The Wild Flowers of California: Their Names, Haunts, and Habits

“The Wild Flowers of California: Their Names, Haunts, and Habits” was the earliest (1897 – the Miller Library has the 1921 third edition) West Coast book published in a recognizably field guide format. Text author Mary Elizabeth Parsons (1859-1947) was born in Chicago, but spent most of her life in California. She was a keen student of the state’s botany and studied with noted botanist Alice Eastwood at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco.

Her book reflects her scientific discipline by including a “How to Use the Book” introduction, a glossary of botanical terms, and keys to distinguish plant families. She goes on to describe these families – all of flowering plants – with a count of the genera and species as known worldwide and in the state at that time. This makes the book a useful time capsule of botanical history.

Parsons also studied art, but she asked Margaret Warriner Buck (1857-1929) to illustrate the book and accompany her explorations of the state. With few exceptions, Buck drew her simple but effective pen-and-ink drawings in the field. All these efforts paid off, as the “The Wild Flowers of California” remained a standard through several editions into the middle of the 20^th century. Later editions included color plates by Buck, also known for her work with the early years of “Sunset” magazine. The Miller Library also has the 1960 edition, available to borrow.

In addition to her attention to detail, Parsons captured the joy of being a field botanist. “Every walk into the fields is transformed from an aimless ramble into a joyous, eager quest, and every journey upon state or railroad becomes a rare opportunity for making new plant-acquaintances—a season of exhilarating excitement.”

Excerpted from the Winter 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Field Book of Western Wild Flowers

Margaret Armstrong was from the Hudson River valley of New York; she explored the West as part of an extended adventure, but never settled here. She traveled from 1911 to 1914, often with two or three female companions, exploring all of the states west of the Rocky Mountains and into Canada. She was possibly the first woman of European descent to travel to the floor of the Grand Canyon, where she found, described, and illustrated several new plant species. The result of these adventures was the “Field Book of Western Wild Flowers,” published in 1915.

She had considerable training as an artist and is perhaps best known amongst bibliophiles for the over 300 book covers she designed, an art form mostly lost in the 20^th century with the development of dust jackets. She also wrote biographies in her 60s, and mystery novels in her 70s! Her schooling was in art, but she understood botany practices very well, collecting and pressing some 1,000 herbarium specimens. Many remain in the New York Botanical Garden herbarium. She lists as her co-author, John James Thornber (1872-1962), professor of botany at the University of Arizona, crediting him and many others (including Alice Eastwood and Julia Henshaw) for assuring the accuracy of her text.

“But it is her illustrations that make the book so appealing,” according to a review by Bobbi Angell in the December 2018 issue of “The Botanical Artist.” These included some 500 pen and ink drawings and almost 50 watercolors, all drawn or painted on site. While there is a glossary of terms and a short set of keys, this book relies more on its illustrations for identification than the others in this review.

Excerpted from the Winter 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Mountain Wild Flowers of America: A Simple and Popular Guide to the Names and Descriptions of the Flowers that Bloom above the Clouds

Photography was a major innovation for field guides in the early 20^th century. Julia W. Henshaw (1869-1937) was an early adopter with her 1906 book “Mountain Wild Flowers of America.” While this title implies inclusion of alpine plants across Canada and the United States, she lived in Vancouver, BC and gives special attention to our regional mountains. The Miller Library also has a later edition (1917) under the slightly revised title of “Wild Flowers of the North American Mountains.”

Born in England, she studied art in her home country, but didn’t take up photography until she moved to British Columbia around 1890. Her images are in a studio setting, in grey scale with a neutral grey background. Ordered by color, it is not too difficult to imagine the appearance of the living plants.

Like other writers of these early field guides, Henshaw had abundant energy and a wide variety of interests. Daphne Bramham writes in the “Vancouver Sun” (published September 8, 2014) that she was “an explorer and general outdoorswoman” who climbed in the Rockies and mapped much of the interior of Vancouver Island. A strong advocate participation in World War I, she drove an ambulance at the Western Front in Europe, and spoke across Canada of her experience to encourage more involvement in the war effort. She had her indoor pursuits, too, as a theater critic (using Julian Durham as a pseudonym), writing novels, and founding a social club for women, the first such society in Vancouver.

Other than the use of photographs, this field guide is very similar in style to the others of the time. The writing is intended for a general audience, but Henshaw acknowledges a respectable list of botanists and naturalists as scientific advisors. However, she is at her best with her subjective descriptions. In reference to Erythronium giganteum (now E. grandiflorum var. grandiflorum), which in her day was burdened with the common name of “yellow adder’s tongue” (now “glacier lily”) she writes, “Late at evening, when beneath the star-sown purple of the sky you return from making some alpine ascent, the pure flames of these wild Lilies gleam in their leafy setting with a pale golden light, and illuminate the green brink of your path.”

Excerpted from the Winter 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Wild Flowers of the Pacific Coast

“On the very top of the mound grew this fine salmon blossom, and a few feet away a bed of tall pink grass, the finest I had ever seen. It waved and nodded in the warm breeze, as if inviting me to select its finest bunch to keep company with the pretty white blossoms that had been its neighbors, and from whom it was loth to part company.”

Emma Homan Thayer (1842-1908) wrote these illustrative words, and painted these neighborly plants while visiting Astoria, Oregon in the 1880s. Her “Wild Flowers of the Pacific Coast” (published in 1887) is the earliest guide to the flora of the West Coast in the Miller Library collection. I hesitate to call it a field guide. Instead, it is a series of short travel essays, each tied to a local wild flower. Often the description of the people she encountered is more detailed than that of the flowers. The stories are mostly set in California, but she did make the one visit to Oregon, including a trip by boat from Portland to the mouth of the Columbia River.

In an appendix of “botanical descriptions,” the “fine salmon blossom” is identified as thimbleberry or Rubus nutkanus, but the identity of the grass is not attempted.

Born in New York, Thayer went back to school after her first husband died, attending Rutgers and area art institutions. Late in life, she established a reputation as an author of novels. However, it is for this book, and her similar book, “Wild Flowers of the Rocky Mountains,” that she is best known. While her impressionistic style of illustration lacks the fine detail necessary for certain identification, her books were an introduction, especially for East Coast audiences, to the splendors of the western flora.

Excerpted from the Winter 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Rocky Mountain Flowers; An Illustrated Guide for Plant-Lovers and Plant-Users

Unusual for her time, Edith Clements (1874-1971) had a formal botanical education; she received a Ph.D. in botanical ecology from the University of Nebraska, and spent her life in various academic and research pursuits. Typically this was in conjunction with her husband, Frederic Clements (1874-1945), who was also a plant ecologist. Together, they published “Rocky Mountain Flowers” in 1914, a botanically detailed flora of the flowering plants including trees, but no conifers or ferns. This is not a field guide, but the watercolor illustrations by Edith Clements are exquisite, typically showing several plants from the same family together. On her own, she later published “Flowers of Mountain and Plain” (1926), a book for a more general audience using many of the same illustrations.

Willa Cather was a classmate of Frederic and a good friend of Edith and it’s likely their scientific knowledge influenced the environmental aspects of the novelist’s writing. In an interview by Eleanor Hinman in the “Lincoln Sunday Star (November 6, 1921), Cather expressed her love of Nebraska wild flowers, concluding, “There is one book that I would rather have produced than all my novels. That is the Clements botany dealing with the wild flowers of the west.”

Excerpted from the Winter 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Naturalistic Planting Design: the Essential Guide

Garden designer Nigel Dunnett uses two contrasting slogans in his work: “planting design is an art form” and “planting design is essential.” The former captures the impact a successful design has on our emotions. The latter expresses the necessity to create healthy human environments, especially in cities. His book “Naturalistic Planting Design: The Essential Guide is an excellent introduction to these creative principles.

He defines naturalistic planting design as inspired by nature, but not a recreation of a particular ecosystem. The book goes deeply into the historical development of this practice, while also providing pragmatic step-by-step guides. Examples are shown in all stages from planting – often a mix of seeding and starts – to the succession of the gardens through the seasons and subsequent years.

Dunnett’s gardens won’t appeal to everyone. He’s very limited in his use of woody plants and his herbaceous plantings are mingled rather than in solid blocks. Imitating nature, his projects grow and change, meaning there is no single climax or season when everything is in bloom. Instead, he aims to have something of interest year-round, using a general rule that no more than three plants need to be at a peak at any one time.

I recommended enjoying the exuberance of the photographs first, and then read the text. To Dunnett, “the future is all about planting that’s exciting, uplifting, dramatic, beautiful, breath-taking, bold and adventurous. Wild too, and not just in the sense of it being natural but wild because it has an edge to it, it’s challenging, it’s not safe, and it’s not always tasteful.”

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Winter 2020

In the footsteps of Joseph Dalton Hooker

Seamus O’Brien is another modern day plant explorer. Between 2012-2015, he led four tours of small groups to explore the rich flora of Sikkim, the tiny state of India wedged between Nepal and Bhutan, and butting up against the Himalayas. This landscape creates vast extremes in topography and climate, and an especially rich variety of plants in an area only slightly larger than King County.

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was one of the prominent plant explorers of the 19th century with voyages to Antarctica, the Middle East, Morocco, and western North America. He is arguably best remembered for his three years in and around Sikkim from 1849-1852. At that time, it was an independent kingdom and the crossroads of several distinct cultures.

O’Brien wrote “In The Footsteps of Joseph Dalton Hooker” about his trips to Sikkim, skillfully weaving his travel stories around a biography of Hooker’s trip. “Unlike Hooker, our mission was not to collect, but to study and compare places he visited and to record how they had fared and appeared over 160 years later. In some ways Sikkim has changed little over the course of time.”

The main goal of each man was finding plants, and especially rhododendrons. Hooker discovered many, and confirmed and accurately described several other species for science. O’Brien’s group sought many of the same plants in the same locations where Hooker found them. Each was also interested in the people and the animals of Sikkim.

The result is a rich dialogue between two eras. Many of the physical and flora features of Hooker’s day are still there. An example is “Hooker’s Rock,” a gigantic boulder in the Lachen valley, probably deposited by retreating glaciers. Hooker sketched it in great detail and included a circle of seated villagers and a couple of enormous yaks in the foreground. O’Brien includes photos of the same rock, and even captured a large, black yak posed in front! Hooker also adopted a Tibetan mastiff named Kinchin to be his companion and fierce protector. Sadly, Kinchin perished during a river crossing, but O’Brien was able to find similar – if somewhat more placid – dogs of the same lineage.

Seeds of many of the Rhododendrons that Hooker sent home were planted at an estate south of Dublin. Conditions here closely match the climate, soil, and rainfall of Sikkim and the plants are still flourishing. This estate became the National Botanic Garden, Kilmacurragh of Ireland in 1996 (an annex to the gardens at Glasnevin). O’Brien took a position managing these gardens in 2006. The awe he felt for these “Hooker rhododendrons” every spring gave him the incentive to see them in their native land.

Excerpted from the Fall 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.

A plant-hunter in Afghanistan

a plant hunter in Afghanistan book cover Christopher Grey-Wilson is a major author in the Miller Library collection with twenty-four books he either wrote or edited. Many focus on a specific plant such as cyclamen, pasque-flowers, saxifrages, or poppies of the genus Meconopsis. Others are excellent guides to alpine and rock garden plants. As you read these books, you learn that he has considerable experience as a plant explorer. In “A Plant-hunter in Afghanistan,” he provides a detailed and fascinating account of his nine months of plant exploring through southern Iran and Afghanistan in 1971.

Why publish this now, almost fifty years after the events? The author claims other professional demands prevented him having the time, but he also reflects on the tragic changes to these countries, suggesting the need to document “the peaceful and welcoming country that I and my colleagues encountered in 1971.” In my reading, I certainly developed a greater awareness of the destruction caused by the upheavals that began just two years later.

Grey-Wilson’s writing is always quite accessible, but this book especially reads like a matter-of-fact journal. Some of the cultural clashes put the author and his colleagues in an unfavorable light, but they are left as written at the time in this self-published book. His photographs were all taken on film during the trip and although digitally enhanced, still evoke an earlier time.

In the Iranian city of Mashhad, Grey-Wilson was eager to photograph the golden dome of the tomb of Iman Reza and the turquoise colored dome of the nearby Great Mosque of Goharshad. He knew that as a foreigner, he was not allowed within the sacred area enclosing these buildings, but the boundary was unclear. “I unfastened my camera and was just about to take the photo of a lifetime when a hefty clout on my shoulder almost sent the camera spinning to the ground, fortunately undamaged.” A group of local students recognized his confusion and led him to a permitted, if somewhat farther away, rooftop to take his photo.

Of course, the main purpose of the trip was to find plants and Grey-Wilson and his companions were successful at that, finding 18 new species. Many plants are documented with photographs taken by the author, but this book is mainly a travelogue, and the photographs also effectively capture the often spectacular terrain, the human structures, the people, and the animals of this fascinating area. I recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about this region before the recent wars and terror; an interest in plants is not required. That said, this is a limited edition book, and does not lend, but I urge spending time with it in one of the Miller Library’s comfortable chairs.

Excerpted from the Fall 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.

The orchid hunter

The orchid hunter book cover Taking a gap year between college and graduate school is often a time for young students to explore distant parts of the world, perhaps to donate their time to a devoted cause, or to learn a different culture. Very few spend the time botanizing. This is what makes Leif Bersweden’s story so interesting. At age seven, he found his first orchid: “Mum, this flower looks just like a bee.” From this simple beginning, a passion grew, and he decided to spend his gap year tracking down and photographing all 52 native species of Orchidaceae in Great Britain and Ireland. He relates his story in “The Orchid Hunter: A Young Botanist’s Search for Happiness.”

This was no small task. In general, the orchids of the British Isles are not showy except up close and easily hide amongst other vegetation. Some are extremely rare. Most are located well off beaten pathways, difficult to reach with Bersweden’s car that was prone to breaking down. Actually two cars. The first did not last the year. Meanwhile, our young botanist was growing up and undergoing many of the usual coming-of-age emotional upheavals.

Other than the botanical theme, why am I recommending this book? Because Bersweden is an excellent storyteller. Combining this with a plant theme is a bonus. In additional to his personal challenges and triumphs, he is adept at telling the history of British and Irish botany and related studies of wildflowers. Best of all, you the reader get caught up in the chase! (Spoiler alert). Will he succeed in finding all 52 native orchids despite a late spring, a hot summer, the challenges of driving 10,000 miles on often minimal roads, and some iffy accommodations? Happily, he does.

And happily for the reader, he never loses his sense of humor. He notes that the Fly Orchid (Ophrys insectifera), despite the name, is pollinated by a digger wasp. “It looks very different from the Fly Orchid flower. So different, in fact, that you really start to question the wasp’s intelligence. How can it possibly be duped into thinking the orchid flower…is its star-crossed lover?” After explaining how the smell and feel of the Fly Orchid is the attraction, he concludes: “To the digger wasp, the Fly Orchid is a sex toy, not perfectly life-like but able to arouse the senses and cloy the mind.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.

The bulb hunter

Bulb hunter book cover I received at an early age a birthday present of a dozen gladiolus corms. The results – plants taller than I was, with brilliant colors – were enthralling and made me a life-long bulb (more accurately: geophyte) enthusiast. For author Chris Wiesinger, it started with a single red tulip bulb. He planted “his little rock” in his Central Valley of California home and forgot it. The next spring “something magical had occurred; my living rock had turned into the most striking red tulip.”

Sadly, this was a one-and-done experience. The next year, only leaves appeared. A year later, he dug down to find the remains of a rotted bulb. But it lit a spark, and for Wiesinger, this experience turned into a combination business and consuming passion. He wrote his story in “The Bulb Hunter,” co-written with William Welch.

Wiesinger was only a temporary Californian. He returned to his southern roots in Louisiana and now Texas, searching for bulbs who have long out-survived the demise of the house they surrounded. This includes an elusive, perennial red tulip (Tulipa praecox), but it is found only where there is gritty black clay, so hard that it bends shovels. This quality protects the bulbs from their natural enemies, gophers and voles, and the good drainage allows drying out in the summer, much like the tulip’s central Asian homelands.

The book is divided into two halves, with the second being author Welch’s story. His is more typical garden memoir, recounting the bulbs and companion plants that thrive in each season for Texas and the Gulf South. While it is a stretch to use this as guidance for Pacific Northwest gardening, there are some interesting possibilities here, and I’m looking forward to trying them.

I was pleased that gladiolus species are prominent in both halves of the book. Gladiolus byzantinus (syn. G. communis var. byzantinus) is found in old cottage style gardens and Wiesinger considers it one of the most valuable bulbs he sells. Unfortunately, it is also a favorite of gophers and voles. The challenges of thwarting these “glad lovers” will amuse every gardener.

Excerpted from the Fall 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.