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

Leaflet for Scholars from the Elisabeth C. Miller Library

Volume 12, Issue 10 | October 2025

October exhibit: The Natural State of Imaginary Things

New works by Lisa Myers Bulmash

Please join us in welcoming Lisa Myers Bulmash with a collection of new work, The Natural State of Imaginary Things. Her piece titled Tenderheaded is shown here.

The exhibit runs October 2-30 during library open hours. Join us for a reception in the library on Saturday, October 11, from 12 to 2 pm. A word from the artist:

I grew up with an appreciation of nature that was mediated by words and books. Reading widely and voraciously filled my head with words for certain plants years before I ever saw them in person. Then, when I began to read gardening and botany books in preparation for this exhibition, I was drawn to descriptions that anthropomorphized nature, like referring to categories of plants as “families.”

The work in this exhibition is the result of a generous interpretation of “nature.” Birdsong emerges from a human throat; flowers grow hands and faces.

The Garden at the End of Time:

Getting by in the Age of Climate Change
By John Hanson Mitchell
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy

Whenever overwhelmed by news of a new climate-related disaster, John Hanson Mitchell buys a new rose bush. He explains it as a philosophical statement of resistance.

The Garden at the End of Time combines descriptions of climate-related problems with an account of his own gardening response. Each chapter is named for his latest rose purchase. Near the end of the book, in “Reine Marie Rose,” he never names the rose in the chapter; he just assumes you know that is what he bought.

The garden at the end of time : getting by in the age of climate change / John Hanson Mitchell.

Mitchell builds his theme around the last chapter in Voltaire’s Candide. There, after surviving multiple disasters, such as the huge 1755 earthquake in Lisbon (real), Candide (fictional) retreats to cultivate his garden. Mitchell reports his own conversations with a real ecologist he calls “Pangloss Rosen,” named for the Pangloss who accompanied Candide and tried to convince him that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”

The book includes a history of gardens, a history of sanctuaries, and many accounts of contemporary climate problems. One positive example is rewilding, a project to return farmland, the Knepp Estate in England, to its status before it was farmed. A history of English agriculture, beginning in the Stone Age, follows.

For all its weighty messages, The Garden at the End of Time presents its material lightly. To gardeners it brings more reasons to keep on cultivating.

Visit the library on Saturdays during Autumn Quarter

Starting this Saturday, October 4, we will be open each Saturday from 9 am - 3 pm, Mondays from noon to 8 pm, and each Tuesday-Friday from 9 am to 5 pm. We will also be open late (until 6:30 pm) on Thursday, October 23, right before Northwest Horticultural Society's event featuring Charlotte Harris.

Schedule a Tour

This quarter the Miller Library highlights sustainability. We are featuring relevant books, peer-reviewed journals, and theses in our Student and Faculty display area near the armchairs in the corner.

We offer ecological restoration handbooks, sustainable landscaping textbooks, recent theses, permaculture guides and much more. Visitors are welcome to browse, using or borrowing items directly from the display, and to ask questions. Our dedicated staff can guide your research and help you get the most from your library time. We also welcome class tours of the library. Just email us at hortlib@uw.edu to schedule a tour.