Around the World in 80 Plants

[Around the World in 80 Plants] cover

I imagined Jonathan Drori’s world tour starring 80 plants would be interesting to a plant nerd like myself. Inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, Drori’s second book follows on the well-received Around the World in 80 Trees, but with more flowers and herbaceous subjects. I was not disappointed. The book is fun and informative with a perfect mix of botany, history, and culture.

I was surprised to learn that the common Rhododendron native to Turkey, which is invading natural areas of Western Scotland, produces toxic nectar. The honeybees that evolved with this Rhododendron aren’t harmed by the toxin. However, the “mad honey” created from this nectar causes low blood pressure and general feelings of wooziness in humans who eat it. Drori reports that the delicious but dangerous mad honey was used as a bioweapon against pursuing Roman soldiers in 69 BCE by a fleeing Persian army.

The country/plant associations are not always obvious nor necessarily plants native to the country or even the region. Scotland gets Rhododendron because it is so invasive that it is taking over the countryside there. One unusual tree representing the USA is the Cook Island pine, frequently planted in California, especially on college campuses. Part of the fun of this book is anticipating which plants represent which countries. Germany has entries on barley and hops, while Australia has the endemic grass tree (Xanthorrhoea), but also the opium poppy because it is the world’s largest legal supplier to the pharmaceutical industry.

Most of the included plants make an economic or cultural contribution to humankind, such as sugar cane, henna, wormwood, or yerba mate. Others, such as sphagnum moss or saguaro cactus, anchor an ecosystem . A few plants are simply botanically remarkable, such as Welwitschia growing in the harsh Angolan desert. It survives by collecting moisture from fog and Charles Darwin described it as the “platypus of the plant world” because it exhibits traits from both cone-bearing and flowering plants.

Drori’s writing style is clear and engaging. He teases us with just enough botanic and cultural highlights, and seldom writes more than two pages of text per entry. I would guess that most of these 80 plants could each have their own book filled with history, lore, and botany. French illustrator Lucille Clerc really brings the entries alive with captivating color drawings of plant habit and flowers, but also little sketches of products made from the plants, such as thread on spools and a bottle of linseed oil for the entry on flax. The illustrations for lotus were so expansive that they required a two-page spread without any text.

Published in Leaflet for Scholars Volume 8, Issue 9, September 2021.

The Kinfolk Garden: How to Live with Nature

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When I first picked up The Kinfolk Garden, I was impressed with the breadth of photographs capturing the many ways people engage with plants in diverse settings of gardens and in homes. Supplementing these photographic essays is text that is brief, but I found effective in capturing the individual and collective passions of those profiled.

Kinfolk.com describes itself as “a leading lifestyle authority.” Founded in Portland, Oregon ten years ago, it is now based in Copenhagen and publishes a quarterly magazine, social media posts, art prints, and several books including The Kinfolk Garden.

Aside from a few short sections, this is not a how-to book, nor is it about the plants to be found by trekking into nature. Instead, it gave me insights into the human drive to use plants for nurturing in ways both casual and immersive. This is a passion that spans all cultures, all climates, and all peoples.

An example is Ron Finley, who is described as a community garden activist in poorer communities of Los Angeles. He sees gardening as a way to foster self-sufficiency that “can also positively disrupt the social and political systems that perpetuate self-defeating cycles in low-income communities.”

Umberto Pasti, an Italian novelist, has embraced the plants and people of northern Morocco, developing a garden near Tangiers that rescues endangered native flora. He has discovered this also helps rescues the native people who, like the plants, are endangered by industrialization. More on Pasti and his work can be found in the book Eden Revisited.

The subtitle of The Kinfolk Garden is “how to live with nature.” I think a more complete description would be “how to bring nature, specifically plants, into everyday life.” Sometimes, the separation between human life and plants in nature is not very wide. Eduardo “Roth” Neira designed and built a hotel and museum near Tulum, Mexico and yet avoided chopping down trees in the dense rain forest setting. How to do this? “Build around them.”

Published in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 8, Issue 8, August 2021.

Tokachi Millennium Forest : Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature

[Tokachi Millennium] cover

I have always wanted to travel to Japan to experience the bustling energy of Tokyo and the serenity of ancient Buddhist temples in Kyoto. Now after reading about Tokachi Millennium Forest I know I have to include the northern island of Hokkaido on my itinerary. Why did the owner of a private parcel comprised of second growth forest and former agricultural fields hire a British garden designer? Because the lofty goal of creating a carbon sequestering ecological park that would be sustainable for 1,000 years, while also charming urban Japanese visitors required cross-cultural collaboration. Designer and author Dan Pearson’s expertise is creating ecologically sensitive, naturalistic landscapes. He worked with Japanese landscape architect Fumiaki Takano to fulfill the vision of site owner and newspaper magnate Mitsushige Hayashi starting in 2000. In a nutshell, Hayashi’s vision is to rekindle the visitors’ connection to nature in order to instill an ethic of environmental responsibility and love for the mountains and forests. Head gardener and co-author Midori Shintani – profiled in Jennifer Jewell’s The Earth in Her Hands – joined the team in 2008.

The book is elegantly designed with beautiful color photographs. The opening chapters relay how Pearson first traveled to Japan and how he was introduced to the project. It includes a brief history of the island, mountains and forest, and the reason behind Tokachi Millennium Forest. Pearson writes the main body of text while Shintani contributes essays on Japanese culture and how the culture is manifest at Tokachi. Pearson conveys high level design concepts such as sense of place and ecology, purpose and mission. He also includes very specific horticultural details such as how the native, yet aggressive Sasa bamboo is cut back in the forest every spring in order to give other native plants a chance to regenerate.

The following chapters describe each of the park’s main regions, such as the Forest or the Earth Garden with its waves of grassy, sculpted landforms that relate to the looming mountains. The Productive Garden contains vegetables, herbs, and fruits for the café as well as roses to delight visitors. Native flowers mix with carefully selected cold hardy perennials from temperate regions of the world in the Meadow Garden. Pearson and Shintani continue to meet for a week every year to discuss and plan maintenance strategies and required edits. The editing process means perennials that are too dominant either get deadheaded so seeds don’t spread or potentially removed entirely, while less vigorous or short-lived plants are encouraged to reseed or are propagated and replanted the following spring. For example, Thermopsis lupinoides was edited out while Verbascum ‘Christo’s Yellow Lightning’ was added later. I question how the complex, perennial-filled Meadow Garden will be sustainable for 1,000 years given the work required to keep it looking presentable through the short growing season, but I am eager to see it in person. It must be magnificent to walk through the flower-filled Meadow with the mountains framing the scene. The book concludes with a complete list of plants used in the Meadow Garden with notes on which ones failed to thrive or were removed for being too dominant.

Published in The Leaflet, Volume 8, Issue 8, August 2021.

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.

Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast

[Under Western Skies] cover

An omnibus of garden profiles is a popular format for many horticultural authors, and yet I find Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast especially engaging. Author Jennifer Jewell brings broad and creative perspectives to what makes each place noteworthy.

Although Jewell wrote the text, she gives first title page credit to Caitlin Atkinson, the photographer, an appropriate decision for a book as sumptuous as this one. The gardens of the geographic range, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, have only infrequently been considered before, and the choice of subjects is quite remarkable.

A handful are well-known, such as Heronswood, but even its story is quite different now under the ownership of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe. Most were new to me. In Washington State, this includes private gardens in north Seattle, Castle Rock, and Pullman. Others in the region are found in Hood River, Oregon and Tofino, British Columbia.

While I can envision visiting some of the gardens that have public access, this is not a travel guide. By profiling the place, the people, and the plants, each location is presented with a sense of its space in a bigger world. This is done in part by a brief description of the climate, geology, and human history of the indigenous peoples that once dwelt on the land. The photography, rarely showing close-ups, enhances the feeling of lightly defined borders. These gardens, while often providing sanctuary, are not isolated from their surroundings or their past.

Jewell writes in the preface, “Most gardens are a three-part alchemy between the riches and constraints of the natural and/or cultural history of the place, the individual creativity and personality of the gardener, and the gardening culture in which both the garden and the gardener exist.” While I won’t use “Under Western Skies” to plan my next garden touring itinerary, it does give me a better sense of my place and purpose as a gardener, especially in this part of the world.

Published in The Leaflet, Volume 8, Issue 7, July 2021.

The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World

What is a Wardian Case? Any English gardener between 1850 and 1900 could have easily answered that question, but today it is mostly forgotten. Partly because the term was used for two distinct variations of the device. The first was a decorative, enclosed case – the forerunner to the terrarium – that allowed Victorian plant lovers to grow their ferns and orchids despite the heavily polluted air of London and other cities. The second was a tool for transporting plants on long sea voyages, and that form is the subject of “The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World” by Luke Keogh.

In part, this book is also a biography of Nathaniel Bradshaw Ward (1791-1868), a London physician who was a passionate, amateur botanist. His experiments with sealed environments led to the highly successful efforts in the 1830s to transport plants for the many months it took to travel from, for example, Sydney to London. Prior attempts had mostly failed because of damage from salt spray or a shortage of fresh water. This invention became so popular that by later in the 1800s “there were thousands if not tens of thousands of these cases in operation, moving plants around the globe. Our choices of what we drink, eat, smell, and wear have all been transformed by the movement of plants.”

This movement of plants had a profound impact on human cultures, especially those colonized by European powers. The Wardian Case allowed for the transport of many valuable crops to be grown in colony plantations with suitable climates, typically destroying the native flora and often subjugating the local population to work these foreign crops. Examples include tea, rubber, cocoa, and cinchona, the source of quinine used to fight malaria.

These plants did not travel alone. In their soil and on their leaves came various animal species and plant diseases eager to attack a susceptible flora. Many of the plants themselves became invasive. All this led to efforts in the 20^th century to using these cases (now better known as cages) to send predatory insects to attack unwanted plants and destructive pests. The advance of air travel ended the prominence of the Wardian Case but for about a century it was closely linked to all aspects of the global movement of plants for profit, research, and horticulture.

Winner of the 2021 Award of Excellence in History from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries

Excerpted from the Summer 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants

Jennifer Jewell has gained a wide following for her blog “Cultivating Place.” Produced from her home in northern California, it is self-described as a “conversation on natural history & the human impulse to garden.”

That same description could apply in part to Jewell’s first book, “The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants.” This is a wide-ranging discussion on this gardening impulse, using a very broad definition of the idea of horticulture, captured in a series of pithy biographies. The profiled women have careers in and a passion for plants, expressed in botany, landscape architecture, floriculture, agriculture, plant hunting and breeding, food justice, garden writing, and photography.

Many of the subjects are from the Pacific Northwest. An example is Cara Loriz, the executive director of the Organic Seed Alliance in Port Townsend, Washington, advocating for community building and research for sustainable food systems.

Another is Christin Geall, a multi-talented writer/photographer and educator in Victoria, British Columbia. I confess to having not heard of either woman prior to reading this book. Jewell writes that for Geall, “flowers are a horticultural medium for leading and educating others about plants, acting not as pretty cages, but as colorful, Socratic-style critical thinking.” Both women are examples of conducting important work at a local level that addresses global needs facing all cultures.

All these biographies provide a short list of women that inspired the subject. Many are contemporaries, or cherished ancestors. Some are important figures from history, including Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman, and Rachel Carson. Others are women without recorded names, but for whom “horticulture is a human impulse, in all cultures, in all times, practiced, codified, ritualized, and valued across any and all social boundaries.”

The narratives about women in horticulture are evolving. In public presentations, Jewell has been expanding on the process of choosing and researching the subjects of her book. I’ve heard her speak twice in the last year and each time, she acknowledges that many additional women, from a wider breadth of ethnicities and nationalities, could be featured now. This study is important, on-going work and I hope that Jewell or others will continue this undertaking.

Winner of the 2021 Award of Excellence in Biography from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries

Excerpted from the Summer 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Flower: Exploring the World in Bloom

Phaidon Press is noted for their exquisite art books, capturing in print garden subjects from many different media. “Flower: Exploring the World of Bloom” is the 4,000 year story of human fascination with flowers as told in over 300 images.

Edited seamlessly by Victoria Clarke, the book begins with an insightful essay by Anna Pavord, the author of “The Tulip” and several other books that examine the human history with plants and landscapes. She does an excellent job of setting the background for the art that follows, noting that “the images in this superb collection could have been arranged by chronology or theme, but instead pictures have been cleverly paired on facing pages to highlight revealing or stimulating similarities or contrasts.”

This book is fun! You can open anywhere and immediately dive into a story told in both prose and images. It’s also huge, a hefty tome worthy of any coffee table. At first glance it might see like a lot of lovely fluff. But read on! It is an excellent and easy-to-digest history book as well as art exhibit.

A stain glass window by Louis Comfort Tiffany of wisteria looking out on Long Island’s Oyster Bay is contrasted on the opposite page with a 17^th century Japanese tea pot with overglazed enamel, also depicting wisteria. A 19^th century, hand-colored lithograph of a bouquet of peonies is matched with a 2011 watercolor designed to look like an herbarium specimen, also of peonies.

The subjects come from around the world and reflect developing traditions. A 1973 painting using gouache on paper is a recent stylistic example by a member of the Kwoma people of Papua New Guinea, adapting their practice of bark painting formerly used to decorate the ceilings of ceremonial buildings. This is complemented on the opposite page by the image of a bag made with glass beadwork from the last half of the 19^th century. Equally colorful as the Kwoma piece, it was created by an anonymous member of the Nēhiyawak peoples of eastern Canada. The use of glass beads reflects incorporation into the native artform a new material after contact with European traders.

The book is nicely supplemented by ending appendices that include a timeline of flowers in human history, the symbolism of flowers, and short biographies of key artists represented. This is a book that takes time to digest, but that is time well spent.

Excerpted from the Summer 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Glass Flowers: Marvels of Art and Science at Harvard

Flowers made of glass is an unusual expression of floral art, but the more than 4,300 models in the collection at Harvard University were not intended as art objects. Instead, these were teaching tools showing a selection of primarily North American native plants and frequently grown exotics for botany students in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Created by the Czech father-and-son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, this collection was revived by a major conservation effort and enhancement of the exhibit space over the last ten years.

Celebrating that effort is a new book: “Glass Flowers: Marvels of Art and Science at Harvard.” There are several authors, but the stars of this book are the amazingly close-up and fine focused photographs by Natalja Kent. There have been earlier books on this collection, but none capture the beauty of this restored collection like this new publication.

Excerpted from the Summer 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Rare Plants: The Story of 40 of the World’s Most Unusual and Endangered Plants

I first glanced through “Rare Plants’ by Ed Ikin for the beautiful plant images: artwork and herbarium specimens from the vast collections of Kew Gardens dating back to the 1700s. These alone would make this book worthwhile, but there is much more. The heart of this book is a collection of essays on 40 plants from around the world that are rare or unknown in the wild. What’s surprising is that many are very familiar to gardeners in the Pacific Northwest.

An example is the Monkey Puzzle Tree (Araucaria araucana) with its distinctive and frequently seen profile on the Seattle landscape. Native to the slopes of Andes Mountains in Chile and Argentina, it is endangered because of its heavy use for timber, slow regeneration because of fires (often deliberately set), and competition from exotics (including eucalyptus) and agriculture.

One traditional way to preserve rare plant is through seed banks, but that is not an option for the Monkey Puzzle – the seeds do not survive the desiccation and chilling typical for these facilities. The author recommends instead growing the tree in suitable climates as a preservation technique, and recommends planting groves to emulate the natural associations of these dioecious plants. Image such a grove in the Chilean Garden at Pacific Connections!

These stories are an engaging way to study conservation and threatened plants, and the choice to illustrate using historic documents is very effective. Ikin, the deputy director of Kew’s wild botanic garden at Wakehurst, also raises some difficult questions, especially for plant collectors in the UK and in North America.

For example, African violets (Streptocarpus ionanthus) is a mainstay of the multi-million dollar houseplant industry, but has become exceedingly rare in its native Kenya and Tanzania. The author asks, should these countries receive some of the profit from the selling of these plants? Aloe vera, a plant well-known by many non-gardeners for its presumed healing qualities, is unknown in the wild. However, DNA studies are gradually solving the mystery location of its origin, somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula. When that is pinpointed, should that original host country (or countries) be compensated for this plant valued around the world?

Ikin is always eager to share positive outcomes, too. “Lebanon is pioneering a new approach new land management – a balance between preserving biodiversity and provisioning human need – and the results are promising.“ This is good news for the endangered, Lebanese endemic Iris sofarana, the Sofar Iris with its striking blend of marbled greys and bronze with purple highlights. Also hopeful are new cultivation techniques in Ukraine that are slowing the wild harvest of increasingly rare Galanthus nivalis (known ironically as the “common snowdrop”) to allow for its natural recovery and to ensure income to its the host country.

Co-winner of the 2021 Annual Literature Award from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries

Excerpted from the Summer 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin