Michael Edward Kauffmann presents an excellent introduction to the ecology and the geology of the Klamath Mountain region in his book “Conifer Country.” He also helped me understand the names of the mountains. The Klamath Mountains include nine distinct sub-ranges beginning in the north with the Umpqua Valley of Oregon and reaching south to the Yolla Bolly Mountains west of Red Bluff, California.
The Siskiyou Mountains sub-range is by far the biggest, and includes all of the Oregon portion of the Klamath Mountains and a sizable part of California, especially closer to the coast. But to complicate matters, the coast has its own, separate mountains (the North Coast Range).
Confused? The maps that Kauffmann has drawn for his book will help tremendously. The main take-away is that this is an extremely rich area for botanists. “The Klamath-Siskiyou Ecoregion is world renowned for being a crossroads for biodiversity, representing one of the most species rich temperate coniferous forests on Earth.”
Following this engaging introduction, the author profiles the 35 conifer species of this region, including excellent range maps and photos, along with text that is suitable for the amateur to tell these often similar trees apart. These are followed by a series of suggested hikes, all geared for seeing the most of conifers, the richest being the so-called Miracle Mile. This square mile near Little Duck Lake, about 50 miles west of Mount Shasta, has over 400 vascular plant species including 18 different conifer species!
Excerpted from the Winter 2016 Arboretum Bulletin.
If you have enjoyed a hike up one of the Table Rocks in Southern Oregon, you might be interested in “Flowers of the Table Rocks” by Susan K. MacKinnon. These distinctive geological features in the Rogue River Valley just north of Medford are the likely remnants of a lava flow some seven million years ago. Erosion has left two plateaus standing well above the surrounding valley, and the mostly open and grassy tops are home to over 300 plant species, including 200 wildflowers.
This self-published book primarily speaks through its numerous close-up photos, with enough detail to engage the serious field botanist, but presented by the author/photographer to help anyone who just wants to know the names of the flowers. “I hope that some of the photos will inspire in even the casual reader the sense of awe, excitement and discovery that I experienced in studying the flowers.”
Much of the text discusses recent changes in nomenclature and a table in the appendices records these changes. Other tables show times of flowering, common names, and – perhaps the most interesting – the meaning or source of the scientific names.
Excerpted from the Winter 2016 Arboretum Bulletin.
The author of three more conventional field guides to wildflowers, Elizabeth L. Horn makes “Oregon’s Best Wildflower Hikes: Southwest Region” about hikes to see wildflowers. Throughout she uses only common names, but this helps move you along the trail.
“Both Table Rocks are known for their colorful displays of springtime wildflowers. We hiked the area in both early April and early May and found the wildflowers breathtaking.” Lest this sound a little too idyllic, she warns that the trail rating is “strenuous” and that “poison oak and ticks are plentiful, so stay on the trail.”
While this is not a field guide, many prominent species are highlighted with close-up photos (all by the author) with interesting facts that make each distinctive. Detailed directions and GPS coordinates will help you find the trailhead while close-up maps will help along the trail.
Excerpted from the Winter 2016 Arboretum Bulletin.
“Wildflowers of Southern Oregon” was written by John Kemper, a natural history writer who settled in Medford, and recognized the need for a simple guide to the native and naturalized flowers of the region. He’s also a skilled photographer, and even though each entry has only a single image, this will work well for most readers. Plants are divided by color and by families within colors.
In the forward, Frank Lane, retired chairman of the Biology Department at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, writes that until this book was written, “there was no book for beginners covering all of Southern Oregon.” The author includes a short list of best hikes and to help with planning, each image includes a description of the location and time of year when the photograph was taken.
Excerpted from the Winter 2016 Arboretum Bulletin.
Intrigued by all those Irish gardens with lyrical names? The beauty and glory of these can be found in The Irish Garden, a new, coffee table-worthy book from Jane Powers (writer) and her husband Jonathan Hession (photographer). While its majestic cover and heft will impress your friends, don’t just leave it on the table unopened, because it’s one of the best books on the gardens of a particular region that I know, with the writing, photography, and publication values all top notch.
The grand gardens are here, but so are the very personal, including Helen Dillon’s place in Dublin. Other gardens are more for a ramble, while most unexpected is a chapter devoted to food gardens. Best of all, these are not formulaic descriptions; Powers wisely leaves the clutter of the often-changing practical details for an Internet search. This book draws you in with both words and images, intrigues you, and makes you want to quit your job and go spend several months in Ireland visiting them all.
Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Winter 2016
As a new graduate of the University of Washington’s Library and Information Science Master’s program, I began volunteering at the Miller Library in July 2011. I had some experience in academic libraries, and had worked as a student assistant in the UW’s Natural Sciences Library. After I began volunteering, I started reading and checking out several books on fruit and vegetable gardening. The books were great, and really helped me learn how to grow food.
I decided to add chickens to my urban garden, making it a small urban farm. One of the best books that helped me prepare for my chickens was “Reinventing the Chicken Coop” by Kevin McElroy and Matthew Wolpe. The book contains 14 coop designs. It covers chicken coop essentials including space requirements, roosts, ventilation, and nesting boxes. This information was very helpful to me as I was learning what it would take to keep chickens in my yard. In the Coop-Building Basics chapter the authors explained, “One of our goals for this book was to keep things simple, using ordinary shop tools and building with similar materials and repeatable processes as much as possible” (p. 21). In the end, my husband and I built our coop using their design, SYM, which is “much more than a chicken coop; it’s a symbiotic urban farming system” (p. 106). This was exactly what we needed. The step by step instructions were easy to follow and it didn’t take too long to build this simple yet stable coop for our new flock. “Reinventing the Chicken Coop” is a great resource for building chicken houses with ease and low cost. Most pre-built coops cost twice as much as the materials used for building your own coop. I enjoyed the collection of contemporary designs and my chickens love their little home in my city backyard.
Now, I am a librarian at the Miller Library, with two years of experience in chicken husbandry and a growing knowledge of year-round vegetable and fruit gardening. I take pleasure in being knowledgeable on these subjects and plan to continue learning, expanding my understanding of urban farming.
Published in the November 2015 Leaflet Volume 2, Issue 11.
Grass Valley, California is on the outer rim of our region, but the resident gardening columnist Carolyn Singer is worth knowing about, especially for gardeners in the foothills of the Cascades. She is very experienced with the ravages of deer, and address this concern in two books. “Deer in My Garden” (2006), was largely written while the author spent the summer of 2005 in Seattle and focuses on perennials and subshrubs. “Deer in My Garden: Volume 2” (2008) considers the impact on groundcovers and garden edge plants.
Both books are part of “The Yucky Flower Series,” honoring the advice of her then 3-year-old grandson: “The deer wouldn’t eat yucky flowers!” So that is what she planted. Her deer-resistant recommendations are based on her own experience, or those of gardeners who grew trial plants for her, knowing that in the interest of science (or cervid consumer selection), the trial plants might disappear.
While yucky to deer, the selected plants are all quite lovely to gardeners and would make many other recommended plant lists. Most are drought tolerant and adapted to a wide temperature range. Best of all, the author enthusiastically rates the maintenance requirements of most as “EASY!” to “VERY, VERY EASY!” Deer or no deer, these are great garden plants.
Excerpted from the Spring 2015 Arboretum Bulletin
The three books by Constance Sidles about her experiences with birding in the Montlake Fill (also known as the Union Bay Natural Area) have been amongst the most circulated titles from the Miller Library. All are filled with her careful observations of the life in this urban wetland and her philosophical observations to broader life. In “Forty-Six Views of Montlake Fill” she takes a different linguistic approach: poetry.
The poems are distilled observations of this ecosystem throughout the seasons. Hiroko Seki, an accomplished artist of sumi-e, the Japanese style of ink wash or literati painting, has created paintings to accompany each poem, making for a simple but profound combination.
“In the pond,
A female Cinnamon Teal paddles with her babies,
Mother ship followed by seven little tugboats,
Fueled with green algae.”
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.
Thor Hanson’s son Noah became fascinated with seeds at an early age. After reading “The Triumph of Seeds”, this is not surprising. Having a father who could tell such compelling stories could make the commonplace imprint on almost any child.
Adults will find Hanson’s stories equally engaging. He is an excellent researcher, interweaving the importance of seeds in botany, ecology, and natural history with their significance in both human history and what you are serving for dinner. Why are the seeds of chili peppers hot? What’s in it for the coffee bean to be full of caffeine?
These questions have chapter-long answers that introduce a wealth of characters, ranging from Christopher Columbus to Johann Sebastian Bach to a barista in Ballard. Through both history and modern culture the relationships between humans and plants (and animals) are very deep, on-going, and ever-developing.
As his son ages, Hanson involves him in his experiments, but the end results are often about more than just the research. Describing the flight of the seed of a Javan cucumber, with its six inch wing, he recalls, “We watched that seed fly for the simple joy of seeing something beautiful doing what it is meant to do. Standing there together, heads tilted skyward, we laughed and laughed until it disappeared from view—a papery wisp at the edge of visions, still rising.”
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.
If your exploration of native trees takes you on a trip farther afield, consider bringing “Conifers of the Pacific Slope” by Michael Edward Kauffmann. Inspired as a youth by a family visit to the forests of California, this Virginia native returned to work amongst the majestic trees that stirred his younger self. This field guide is a product of that passion and is designed for easy packing.
The scope is all of the native conifer species of the Pacific Coast from northern Baja California to well into British Columbia, and eastward to the Rockies. This includes some very impressive trees. In addition to the familiar Pacific Northwest conifers highlighted in the previous book, there are the many cypresses, junipers, and pines of California plus representatives from a few other genera, including the most impressive of them all, the coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)and giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum).
While intended as a field guide, the author provides lots of interesting bits of natural history with his descriptions and some wonderful maps that group related species together, including areas of hybridization. These, along with essays at the front and back, make this a book easily readable from cover-to-cover.
Excerpted from the Fall 2015 Arboretum Bulletin.