This year marks an important milestone to celebrate: Seattle Japanese Garden's  kanreki, or 60th year celebration. In Japanese culture, a person's 60th birthday is an occasion of reaching full circle and carries a sense of renewal. Recently reopened with timed tickets to prevent crowding, the garden is more beautiful than ever today.

Please join Seattle Japanese Garden and the Miller Library in welcoming five local artists: sketcher Elijah N. Pasco, photographer Kathleen Atkins, textile artist Kathy Hattori, multidisciplinary artist Markel Uriu, and illustrator Michelle Kumata. Kumata's piece inspired by the annual moon viewing celebration is featured at right. The whole collection of work will be featured on the Seattle Japanese Garden website this month.

Only a few pages into Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, my mind expanded like a puffball, fit to burst from the wildly proliferating spores of ideas. This is so much more than a book about mushrooms, the showy fruiting bodies that tend to dominate our attention to the fungal world. Merlin Sheldrake, son of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, holds a Ph.D. in tropical ecology for research on mycorrhizal relationships. The book should appeal to scientist and layperson alike, as the author excels at communicating complex concepts in lucid and literary prose, while retaining a sense of humor, wonder, and above all, hope. What role does hope play? Reading the book at this time of pandemic and social inequity, the notions of mutualism, symbiosis, and involution (involution — distinct from evolution's focus on competition  — attends to patterns and strategies of cooperation) ramify beyond the realm of mycelial networks, their implications readily extendable to human interaction.

...[Editor's note: this is an excerpt. Read Rebecca's entire review in the Gardening Answers Knowledgebase.]...

The book calls attention to the groundbreaking research of scientists, many of them women (Suzanne Simard's work on carbon transfer between plants; Katie Field on mycorrhizal solutions to agricultural problems; Lynne Boddy on mycelial networks; Lynn Margulis's endosymbiotic theory once dismissed as "evolutionary speculation"). Sheldrake describes his meetings with Pacific Northwest innovator and fungal theorist Paul Stamets (who has recently been working on fungal antiviral compounds), and mycoenthusiasts and entrepreneurs like Peter McCoy (founder of Radical Mycology, a group that promotes citizen scientist education on things fungal, such as mycoremediation and mycofiltration). Farther afield, in New York, the versatility of fungi is being harnessed to make biodegradable packing and building materials and furnishings as alternatives to plastic. Imagine ordering a grow-your-own-lampshade kit, or sitting on a fungal stool!

Each chapter presents surprising observations that may dismantle and rearrange the reader's preconceptions. We humans tend to think of ourselves as discrete, separate individuals, but each of us is actually an ecosystem "composed of — and decomposed by — an ecology of microbes" that make it possible for us to function (to digest our food and reap nutrients from it, for example). We are not unique in this. Symbiosis is widespread.

...[Editor's note: this book is available as an ebook or downloadable audiobook from Seattle Public Library. King County Library System patrons can request access to a downloadable audiobook edition.]...

This book is the work of an adult who has retained his childhood curiosity about the world, who built piles of leaves and embedded himself in them to see if he could experience their decomposition. He continues to be a fungal experimenter, brewing and fermenting, and exploring the many possibilities of partnering with fungi to mend the planet. I highly recommend immersing yourself in this book. Merlin Sheldrake's enthusiasm is contagious.

Editor's note: this title is available as an e-book or as an audio download for King County Library System borrowers.

Professor Marzluff sets the scene for his exploration by camping in a cornfield in Illinois to survey birds. After an early morning walk he reports: “It takes me an hour and a half before I hear my first meadowlark — an eastern — belting forth a high-pitched, if simple tingaling from an abandoned grassy field.” After 3 hours he counts only 6 meadowlarks, the lowest count ever on that stretch of road. In North America, in fact, “the estimated population [of meadowlarks] has decreased by 71 percent since 1966.” Yikes! The reasons for the decline are complex, from habitat loss to decrease of prey insects due to pesticides. In Search of Meadowlarks: Birds, Farms, and Food in Harmony with the Land covers case studies and field trips to farms, vineyards and ranches from Montana to Costa Rica and Washington to California in order to discover which agricultural practices sustain birds.

What more can farmers do to help the environment than just avoiding pesticides? I’ve never thought about how farms could provide habitat to wildlife and support birds. I assumed wildlife conservation was something that happened in wilderness areas or abandoned fields. Marzluff points out that creatures also inhabit farms and ranches, albeit in declining numbers. Pasture and fallow fields can resemble natural grasslands while hedges resemble forest edges. Regenerative agriculture is a new buzzword to describe practices on farms and ranches that might build soil health, sequester carbon, prevent storm water pollution or support wildlife.  The regenerative practices must also produce food and be economically sustainable. That last part is tricky, but the example farms that Marzluff visits have managed to make it work.

One simple example employed by California vineyard Tres Sabores involved installing bird boxes to house nesting owls. Research shows an owl family consumes more than a thousand rodents over a summer. This saves vineyard managers considerable time and money controlling grape-damaging voles, rats and gophers. Another example that surprised me was how tightly-controlled cattle grazing in Montana improved river ecosystems. Cows eat invasive grasses and compact the ground to allow vernal pools to last longer into early summer, providing habitat to amphibians.

Marzluff explores how some farmers spare land on the margins to support wildlife while others embrace sharing the land, by delaying pasture mowing, for example, to allow birds to fledge their young. The book concludes with a hopeful chapter on actions consumers and policy makers should take to assist the farmers who provide for birds.  

In an ideal world, farms and ranches practicing sharing and sparing methods would form networked corridors to wild lands to boost biodiversity and reduce the risk of localized extinction. Readers wanting to dig deeper into the scholarly background of themes revealed in this book should also read "Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty" by Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer and Angus Wright (2009). In Search of Meadowlarks is enjoyable reading for anyone interested in wildlife conservation or regenerative agriculture.