We first noticed the work of natural science illustrator and botanical artist Sharon Birzer through her participation in the Miller Library’s annual exhibit of work by members of the Pacific Northwest Botanical Artists. This month, Sharon was scheduled to show her work featuring lichens of southwest Alaska’s Tebenkof Wilderness Area in the library. Until that exhibit can be rescheduled, we invite you to enjoy her finely honed observations of nature by visiting her virtual exhibit, Gathering from the Land. Her keen sense of color, line, and composition reveals the defining characteristics of her subjects (lichen, plants, insects, birds, sea creatures) in drawings and paintings that are startlingly beautiful.

Sometimes reference librarians ask ourselves questions—especially in times of social isolation! Since libraries are closed, I have been rereading my own collection of books. When I Lived in Modern Times is a novel by Linda Grant, set in 1940s Tel Aviv before Israel became a state. The main character refers several times to unnamed trees that are growing along Rothschild Boulevard (Sderot Rothschild). The trees are noteworthy, yet she cannot identify them. After having read this book twenty years ago, I decided it was time to solve the mystery!

By searching Google Maps, I could see there were two main types of trees. It's a mile-long road with a central pedestrian thoroughfare, and in researching sources like Tel Aviv municipal archives and local news, I determined that both Delonix regia and Ficus (F. microcarpa and F. sycomorus) grow there. Delonix, native to Madagascar, was introduced to Israel in the 1920s and may have been planted on the boulevard then or later. The trees are depicted in a 1937 painting by Yehezkel Streichman, "The Kiosk on Rothschild Boulevard." The ficus trees on Rothschild Boulevard were planted in the 1930s. Although jacaranda trees are mentioned in various historical sources, I did not see contemporary images of them, though a 1946 photo of Rothschild Boulevard at the intersection of Allenby Street (the very corner mentioned in Grant's novel) shows jacaranda and ficus branches overhanging a photographer's sidewalk photo-shoot.

To this day, Rothschild Boulevard is a well-used tree-lined corridor through the heart of a busy city. Just as we have cherry blossom mania here in Seattle during the spring, there is great excitement when the red flowers of Delonix regia (known as flame tree, Royal Poinciana, Flamboyant, Gulmohar, and in Hebrew tze'elon naeh) bloom in early June. The ficus trees with their pale trunks sometimes covered in a net of accessory trunks made of aerial roots, are stately but drop fruit that can be perilous for pedestrians. Still, they are a notable feature of the landscape; Tel Aviv-Yafo municipal agronomist Haim Gavriel even published a recent monograph about the Ficus of Israel's Boulevards.

Resources that were useful in researching this mystery include:

• Mann, Barbara. A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space. Stanford University Press, 2006. [accessed online 4/25/2020]
• Mann, Barbara. "Tel Aviv’s Rothschild: When a boulevard becomes a monument." Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp. 1-38. [accessed online 4/24/2020]
• Rosenberg, Elissa. "Tel Aviv never stops." Landscape Architecture Magazine 107 (11), 120-128

Editor's note: this is an excerpt. For the full story, see our Gardening Answers Knowledgebase.

Students in the Landscape Architecture department and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington have been researching changing cherry blossom times, the benefits of bouquets, Northwest plants and their Lushootseed names, and more. You can catch a glimpse of their results on our website in the Library's recent virtual exhibit, which includes video presentations as well as posters this year.

Q: What is the difference between the buckwheat plant that is used as an edible grain, and the wildflowers that are also called buckwheat? Are they related? I saw a plant growing on a ridge in the Olympic Mountains that was later identified for me as cushion buckwheat. Also, are there flowering buckwheats that people grow as ornamentals in gardens?

A: Edible buckwheat generally refers to Fagopyrum esculentum. If you were to find it growing wild in Washington State, it would be considered an escaped cultivated plant (i.e., weedy). It is sometimes grown as a cover crop, in addition to the use of its ground seeds for buckwheat flour. It is called a pseudograin or pseudocereal because it is not in the grass family (in the same way that amaranth, chia, and quinoa are pseudocereals).

Cushion buckwheat is Eriogonum ovalifolium. Like Fagopyrum, Eriogonum is in the knotweed family— Polygonaceae. There are about twenty native species of Eriogonum in Washington. Many of them grow east of the Cascades. Many more species of Eriogonum are native to California. (This article by Jennifer Jewell, Pacific Horticulture, April 2013 is a good introduction.) Many are best appreciated in the wild. If you want to grow buckwheat ornamentally, try to select a species that suits your garden conditions (ideally, in full sun, in soil that is well-drained and not overwatered, and mulched with gravel). Jewell's article suggests that penstemon, salvia, and grasses might make good garden companions for the right species of Eriogonum. Plant expert Linda Cochran has experimented with growing a variety of Eriogonum umbellatum in her Olympic Peninsula garden.

Here is some interesting trivia about the scientific names for these different kinds of buckwheat, Eriogonum's name is derived from Greek: Erio = wool / gony = knee, referring to hairy nodes of the first scientifically described species E. tomentosum. Fagopyrum comes from Latin fagus (beech) and Greek pyrus (wheat) because the achenes (dried fruits) resemble beechnuts.