I always look forward to new books intended for Pacific Northwest gardeners. Paul Bonine and Amy Campion’s “Gardening in the Pacific Northwest” has been long anticipated, and it doesn’t disappoint. As explained in the introduction, this book is mostly from Bonine’s perspective, as he grew up here and has gardened in this region for many years. Campion did most of the excellent photography.
I found myself reading this book out of order, starting with the final chapter titled “Design: Northwest Garden Style.” Intended as an introduction to design styles, this essay is also an excellent, local history of ornamental gardening and why our gardens look the way they do.
Keeping this in mind, I returned to the introductory chapters on climate, soils, and garden culture with a better understanding. Here, I found the authors’ selection of climatic sub-regions especially interesting. As expected, Seattle is part of the Puget Sound sub-region, but Portland and its immediate suburbs have a sub-region of their very own, totally surrounded by the Willamette Valley sub-region. While I was at first surprised by this, after reading the distinguishing factors, I decided these divisions make a lot of sense, and will help gardeners make better plant selections.
The plant encyclopedia is especially good for woody plants. While most species are represented by a single cultivar, these are excellent selections. After admiring Albizia julibrissin ‘Summer Chocolate’ at a couple of Portland gardens last summer, I appreciated learning why it is rarely seen around Seattle. Our immediate sub-region “normally doesn’t receive enough summer heat for its wood to harden off properly in preparation for winter’s cold, leaving it vulnerable to even mild freezes.” Tips like these, make this selection of plant varieties especially valuable.
Excerpted from the Spring 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.
![[RHS Genealogy for Gardeners]]cover](https://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/graphix/RHSGenealogyforgardeners (2).jpg)
Confused by plant families? Having trouble keeping track of recent changes based on DNA and other molecular research? RHS Genealogy for Gardeners can help with these questions. Ross Bayton (a long-time volunteer in the Otis Douglas Hyde Herbarium and at the Rhododendron Glen of the Washington Park Arboretum) is co-author with Simon Maughan of this Royal Horticultural Society (“RHS”) publication.
Don’t be put off by “for Gardeners” in the title. This is an excellent book for field botanists, or anyone interested in understanding the relationships between plants in any setting. The book is published in the United States under the title Plant Families: A Guide for Gardeners and Botanists.
Bayton has his PhD in taxonomy, while Maughan has an extensive background in writing, editing, and publishing both botanical and horticultural works. The combination means this book has scientific accuracy and is very readable for those with all levels of botanical knowledge. Family descriptions include basic characteristics, the genetic history, best-known genera, and the important uses of the members, including as ornamentals and for food crops or other plant-based products.
The introduction section also coaches good techniques in observation and teasing out the family connections of the plants you’re considering, with the following words of both warning and encouragement: “The intricacies and subtleties of plant identification are unfortunately beyond the reaches of a simple Internet search engine. The best we currently have to rely on are our own observational skills.”
Published in the April 2018 Leaflet for Scholars Volume 5, Issue 4.
![[Saving Tarboo Creek]]cover](https://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/graphix/savingtarboocreek.jpg)
Saving Tarboo Creek is a local book – by local authors about a local place. Tarboo Creek empties indirectly into the Hood Canal. Scott Freeman teaches biology at the University of Washington. His wife Susan, an artist, is also the granddaughter of Aldo Leopold, whose Sand County Almanac is a bible for ecologists. The book is partly a narrative – a description of how the Freemans have labored over a number of years to restore a patch of land along the creek to its natural state – the one before the pioneers straightened the creek and harvested most of the trees to create farm land. The book is also a call to arms to those who can act to save and restore natural landscapes.
One of my favorite chapters, one that exemplifies the Freemans’ approach, deals with beavers. Of course beavers can be disastrous to any tree planting effort, and the Freemans have planted thousands of young trees. The chapter describes clearly, and with some sympathy for the beavers, how the animals live and build and move into new territory like that around Tarboo Creek. Killing them wouldn’t help, even if one thought it a good idea, because more beavers would soon show up. Furthermore, beaver dams help make the creek an ideal place for young salmon, a positive effect for the Freemans. So the Freemans (and friends) have painstakingly wrapped trees near the creek with protective wire, and each year they wrap more and more. They expect “an intense beaver chew-down” each March or April, and do the hard labor of saving their young trees.
Each chapter places an aspect of restoration work, such as tree planting, in its historical and ecological context. In the final chapter, directed especially at young people, the Freemans call for a return to a “natural life,” giving four criteria: be engaged, be simple, be real, be present. The book conveys an urgent sense of hope.
Published in the April 2018 Leaflet Volume 5, Issue 4.
![[Companions in Wonder]]cover](https://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/graphix/Companionsinwonder.jpg)
Sharing is a multiplier. The most ordinary things can become extraordinary when shared. Julie Dunlap and Stephen Kellert, in Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together, gather lively examples of how adults and children experience the outdoors together, restoring nature to its rightful place in people’s lives.
Personal experiences described by the essayists guide the reader to more deeply understand and appreciate a closer relationship with nature and with people across generations. Voices are from wide-ranging geographic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Building on the legacy of Rachel Carson’s essay “Help Your Child to Wonder”, contributors include journalist and author Richard Louv (“Fathers and Sons”), Native American writers, educators, and storytellers James and Joseph Bruchac (“Tracking Our Way”), educator and earth historian Lauret Savoy (“Colored Memory”), among many others. The editors conclude with general recommendations for adults as well as particular recommendations for teachers.
Companions in Wonder inspires happy, healthy ways to engage and bond children and adults in the great outdoors. The primal power of regular, positive outdoor experiences is paramount in reversing the trend of “nature deficit disorder” at all levels. Sharing experiences in the natural environment multiplies both discovery and renewal of relationships in considering the past, the present, and the future of life on earth.
Published in the March 2018 Leaflet Volume 5, Issue 3.
The Lan Su Chinese Garden is a tranquil oasis in downtown Portland. Long time guide Daniel Skach-Mills wrote The Beyond Within: The Downtown Dao of Lan Su Chinese Garden in 2017, but this is not a traditional guidebook. Instead, the author explores the Daoist principles, as he understands them expressed by different parts of the garden. “Our garden is more than a place of transformation—it is transformation happening, right before our eyes.”
Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, February 5, 2018
Thomas Liptan introduces his new book, Sustainable Stormwater Management, by recounting an aha! moment early in his career as a landscape architect. While working on a parking lot design, the project’s engineer urged putting the water “in the landscape.” That is what they did, effectively directing the runoff to shallow gardens for absorption and filtration.
As Liptan’s career progressed, he discovered this was very unusual thinking for the time (1978). However, he continued to seek opportunities to further this design concept, his guiding principle being “we continually underestimate the capacity of our built environment to manage rain and runoff, just as we underutilize rainfall’s benefit to soil and plants.”
This book is an easy-to-read summation of the lessons the author has learned over his career, and is recommended for anyone considering stormwater management projects, large or small. He is both upbeat in encouraging innovation and pragmatic in the need to have results that are functional, economically sound, long-lasting, and look good.
Most engaging are the many case studies and the practicalities of choosing plants and structural materials. Liptan has worked in Portland for many years and uses this city for many of his examples. Given our similar climate, rainfall, and interest in sustainable development, this is an excellent book for projects in the Seattle area, too.
Published in the February 2018 Leaflet for Scholars Volume 5, Issue 2.</p?\>
“Orchid: A Cultural History” will please anyone who loves orchids and is not offended by frank descriptions. From its first appearance in an ancient Greek herbal, the orchid has been associated with sex, and Jim Endersby makes clear that association continues to the present. Orchids have been associated with subjects as wide-ranging as death (in one fictional account a blossom consumes a human), masculinity, female temptation, and homosexuality.
Endersby traces the orchid’s appearance in myth, art, literature, and film. The late 19th century English “orchidmania” is a particularly rich lode. The adventures of real life orchid hunters make fascinating reading, but much fiction grew out of it as well. For instance, in “The Pollinators of Eden” by John Boyd (1969) the pseudocopulation of one type of orchid (a fascinating true phenomenon also described in Orchid) was stretched to include intelligent orchids copulating with humans. The author knows his orchids and includes solid scientific information along with the plant’s less rational associations. This is serious history with a light touch.
Published in the February 2018 Leaflet Volume 2, Issue 5.
![[Garden Revolution] cover](https://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/graphix/GardenRevolution.jpg)
The title Garden Revolution is hype. This new book by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher is instead a retreat, a going back to working with nature.
Yes, it does challenge many traditional horticultural practices. Primary author and long-time garden designer Weaner uses the term ecological gardening to describe his technique. He insists on working with the existing soil, exposure, and other elements of a site, choosing plants that thrive in the given conditions, instead of amending to the needs of plants you want. He also argues against most accepted weeding practices because they disturb the soil, encouraging more weed seeds to sprout.
Most of all, he wants the gardener and anyone who carefully observes a landscape to recognize that change is inevitable, but it can and should be embraced.
Why am I recommending this book to students and researchers in restoration? Because there is a lot of good horticulture that is very applicable to restoration sites. Weaner lives in the eastern United States, but his principles are quite adaptable and applicable.
He is blunt: “Ecological garden design is not a style of garden-making for the micro-manager. To be successful, this sort of design requires letting the landscape make many of the decisions.”
So perhaps this is a revolution. One that on a small scale has already proven successful.
Published in the March 2018 Leaflet for Scholars Volume 5, Issue 3.
The story of Will Allen and his urban farming non-profit organization (described in his book “The good food revolution”)has inspired a book found in the children’s section of the Miller Library. “Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table,” written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Eric-Shabazz Larkin, focuses on the role neighborhood children played in helping Allen’s enterprise be successful.
In vivid colors, this book captures the diversity of food produced in these greenhouses, including the pools for tilapia, chickens for eggs, sprouts for quick greens, and hives for honey. The people are colorful, too, and of many ethnicities and ages.
The children were especially eager to help bring food garbage, and to come back every day to watch the red wiggler worms turn these scraps into compost. There is tragedy in this story, as some of the worms died until the kids discovered the proper care and feeding they required, but in the end, “the squirmy crew has stayed hard at work.”
Excerpted from the Winter 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.
Michelle Obama needs no introduction and even her book “American Grown,” describing the White House Kitchen Garden she started, is already well known. For some, this may be an easy book to dismiss as a public service announcement, or worse, as a political statement. This is unfortunate, because it is a good gardening book, both for techniques and as a model of how gardening improves people’s lives in many ways.
This book has many authors. The White House gardening staff share their experiences and appreciation of the garden along with basic cultural advice, geared to both the new gardener and to those unfamiliar with the wide range of delicious foods they can easily grow. White House chefs share tips on harvesting and preserving, and provide recipes that make it simple to add more fruits and vegetable to your diet.
Equity and diversity are quiet, background themes in “American Grown”, but it clear that in this garden “equality is a key part of the message of planting day. We are all down in the dirt. Anyone present can help dig. There is no hierarchy, no boss, and no winner.”
Obama also reaches out to those involved with community gardens, school gardens, and food resources across the country (including Will Allen), and with other programs that encourage exercise for youth and healthy school lunch choices.
One such garden is the New Roots Community Farm in San Diego, where gardeners from Uganda, Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, and Guatemala began working together. “At first, they weren’t sure how people from so many different countries would get along—especially since the garden had only two hoses to share and the farmers often didn’t speak the same language. But their enthusiasm and determination drew them together.”
Excerpted from the Winter 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.