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Elisabeth C. Miller Library

Keyword: Reviews

Down-to-Earth Women: Those Who Care for the Soil


A charming caricature by Sir Edwin Lutyens of Gertrude Jekyll with a spade adorns the cover of Down-to-Earth Women. It attracts the reader and suggests the tone of this 1982 collection of stories about British women gardeners. Dawn MacLeod announces in the preface that “gardens were of little interest to me unless they were personal and subjective” (p. ix), and “Certain gardens could only be made by women” (p. x).

Of the book’s eight chapters, two deal with earlier periods and six with the twentieth century. MacLeod knew personally a number of her later subjects. The book places women in groups, such as medieval nuns, herb gardeners, and flower gardeners. Several of her subjects are known mainly for their writing about plants, but MacLeod assures the reader that she included none unless she was convinced they got their hands dirty in the soil.

MacLeod provides a variety of information about her down-to-earth women. Some had art school training and adapted it, some learned from hired gardeners, many from family members. Ellen Willmott had eighty-six gardeners before she lost her fortune due to German investments before World War I.

MacLeod includes character traits: Gertrude Jekyll was an “ideal aunt,” but “Poor Miss Willmott. It is so hard to find anybody who has said nice things about her” (p. 55). Margery Fish found “clearing bindweed . . . far more exciting than golf or fishing” with a reward of “a barrow-load of obscene twisting white roots and the joy of burning them” (p. 122) .

Perhaps MacLeod’s greatest skill is in describing the gardens the women created. Not only does she name plants, but she explains garden designs, often with comparisons to painting and textiles – very helpful in a book with no design illustrations. She also includes the garden’s environment and its history, as it developed and, sadly, often declined or disappeared. Black and white photos support some of the descriptions.

Down-to-Earth Women contains lots of intriguing information. Like its cover, it is lively and very reflective of its creator’s enthusiastic personality.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in The Leaflet, Volume 11, Number 9, August 2024.

A Forest of Your Own: The Pacific Northwest Handbook of Ecological Forestry

Marianne North’s Travel Writing by Michelle Payne

The life and work of Marianne North, the eminent Victorian botanical artist, is well documented. Do we need another book about her? Michelle Payne provides a positive answer in this well-illustrated volume. She aims to modify the dominant image of North as an intrepid lone traveler to the many sites of her art, to show us a different, fuller picture. North always had a cast of helpers around her and benefited from her colonial connections.

Between 1871 and 1885 North traveled to 15 countries in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. The book presents her trips in chronological order, using substantial excerpts from North’s journals. Along with a few examples of the stunning botanical art North is famous for, Payne includes many of North’s impressionistic paintings of landscapes, cities, and buildings she visited, and a few photographs of the journal pages themselves.

The journals record North’s interactions with the many people who hosted her, and her reactions, sometimes amused. Here she describes a formal dinner for fifty in India: “. . . Lady L. herself so hung with artificial flowers that she made quite a crushing sound whenever she sat down” [p. 169].

She also tells of her less comfortable accommodations, this one in Tenerife: “A great barn-like room was given up to me, with heaps of potatoes and corn swept up into the corners of it. I had a stretcher-bed at one end, on which I got a very large allowance of good sleep. The cocks and hens roosted on the beams overhead and I heard my donkey and other beasts munching their food and snoring below” [p.84].

Often she describes plants with the precision one would expect of this woman who painted them so accurately. Here she describes her first view of Sparaxis pendula in South Africa: “Its almost invisible stalks stood four or five feet high, waving in the wind. These were weighed down by strings of lovely pink bells, with yellow calyx, and buds; they followed the winding marsh, and looked like a pink snake in the distance” [p. 217]. Close observation plus context, including a familiar image – very impressive.

Back home in England, North gives the reader an afternoon with Charles Darwin a few months before his death: “He sat on the grass under a shady tree, and talked deliciously on every subject to us all for hours together, or turned over and over again the collection of Australian paintings I brought down for him to see, showing in a few words how much more he knew about the subjects than anyone else, myself included, though I had seen them and he had not” [p. 257].

This reader came away from  Travel Writing wishing she could spend an evening with this brilliant, multitalented woman – just the result Michelle Payne was hoping for.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in the Leaflet, volume 11, issue 8, August 2024

Chatsworth: The Gardens and the People Who Made Them

“There is an indefinable quality about the setting of the ‘Palace of the Peaks’ which has always exerted a hold over me and caused my spirits to rise and my heart to flutter” (p.17). Alan Titchmarsh begins his tour of the gardens and people of Chatsworth with this personal response and then compares it to that of Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice on first seeing Pemberley, the vast estate of the man she eventually marries.

Both Chatsworth and the fictional Pemberley are in Derbyshire in central England. Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, consists of 35,000 acres, 105 of which are gardens. Titchmarsh combines a history of the gardens and the gardeners who created them – including famous landscape designers like ‘Capability’ Brown and Joseph Paxton – with accounts of the owners’ family over the centuries. Luscious photographs and historically accurate pictures of family members combine to excellent effect.

Interestingly, the women of the family seem to have been a major, if not the predominant, influence on the gardens. From Bess of Hardwick, who convinced her husband to buy the property in 1549, to Deborah Devonshire in the 21st century, a number of decisions about gardens have been made by women. Titchmarsh tells good stories about all these characters. He enjoys a personal friendship with the current family, calling Deborah “Debo” in the text.

Each of the estate gardens receives a chapter, noting its planting history and challenges over many years. The formal gardens, the rock garden, Arcadia, the arboretum and pinetum, the maze, the glass houses (several!), the follies, and the sculptures all receive admiring descriptions. Titchmarsh also shows how the family has maintained solvency by inviting in the public for carefully chosen events, such as art exhibitions and fairs.

Mostly this book is a work of admiration for both the gardens and the people. Titchmarsh very rarely gives a less than completely positive opinion. Of the monkey puzzle trees, one originally introduced by Paxton, he notes, “Victorian plant collectors . . . seemed to prize oddity as much as beauty” (p. 192). Monkey puzzle trees here in Seattle may reflect the same taste.

Descriptions of visiting royalty and historic cricket matches add variety to this very engaging, as well as beautiful, book.
Review by Priscilla Grundy published in Leaflet for Scholars, volume 11, issue 7, July 2024.

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children is an innovative book by writer Jamaica Kincaid and artist Kara Walker. Despite the title, it is not for the youngest of readers, and the word ‘colored’ is a pointed, satirical use of an antiquated term. The second half of the title indicates the book’s purpose: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World. In form, the book calls to mind children’s books of centuries past, which were meant as vehicles of moral education. This aim is true here, too, but the content is distinctive for its intense focus on plant discovery and naming in the historical context of conquest, colonial exploitation, and slavery. This book is a necessary counter-narrative to traditional white Eurocentric perspectives on botany and human-plant relationships.

Kincaid is known for her literary style and her deep botanical knowledge; Walker is best known for her silhouettes and large art installations that both employ and transform racist imagery of past eras. Though each alphabetical entry is brief, all are dense with layers of meaning. Kincaid’s sentences twist and turn as they disentangle a plant’s context. Here are excerpts from the Amaranth entry:

“When the Spaniards were not committing genocide against the peoples they met, who had made a comfortable life for themselves and created extraordinary, glorious monuments to their civilizations, they were forcing them to abandon this source of physical and spiritual nourishment and replace it with barley wheat, and other European grains. This, along with many other cruelties, led to the decline of the Aztecs and the Inca.” Contemporary gardeners are not immune to a bit of sly critique: “Some gardeners, when reflecting on its [amaranth’s] history and its appearance in their garden as an ornamental, have a very fleeting debate within themselves over the ethics of growing food as an ornamental.”

Walker’s illustrations are thought-provoking: two enslaved Black men laboring under the weight of enormous cotton bolls while, on top of one puff of cotton, a white man in colonial dress takes his ease, smoking a pipe. The illustration accompanying the Guava entry shows a Black woman reaching toward a fruit while poised on a shipping crate marked “Exotic Fruits,” “For Export,” while an impish white boy lifts up the back of her dress. The visual double entendre here speaks volumes.

Though at times veering toward didactic or opaquely allusive language, there is much to learn from this book and its illuminating explorations of plants and their complex histories.

Reviewed by Rebecca Alexander.

Mystery-themed books

For students contemplating a career in the plant sciences, being a forensic botanist is probably not at the top of the prospective career list. Reading Planting Clues by David J. Gibson may change that viewpoint. As the author observes, “an appreciation of the value of plants in forensics is often lacking.”

This gripping book relates many cases in which identifying plants is key to solving crimes or making convictions. This includes some very famous cases, such as the kidnapping of the infant child of Charles Lindbergh in 1932. A forester was able to identify the wood in the homemade ladder used to take the child from the second floor nursery. During the trial, the defense moved to have this expert testimony disallowed, but the objection was overruled and the findings helped convict the kidnapper.

This is only one of several grisly murder cases in which plants linked the criminal to the crime. Other stories are less gruesome. These include smuggling expensive orchids by mixing them in with less valuable but similar plants. Out-of-bloom, only an expert can tell the difference.

This garden of horrors provides fertile ground for fiction writers, too. Marta McDowell writes a rollicking book titled Gardening Can Be Murder, recounting all the ways in which mystery writers have used plants (or fungi) to kill characters, or incriminate killers. As the author observes, “criminal investigation, whether vocation or avocation, calls for many of the same skills as horticulture.”

This is a widespread genre and from my own reading I know it is only growing! Nineteen of Agatha Christie’s stories have a garden or plant component, as do four of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

My personal favorite series is Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters. Set in a 12th century abbey on the Welsh-English border, the eponymous monk is the abbey’s herbalist. Although these are works of fiction, the garden practices are informative and largely accurate for the time. More about this can be found in Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden by Robin Whiteman, published in 1997.

Reviewed by Brian Thompson in the Leaflet, Volume 11, Issue 6, June 2024.

Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company

Forgotten Masters  (edited by William Dalrymple) focuses on restoring to art history the paintings and the forgotten names of the artists in India who worked for British government officials during the 18th and 19th centuries. Although the text suggests a mostly benevolent relationship between the artists and their patrons, the goal of reclaiming the names of at least some of the artists works to right one colonial wrong.

The book is based on an exhibition of the same title at the Wallace Collection, a museum in a historical house in London, Hertford House. Sir Richard Wallace, the “likely illegitimate son” of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, collected  art and left it to his wife, who donated it to the British government (except some she gave her secretary).

Each of the book’s six chapters is accompanied by essays by one or two specialists in Indian art. Of particular interest to Miller Library readers is the section on “Indian Export Art? The botanical drawings,” with an essay by H.J. Nolte. He writes he had more than 7,000 botanical drawings to choose from, in just four British collections, plus many more in private hands. The Indian artists were shown examples of European botanical drawings and instructed to copy them. They were very successful. Nolte makes clear throughout that the paintings retain some qualities of the techniques the artists had learned previously in various Indian locations. One early example, Trapa natans (p. 83), by an unknown artist, shows more of these techniques than others in the book with its two-dimensional presentation and near symmetrical arrangement. Others, such as Spray of Green Mangoes (p.86), by Bhawani Das, and A Cobra Lily (p. 87), by Vishnupersaud, display a crisp, representational style.

The variety of subjects makes this book particularly impressive, all elegant reproductions in the coffee-table-sized book. Paintings of animals and birds, portraits of individuals and groups of both Indians and British, drawings of buildings (including the Taj Mahal) — the book shows many aspects of Indian life at the time. And it is all a delight to look at.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 11, Issue 6, June 2024

The Signature of All Things

In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert weaves a narrative that follows the life of Alma Whittaker, a dedicated botanist driven by an insatiable curiosity for the world. The novel, encompassing elements of historical fiction, botanical exploration, and an unyielding pursuit of knowledge, immerses readers in Alma’s journey as she grapples with love, loss, and the intricate facets of the natural world.

Gilbert’s prose paints a picture of Alma’s experiences across continents and decades, capturing the essence of an era marked by scientific breakthroughs and societal transformations. I will note that the book incorporates outdated and offensive terms prevalent in the 19th century, particularly in describing Black and Indigenous people, as well as gay men. While I personally was hoping for a more critical examination of colonization and historical injustices, the narrative predominantly reflects Alma’s European-centric experiences. This focus may be regarded as both a reflection of the prevailing attitudes of the time—where Eurocentrism was prominent—and a limitation that, unfortunately, neglects the exploration of other diverse perspectives that existed during that historical period.

I did love Gilbert’s portrayal of how Alma’s unwavering passion and devotion to the botanical world shapes her entire existence. Rather than remaining a mere backdrop, botany becomes the cornerstone of Alma’s life events, resulting in a narrative where nearly every moment is interwoven with her botanical pursuits. This centrality of botany offers a unique depth to the narrative.

I especially appreciated the contrast between Alma’s exploration of moss and the portrayal of glamorous tropical plants, like orchids. Moss, with its associations of resilience and understated beauty, provides a window into Alma’s character, revealing her preferring and embodying the overlooked and intricate. Meanwhile, the allure of orchids symbolizes exoticism and societal expectations, but also offers a reflection of cultural and historical values, adding depth to the broader context of the story.

In essence, the novel is an interesting blend of historical fiction and botanical fascination, offering a portrayal of Alma’s life while prompting reflection on the societal issues of the era.

Reviewed by Ashlyn Higareda in the Leaflet, Volume 11, Issue 4, April 2024

Enchanted Forests: The Poetic Construction of a World Before Time

Boria Sax owns a forest. About 80 acres in upstate New York, it’s twice the size of the 40-acre farm once thought enough to support a family. From his investigation of the history of his woods, Sax moves to consider the many ways humans have thought and written about forests over centuries.

“Enchanted” can mean either “bewitched” or “charmed.” As Sax points out, forests can instill terror. He cites mythic “figures of terror, which give tangible form to amorphous fears that the forest can inspire” (p. 50), such as the Windigo of Canada and the northern U.S. and the Nandi Bear of Kenya, both of which devour humans.

A forest, Sax reports, “has always been defined far more by its mythic character than by its vegetation” (p. 82). It’s the opposite of civilization, a wilderness, but not necessarily full of trees – often “a sort of indeterminate landscape, with rocks, caves, mountains and trees” (p. 82).

One theme running through this account is the gradual diminishing of forests worldwide. Sax’s own forest is a regrowth after previous use for farming. For most of the United States, no regrowth has occurred – the woods are just gone. Even in classical Greece and Rome timbering began the clearances which have left few wooded areas across Europe and the U.S.

Sax provides chapters on various ways of viewing forests: “The Classical Forest,” “The Forest and Death,” for instance. In “Law of the Jungle” he shows how the word “jungle” appeared first in late 18th century England, applied to forests in the southern hemisphere and associated with Empire: “The word suggested a place of primordial violence and disorder, which was only good for testing one’s manhood and making one’s fortune” (p. 201).

All in all, Enchanted Forests is an enchanting read.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 11, Issue 4, April 2024

Through the Woods

“A wood should never be vast. The best woods are small, a few acres in extent, not much more than copses” (p. 82). H. E. Bates’s book is as paean of praise to these small woodlands in England. As the title suggests, the book takes the reader through the seasons, April to April. Bates describes changes in plants, animals, but also air and atmosphere.
“Children are never frightened in fields . . . But they are often frightened in woods, by the very mystery and seclusion of the place, by the sudden soft hushings of leaves, by the magnified echoes of feet, by the leaping up of rabbits, by the savage sudden screeching of unknown birds” (p. 42). Bates’s sentences are marvelous.
The few interruptions to the admiring descriptions of woodlands relate to people who misuse them. A favorite target is the keeper, the man (if there were any women, they were not mentioned) hired to prevent damage, especially poaching, to the pheasants needed for those riding to the hunt. Keepers suspect anyone walking in the woods of poaching, and this book centers on walking in woods. Unpleasant encounters ensue. Bates writes in 1936; I wonder if many keepers remain in 2024.
Particularly charming, the next-to-last chapter, “The Darling Buds of March,” describes with wonderful detail changes that occur in tree buds as spring is about to arrive. For example: “The first buds of elm are little fluffy French knots of dark pink wood securely sewn on the jagged branches. The gray-black buds of ash are like arrow heads of iron” (p. 137).
Agnes Miller Parker’s wood engravings, like the book’s prose, convey the feeling as well as the physical components of the woods. Presented without captions in the text, each is titled in the contents section in the front. They elegantly supplement the words to make a very worthy whole.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in The Leaflet, Volume 11, Issue 3, March 2024.