November 2025 Leaflet for Scholars ~ Elisabeth C. Miller Library, UW Botanic Gardens

Leaflet for Scholars from the Elisabeth C. Miller Library

Volume 12, Issue 11 | November 2025

Molly Hashimoto paintings and prints

detail from Wildflowers of the West by Molly Hashimotosee it

Please welcome Molly Hashimoto with her paintings and prints of Northwest trees, flowers, wildlife and landscapes. We are celebrating her new book, Wildflowers of the West: an Artist's Guide.

The exhibit runs November 4-December 29 (continuing as part of our December Arts & Crafts Exhibit & Sale) during library open hours.

Molly will present a demonstration in the library on Thursday, November 6, from 1:30 to 3:30 pm.

This Infant Adventure by Christian Lamb
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy

The multiple botanic gardens established mainly under the direction of Sir Joseph Banks at Kew “helped to underpin the [British] Empire’s commercial success and were also instrumental in furthering botanical knowledge around the world,” (p. 23).

In This Infant Adventure Christian Lamb takes the reader to ten of these offspring. Her focus is on the commercial purposes of the gardens and especially on the botanical explorers who worked at and adventured from them. For each garden Lamb describes its history, often noting the tension between those who saw the goal as a pleasure garden only and those who sought scientific collection methods and commercial uses.

This infant adventure : offspring of the Royal Gardens at Kew / Christian Lamb.

Particularly entertaining are her narratives of botanists. In the chapter on the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, Lamb recounts the travels of Captain Bligh and the efforts to transfer breadfruit plants from the East Indies to the West Indies. Her retelling begins with the need for food for sugar cane workers. She acknowledges Bligh’s shortcomings, which led to the Mutiny on the Bounty, but balances his negatives with his efforts to care for his crew and his amazing navigational skills.

In Australia the chapter on the Melbourne Botanic Garden deals mainly with the adventures, accomplishments, and failures of Ferdinand von Mueller, a German who made many plant discoveries and managed to alienate almost everyone.

Lamb writes of her own visits to these gardens. The dust jacket notes that the book was published in her ninetieth year. This reviewer, ninety now, remembers a world in which the British Empire was more widely admired than at present. Lamb’s book carries echoes of that era. She uses place names which have been changed, Ceylon instead of Sri Lanka, for instance. Some of her references to nonwhites reflect formerly common practices now widely viewed as racist. Even so, This Infant Adventure offers riveting stories and a useful perspective on these wonderful gardens.

Ask the Plant Answer Line: What is this ferny-leaved plant?

Q: What is this yellow-flowered, ferny-leaved plant in my rock garden?

A: After consulting with the Hyde Herbarium, we can confidently identify this as Corydalis cheilanthifolia. The North American Rock Garden Society website has a good picture of it in the same stage of growth in a Calgary, Alberta garden. It's the yellow-flowered one in front. That pink flower in the back looks like a tall type of primrose, perhaps Primula saxatilis.