Volume 4, Issue 1
Trees of Pacific Northwest
Wild Public Lands
Photographs by Richard Dunford
on display through January 30

Richard Dunford has been taking pictures of trees for some 45 years. His aim? To help the viewer see trees and landscapes in a new light. From the artist's statement:

Forests are a confused and disordered visual experience. When we walk in a deep forest we rarely focus on a single tree; there is also the environment. Where the tree lives is sometimes more important than the tree itself. Without an environment, one tree is not much different from the next. This is why my images rarely show a single focal point of interest. They are often an assortment of spaces in what might be called a “tableau” or “mosaic” effect. The tree must share visual interest with its cluttered surround. It is messy, to be sure, but it is my job as an artist and a quiet personal victory to be able to use color, light and shape to make order out of this landscape.

Richard invites you to an opening reception at the Miller Library this Thursday, January 5, from 5 to 7 pm. Visitors can meet the artist and be visually transported to wildland sites throughout our region.

Native Plants of the Southeast
published by Timber Press, 2014
reviewed by Brian Thompson

In the spring of 2014, I visited the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, NC. I was delighted by this extensive collection of herbaceous and woody plants mostly native to the southeastern United States. Many of these plants, or their close relatives, can thrive in our Pacific Northwest gardens.

These are featured in a book that was published later in 2014: Native Plants of the Southeast. Author Larry Mellichamp is the retired director of the botanical garden at the Charlotte campus of the University of North Carolina and has considerable experience with plants throughout the temperate southeast.

This book is much more than a field guide. Each plant is evaluated for garden cultivation. An extensive introduction discusses the merits and challenges of using native plants in a landscape, with principles that would be applicable in our region. The plant encyclopedia is interspersed with essays on broad groupings of plants with an emphasis on garden adaptability.

Restoration ecology in the spotlight

This winter the University of Washington offers many courses that touch on restoration ecology. From the tightly focused ESRM 325 (Environmental Applications of Plants: Bioenergy and Bioremediation) to wider-ranging ESRM 473 (Restoration in North America), more than a dozen different courses will bring ecological restoration to the forefront for hundreds of UW students and researchers this quarter.

With this in mind, the Miller Library features favorite ecological restoration resources, including general-audience guides such as Dobson and Beck's Watersheds: A Practical Handbook for Healthy Water, pictured here. See them all, many available to borrow directly from the display, atop the journal display shelf near the library's north windows.

New to the Library