identifying Shortia

: Jennifer Rose

I saw this unusual flower in a Portland park. What is it?

This is Shortia galacifolia, also called Oconee Bells, a spring-blooming low-growing evergreen perennial native to Georgia, the Carolinas, and parts of Tennessee and Virginia (in southeastern woodlands within the boundaries of Cherokee lands). It is rare in the wild. It was first ‘discovered’ by plant explorer André Michaux in 1788 (with help from Cherokee guides) and not ‘found’ again for almost a century (by Asa Gray). It was known to the Cherokee long before Michaux and Gray became fascinated by it. Its Cherokee name is ‘shee-show,’ two-colored plant of the gods. Because it grows near the water’s edge, it is said to be a harbinger of spring rain. The common name Oconee is derived from Cherokee, Ae-quo-nee, meaning ‘land beside water.’

You can learn more about it from garden writer Charles Elliott’s two-part essay, The Long Trail of Shortia, linked here and here. There is also an essay about its discovery and rediscovery on the Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries website. It is clear from Michaux’s own documentation that Indigenous people knew a great deal about this plant (“I came back to the camp with my guide at the head of the Keowee and gathered a large quantity of the low woody plants with the saw-toothed leaves that I found the day I arrived. I did not see it on any other mountain. The Indians of the place told me that the leaves had a good taste when chewed and the odor was agreeable when they were crushed, which I found to be the case”), but Michaux and Gray, like so many non-Indigenous plant explorers, did not question the decidedly Eurocentric bias behind the idea of plant discovery and classification.

Botanists, Plant collectors, Shortia

Brave the Wild River

Today raft trips through the Grand Canyon are common. Several companies offer choices of a few or many days. One specifies that the client must be at least nine years old. These trips differ greatly from the one Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter took in 1938. One difference is the Hoover Dam. Before the dam, the Colorado River challenged travelers with extreme rapids, rapids now slowed and sometimes covered by the water that rose behind the dam.

Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny recounts how these two women, both affiliated with the University of Michigan botany department, overcame multiple challenges in addition to the river, to map and collect plants in the canyon before many of them were submerged.

Clover, an instructor at the university, was a generation older than Jotter, a graduate student. The trip was Clover’s passion. Opposition came from a chorus of voices proclaiming that the Grand Canyon was “no place for a woman.” She overcame reluctance in the Michigan botany department to approve the project and hesitation by Norman Nevills to guide the trip. He hoped to set up a business floating adventurers through the canyon but was reluctant to take women.

Sevigny takes the reader through the hair-raising trip in boats designed by Nevills, a national media frenzy accompanying the travelers, and Clover’s frustration that no one seemed interested in the plant collecting. She had to harass Nevills to make stops so the women could collect, and the media mostly failed to mention plants as the purpose of the trip.

Sevigny includes the history of the countryside the group passed, as well as biographies of those involved. The book is full of lovely details, like the women’s selection of brown overalls to wear, because Clover thought jeans too masculine. Or the gyrations required to maintain modesty while bathing in the river. (Four men accompanied the women in three boats. The women did the cooking.)

By the end the reader is amazed that any of the collected plants made it back to Michigan and a few to the Smithsonian. Those plants and the carefully detailed descriptions Clovis and Jotter wrote became useful botanic history as scholars have tried to create a picture of flora in the canyon before the dam.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy and published in the Leaflet, November 2023, Volume 10, Issue 11.

The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium

The National Herbarium of New South Wales, Australia, acts as setting and springboard for Prudence Gibson’s narratives about and descriptions of preserved plants. Gibson holds in admirable tension the wonders of the herbarium and the troubling colonialism that assumed authority over Australia’s plants, collecting them without permission, naming and organizing them by European standards. The question of who owns plants hovers in the background.

Gibson spent three years seeking “to find out what plant-human relations really are and what they mean. And what that meaning tells us about the herbarium” (p. xvi).

The chapter on Joseph Banks, for instance, dwells on the irony of Banksia, a widespread tree in Australia, being named for the famous English plant collector. Yes, he was an amazing collector, but the plant was there long before he arrived. Gibson describes some current efforts to add plant names used by Indigenous people to the herbarium descriptions. The task is challenging in part because the many Aboriginal groups have different names for the same plants.

The National Herbarium moved to a new site during the years Gibson was working on this project. The Plant Thieves includes some lively conversations between Gibson and local women artists creating art for the new building. Throughout Gibson expresses awe at the care given the plant samples in the herbarium.

One chapter recounts a collaboration between botanists and Indigenous Elders to solve a mystery about black beans. These large seeds (also called bogum or Moreton Bay chestnuts, also known as Castanospermum australe) are toxic, but Indigenous people process them for use in a bread called damper. (I used Google frequently to translate Australian terms.) Somehow the plant had spread hundreds of miles, puzzling scientists, because this plant does not spread easily. European settlers believed Indigenous people were not organized enough to establish long trade routes, a logical way the plant could have traveled. The Elders told a Songline story of an ancestral spirit carrying a bag of beans many miles. When scientists examined plants along the route described in the story, they found bean plants everywhere. This evidence supports the presence of a highly developed Indigenous social organization.

The Plant Thieves reads very easily. Gibson brings to life the many people she meets and provides much intriguing information about plants and their ties to the herbarium.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 9, September 2023

Chasing Plants: Journeys with a Botanist through Rainforests, Swamps, and Mountains

“Just imagine it: your parents on their hands and knees groping at a swarm of crickets unleashed from an upturned box; your teenage sister screaming at toads spawning in the bath; squirting cucumbers launching a raid of missiles down the stairs; and the gut-wrenching stench of a freshly unfurled dragon arum wafting through the front door. This is what I subjected my family to.” (p. 7)

The opening paragraph of Chasing Plants by Chris Thorogood, recalling his childhood love of living things, lures the reader into the text. Thorogood is Deputy Director and Head of Science at the Oxford University Botanic Garden. He is also a fine botanical illustrator and a winsome writing stylist. This volume focuses on his pursuit of rare plants, developed from his own diaries. The seven trips described take the reader from England to as far as South Africa and Borneo. (No searches in the Americas.) Each chapter includes one or more oil paintings of the sought-after plants.

In Kent he scrambles over the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover to collect picris broomrape ( Orobanche picridis). Impressively, he sits on a foot-wide shelf, “examining, measuring, collecting and scribbling,” (p. 29) and twisting to take a photograph. He then makes it back to the top of the cliff, fending off repeated efforts by a huge gull to pluck him from his perch.

On the Golan Heights at Israel’s northeastern border, he avoids a mine field to reach the black iris ( Iris atrofusca), pausing to consider its beauty in spite of its absence of color.

In Japan, at the Botanic Gardens of Toyama, his guide, the Curator of the Gardens, begins the tour singing a Japanese folk song, accompanied by his shamisen, a three-stringed instrument. One plant there, Monotropastrum humile, “a leafless, ghostly white plant, each stem supporting a nodding flower that looks strangely like a pony’s head” (p. 172), gains attention because Japanese scientists had recently discovered that its seeds are spread by cockroaches.

Thorogood’s variety of experiences and his skill in delivering them combine to make Chasing Plants a very entertaining read.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in the January 2023 issue of The Leaflet, vol. 10, issue 1.

The Multifarious Mr. Banks : from Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World

[The Multifarious Mr. Banks] cover

Joseph Banks was indeed multifarious. Webster defines the term as “having or occurring in great varieties.” Garden lovers might know that Banks became famous after collecting plants on a round-the-world voyage with Captain Cook on the Endeavour in 1768-71, and that he developed and guided Kew Gardens for decades. Toby Musgrave does justice to these huge accomplishments. What he adds is the astonishing range of other ways that Banks influenced the horticultural world – and often other worlds – in late 18th and early 19th century England and beyond.

The book is organized chronologically through the account of Banks’s Endeavour voyage and a smaller one to Iceland, but then proceeds by subject through other areas of Banks’s activities.

Banks was very wealthy. He was endlessly curious. He apparently knew everyone of any importance in England and many others on the Continent and in America. He had an outgoing and friendly personality. James Boswell describes him as “an elephant, quite placid and gentle, allowing you to get upon his back or play with his proboscis,” (p. 187), as opposed to another world traveler (Scottish explorer James Bruce) who was “a tiger that growled whenever you approached him.”

Banks was also a firm believer in progress and in empire (which 21st century readers might be less enthusiastic about). Musgrave shows us Banks’s close relationship with King George III, that nemesis of the American Revolution. “Farmer George,” as the king was called, loved Kew Gardens and walked in it with Banks regularly. In Banks’s decades-long efforts finding new plants and acquiring them for Kew, he remained focused on how plants could be used as crops or resources to aid the empire.

Banks belonged to more that 70 clubs and societies. It’s hard to imagine how he did all this and still managed his own multiple properties, regularly updating them with new planting plans. The most prominent society activity for him was his position as president of the Royal Society, a title he held for 41½ years beginning in 1778. In all these activities Banks assisted other scientists in a multiplicity of areas, giving counsel, offering connections, and sometimes providing cash.

When England needed a new site for prisoners, after Georgia was no longer available due to American independence, Banks weighed in on proposing Botany Bay in Australia as an appropriate location. He also pulled strings and even arranged smuggling a prize breed of Merino sheep from Spain, to the benefit of Australia as well as England.

Through his connections and frequent correspondence with members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham (which included Erasmus Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestly), with a great many others, and through his own study, “Banks became an acknowledged expert in a wide range of subjects including agriculture, botanic gardens, canals, cartography, coinage, colonization, currency, drainage, earthquakes, economic botany, exploration, farming, leather tanning, Merino sheep, plant pathology, and even the plucking of geese” (p. 281). Multifarious indeed.

This is a real biography, based on copious research. Musgrave avoids fictional conversations and mostly stays away from suggesting what Banks “must have thought.” Fortunately, the author is not afraid to express an opinion, such as that Banks behaved very badly in breaking his engagement to Harriet Blosset. Mostly the story Musgrave tells is one of amazing positives, ending with his justified assessment of Banks as a “great and remarkable man”(p. 332).

Published in the Leaflet, November 2021, Volume 8, Issue 11.

The Food Explorer: the True Adventures of a Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

[The Food Explorer] cover

The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats by Daniel Stone focuses on David Fairchild, an American who lived from 1869 to 1954. Mangoes, avocados, dates, nectarines, superior hops, seedless grapes and even kale are a few of the food plants he introduced.

David Fairchild founded the USDA’s Office of Seed and Plant Introduction in 1898 on a shoestring budget and an obsession with finding novel or better plants for American farmers. He traveled by steamship to ports around the world seeking interesting food plants. His expedition benefactor, travel companion and lifelong—if prickly—friend Barbour Lathrop encouraged and funded the early years of exploration. Lathrop was generally restless and always wanted to keep moving. That meant young David would only have a day or two in a given tropical locale to convince locals to show him unusual fruit and allow him to take a few cuttings. Occasionally he spirited away a cutting without permission.

We learn how Fairchild was introduced to Alexander Graham Bell through exclusive events held by the National Geographic Society. Bell then invited Fairchild to a private dinner to introduce his daughter, Mabel. The two later married, had children and established a home with property outside of Washington, D.C. where Fairchild could show off some of the beautiful ornamental cherries he had acquired in Japan. According to Stone, it was Fairchild’s encouragement that eventually led to the 1912 gift of cherry trees from the mayor of Tokyo to the American people. These are the flowering cherries that famously grow along the Tidal Basin today.

The First World War made exploration difficult and even more dangerous. It also coincided with the growth of isolationist sentiment in American politics. Fairchild’s childhood neighbor and later nemesis, Charles Marlatt, was an entomologist also working for the USDA who sounded the alarm over potentially damaging insect pests hitching a ride on exotic imported plants. Marlatt may have exaggerated the threat, but he made a convincing argument that all imported plants must be sent directly to Washington, D.C. for inspection. Congress agreed and passed a law that required inspections, causing new introductions to slow to a trickle. Fairchild was baffled and saddened at this development, but was proud of the foods he introduced, even if not all of them were embraced by American eaters, including his favorite fruit —the mangosteen.

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, the garden that bears his name in Coral Gables, Florida, was a retirement passion project where he was a primary contributor of tropical trees and plants.

Journalist Daniel Stone’s accessible writing interweaves stories of relationships, travel, plant introduction, and governmental bureaucracy. Readers who enjoy biographies with elements of botanical exploration and the history of food will find this book interesting.

Published in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 8, Issue 7, July 2021.

The Brother Gardeners

[The Brother Gardeners] cover

The Brother Gardeners tells the story of how the English garden came into glorious maturity in the 18th century. But its focus is on the men (alas, almost no women) who brought that garden into being, constructing it to include seeds and plants from the American colonies, and eventually from Australia, South America, Asia, and Africa.

Wars are treated by the brothers as annoying obstacles to be overcome. Political divisions are ignored in order to keep governments friendly to plant transport.

Wulf does a superb job of bringing to life the personalities of the gardeners: Linnaeus, John Bartram, Joseph Banks and numerous others. They all work indefatigably, write each other reams of letters, bicker, fail and try again throughout this book, as they serve the goddess of botany.

Linnaeus, without whose organizing system the huge explosion of new species imported by England would not have been manageable, was not always treated well by his English and Swedish beneficiaries. John Bartram, the American farmer, sought out new species all over the colonies and sent them to England. As a result, American plants became essential to English gardens. Joseph Banks, who focused both his energies and his fortune on collecting plants, spread his passion for botanizing until it became an English mania, and promoted successfully the development of an English policy of plant distribution to and from its colonies.

By the end of the 18th century, Continental gardeners were clamoring to create English gardens rather than the other way around, as had been past practice, and New World plants grew abundantly throughout the Empire.

Wulf describes all this in winningly readable, impressively researched prose. Added benefits are the 18-page glossary of plants and an index which includes both Latin and common plant names. The whole book is a delight.

Published in the March 2019 Leaflet Volume 6, Issue 3.

In the Footsteps of Augustine Henry and his Chinese Plant Collectors

While you’re browsing the tables at your favorite plant sale or nursery, you may notice that many of the plant treasures tempting you have “henryi” or some similar variation in their name. In most cases, these honor Augustine Henry, the Irish customs official who worked for the Chinese government in western China during the 1880s and 1890s.

Henry was not sent there to collect plant specimens, but that was his passion, and his day job allowed him far greater access than most outsiders had to the rich flora of the countryside. His discoveries and his tireless efforts to share those discoveries—through his letters and the seeds, bulbs, and dried plant specimens he sent back to Europe—led to many, many important plants being introduced to western horticulture.

My excitement over Henry was sparked by my recent reading of In the Footsteps of Augustine Henry and his Chinese plant collectors by Seamus O’Brien. The author not only tells the history of his fellow Irishman, he also tells of his own recent expeditions to the areas that Henry explored, especially those that were soon after destroyed by the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam.

You can join in celebrating Henry by buying some of his plants, including Lilium henryi, Parthenocissus henryana (Silvervein Creeper), and Rhododendron augustinii. Other plants introduced because of his research—and the enthusiasm for the plants of western China that his research sparked—include Acer griseum (Paperbark Maple), Davidia involucrata (Dove Tree), and Hamamelis mollis (Chinese Witch Hazel).

In the Footsteps is also a winner of The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries’ Annual Literature Award for 2012, one of the highest awards for a book on horticulture or botany. Please come and take a look at this very special book in the Miller Library.

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Fall 2012

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker: Traveler and Plant Collector

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker cover Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker: Traveler and Plant Collector (2001) by Ray Desmond is a marvelous travelogue, masking as a biography. Our hero took two multi-year expeditions (to Antarctica, New Zealand, and Australia from 1839-1843; and to India and the Himalayas from 1847-1851) as well as shorter trips to Morocco, Palestine, and the United States.

All the while he was observing, documenting, and collecting plants, leading to the publications of the native floras of these regions. Even better for us today, he was sketching the plants, landscapes, native peoples, and many other attractions. These sketches, and the botanical illustrations made by others from them, make this a richly illustrated book.

The text is engaging, detailing the trials of travel for both man and plants. Hooker “coped remarkably well with the rigours of botanising in the Himalayas. This he attributed to abstinence…a diet of meat and potatoes, and never over-eating.”

“His problems as a plant collector did not cease with the boxing and parceling of plants and seeds. Sometimes they were lost or dropped into rivers on the journey to Calcutta; often they died before they reached the port.” He tried wrapping seeds in “tins, oilcloth wrapping, paper packets. Sometimes he posted them in letters. But…too often they reached their destination damp or rotting or eaten by insects.”

Excerpted from the Spring 2012 Arboretum Bulletin.

The Collector

The Collector cover For a total change of pace, pick up Jack Nisbet’s “The Collector.” Although written in the third person, the story-telling is so good that it reads like a memoir by one of the most influential of the early plant explorers to our region. David Douglas was a keen observer of all things in the natural world, but especially the plant kingdom, and had a natural talent for the recording, collecting, and preserving what he found. And what energy! From 1823 until his tragic death in 1834, Scotsman Douglas was almost constantly exploring the new world, risking many hazards of travels and meeting many interesting people in both academic and frontier life.

Excerpted from the Fall 2010 Arboretum Bulletin.