples they met, who had made a comfortable life for themselves and created extraordinary, glorious monuments to their civilizations, they were forcing them to abandon this source of physical and spiritual nourishment and replace it with barley wheat, and other European grains. This, along with many other cruelties, led to the decline of the Aztecs and the Inca.” Contemporary gardeners are not immune to a bit of sly critique: “Some gardeners, when reflecting on its [amaranth’s] history and its appearance in their garden as an ornamental, have a very fleeting debate within themselves over the ethics of growing food as an ornamental.”

Walker’s illustrations are thought-provoking: two enslaved Black men laboring under the weight of enormous cotton bolls while, on top of one puff of cotton, a white man in colonial dress takes his ease, smoking a pipe. The illustration accompanying the Guava entry shows a Black woman reaching toward a fruit while poised on a shipping crate marked “Exotic Fruits,” “For Export,” while an impish white boy lifts up the back of her dress. The visual double entendre here speaks volumes.

Though at times veering toward didactic or opaquely allusive language, there is much to learn from this book and its illuminating explorations of plants and their complex histories.

Reviewed by Rebecca Alexander.

Mystery-themed books

For students contemplating a career in the plant sciences, being a forensic botanist is probably not at the top of the prospective career list. Reading Planting Clues by David J. Gibson may change that viewpoint. As the author observes, “an appreciation of the value of plants in forensics is often lacking.”

This gripping book relates many cases in which identifying plants is key to solving crimes or making convictions. This includes some very famous cases, such as the kidnapping of the infant child of Charles Lindbergh in 1932. A forester was able to identify the wood in the homemade ladder used to take the child from the second floor nursery. During the trial, the defense moved to have this expert testimony disallowed, but the objection was overruled and the findings helped convict the kidnapper.

This is only one of several grisly murder cases in which plants linked the criminal to the crime. Other stories are less gruesome. These include smuggling expensive orchids by mixing them in with less valuable but similar plants. Out-of-bloom, only an expert can tell the difference.

This garden of horrors provides fertile ground for fiction writers, too. Marta McDowell writes a rollicking book titled Gardening Can Be Murder, recounting all the ways in which mystery writers have used plants (or fungi) to kill characters, or incriminate killers. As the author observes, “criminal investigation, whether vocation or avocation, calls for many of the same skills as horticulture.”

This is a widespread genre and from my own reading I know it is only growing! Nineteen of Agatha Christie’s stories have a garden or plant component, as do four of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

My personal favorite series is Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters. Set in a 12th century abbey on the Welsh-English border, the eponymous monk is the abbey’s herbalist. Although these are works of fiction, the garden practices are informative and largely accurate for the time. More about this can be found in Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden by Robin Whiteman, published in 1997.

Reviewed by Brian Thompson in the Leaflet, Volume 11, Issue 6, June 2024.