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Elisabeth C. Miller Library

Keyword: Trees

Arboretum

“Arboretum” is a new book this spring in the “Welcome to the Museum” series from Big Picture Press.  The Miller Library has three titles in this series, all illustrated by Katie Scott, collaborating with different text authors.

These books are huge!  Fifteen inches tall by eleven inches wide and are wonderful for reading both silently and aloud to others.  Tony Kirkham, former Head of Arboretum, Gardens & Horticulture Services of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, wrote the text and his wonderment for the vast varieties of trees (over 58,000 species) is very clear.

“At this time of unprecedented change for our planet, it could not be more important to learn how to live alongside these giants.  We cannot protect the natural world until we understand it.”  To help with this understanding, Kirkham’s descriptions typically fill the left page, while Scott’s illustrations fill the right.

This book is about the global arboretum, including tropical species from both moist and dry forests that sadly wouldn’t survive in the Washington Park Arboretum.  But our native trees are represented in a two-page spread featuring the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), including a drawing of “Big Lonely Doug”, a 230-foot-tall survivor of clear-cutting on Vancouver Island.  Scott shows the misshaped branches and the enormous (12 feet in diameter), limbless trunk with close-ups of the cones, needles, and even a cross-section of the trunk.

 

Excerpted from Brian Thompson’s article in the Summer 2023 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Versed in Living Nature: Wordsworth’s Trees

In the preface of Versed in Living Nature, Peter Dale and Brandon Chao-Chi Yen describe the contents: “We visit many of Wordsworth’s trees and explore their meanings and implications, personal, physical, cultural, religious, historical and political.” To their great credit, they do all of that in 320 pages.
The index under “trees” lists 58 varieties, with multiple pages for many, especially the oak and yew. Each tree is located in William Wordsworth’s poems. (It helps to have a little knowledge of the poems, but it’s not necessary).
The trees are also connected to the poet’s activities, his schooling, his years in the Lake District of England, his travels. Special attention goes to the people in his life, chief among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy. Dale and Yen quote her often, reinforcing her importance to his poetry.
Among others they meet, the novelist Sir Walter Scott appears almost as a side note during a visit to Scotland. The book is quite a literary Who’s Who of the British literary scene.
Adding to the breadth of the book are references to Dale and Yen’s visits to Wordsworth sites. In commenting on a scene with four yews in “A Tradition of Darley Dale, Derbyshire,” for instance, they note that only three survive today, and they are hard to find.
Very helpful are the contexts in which all these trees are placed. Some are political (e.g., the Napoleonic war), some economic (the Highland Clearances), some literary (the controversy over the Ossian poems).
Wordsworth was also a gardener. At Dove Cottage he “began to learn about gardens not as a gentleman dilettante but as someone who would supply cabbages for the kitchen” (p. 132). He learned enough to gain a reputation as a garden guru, someone sought for advice on horticultural matters.
Building on all the above, the authors develop Wordsworth’s ideas and how his trees connect to his understanding of Nature as both physical and transcendent. It’s a very impressive accomplishment.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in the Leaflet, Volume 10, Issue 5, May 2023

The Great British Tree Biography

Read this book to have fun with tales, myths, legends, and historical facts about British trees. Mark Hooper says the book aims “to explore the space where social history meets natural history” (p. 9). Along the way he ties events familiar and unfamiliar to many individual trees.
The first short section consists of superstitions and symbolism associated with various types of trees. The birch, for instance, is associated with witchcraft, apparently because household brooms were made of birch twigs bundled with a handle of hazel or hawthorn. Brooms, witches – they go together.
The main body of the book is “An A-Z of British Trees,” one- or two-page accounts of fifty individual (or sometimes multiple) trees in England, Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland. Most are English. Many of the trees are very long-lived. The Ankerwycke Yew has survived since King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, supposedly under its branches. Later Henry VIII is rumored to have courted Anne Boleyn in the same spot. 
Lest you think these associations are all from long ago, the Bolan Tree, “an unprepossessing sycamore” (p, 42) in London, was the site of a 1977 car crash that killed T. Rex lead singer Marc Bolan when his car collided with it. A statue and a plaque serve as a memorial.
Of the fifty entries on trees, 19 are oaks and nine are yews. Some individual trees are identifiable; some are not. In “The Knole Oak and the Strawberry Fields Tree,” an oak on the Knole estate in Kent can only be described as a likely candidate for the oak featured in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. But definitely known is the specific oak on the same estate used in a promotional video for the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields.”
Some entries include multiple trees. The account “The ‘Trees to Remain’” explains the many curves in the A303 highway by way of a 1969 hand drawn plan for a bypass marked “trees to remain.” The builders just had to bend the highway around the trees. No species names are given.
These sample summaries are enough to whet the reader’s appetite. Amy Grimes has illustrated the tales with impressionistic art in saturated hues, adding to the liveliness of these stories.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy for The Leaflet, August 2022, Volume 9, Issue 8.

To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest

For several of her teenage years in Ireland, Diana Beresford-Kroeger lived in fear of being sent by the government to one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries, where orphans like her and unwed mothers suffered abuse and maltreatment. Her second parent died when she was thirteen, and at first it seemed no one would care for her. Then Uncle Pat relented, leading to wonderful summers in the Irish countryside.

Numerous aged women there chose her as a vessel to receive beliefs, stories, and especially ways of healing, that went back to the Druids. Much of this knowledge had been hidden from the ruling British during what the author calls the penal period. In the process, Beresford-Kroeger learned to affirm herself after her traumatic childhood, and to love and honor nature, especially trees.

Beresford-Kroeger writes winningly about this period of her life. Especially given that her parents had not paid much attention to her when they were alive, she makes clear how much these women were responsible for enabling her to develop into the respected scientist and author she became.

After college in Ireland, Beresford-Kroeger came first to the U.S. for a few years, and then settled in Canada. There she completed at Ph.D. but opted out of an academic career after experiencing much discrimination because she was a woman. Instead, she found success as an independent scholar, though she says she fears the word “success” as associated with greed.

The first 186 pages of this 284-page book tell the above story. It brings together her own amazing history, her botanist’s outlook, and the often mystical understanding of the Druids. The final section is a Celtic alphabet of trees. The Celts assigned trees’ names to each letter of their Ogham alphabet. For example, the letter H was called “Huath,” and the tree is the hawthorn. A drawing of each letter is included, plus a description of the letter:” H is designated as a vertical line met by a single horizontal line to the left” (p. 227).

Along with each letter, Beresford-Kroeger gives information about the tree, the healing properties assigned to it by the Celts, and often, how modern scientists have discovered its medicinal value – sometimes the same as the Celts’, sometimes different. The ancients used extracts from hawthorns for “unspecified weakness.”  Today medicines developed from that tree are used for hypertension associated with various heart problems.

Two of Beresford-Kroeger’s previous books – Arboretum America and The Global Forest – are also available at the Miller Library. This one adds background and context to them. About a year after her parents died, she remembers standing outside one of those Magdalene Laundries and smelling fear. This book shows how she channeled that fear into a powerful advocacy.

Published in the Leaflet, June 2022, Volume 9, Issue 6.

Growing Conifers: the complete illustrated gardening and landscaping guide

John Albers has highlighted his garden of 20 years in Bremerton and his passion for sustainable gardening practices in two previous books. Now, he turns his attention to a favorite plant group: conifers, especially dwarf and small cultivars. He is very clear in his reasons for writing the book. “Given the horticultural and ecological importance of urban conifers, it is vital that all of us do our part to restore conifers to our urban environment.”

More than just a gardening book, “Growing Conifers” is a good introduction to the botany of conifers. The narrative description of each genus and species gives clues to help with identification, as do the excellent photographs by David Perry. It also explains the origins of the beloved dwarf forms, including many found in the Pacific Northwest, either as mutations in the wild or in nurseries.

The author walks the reader through the process of assessing a garden and developing a design, with the liberal use of suitable conifers. But he doesn’t stop there. He also gives careful instructions for planting and sustainable care of these long-lived plants, and even the basics of propagation.

The design elements also include good companion plants. An example being clematis, especially if they are species that come from lean soil, as Albers believes neighboring plants should share the water needs. However, “sometimes rules can be broken for the sake of a greater good […] for the sake of creating a beautiful garden vignette that warms the heart and soothes the soul.”

Excerpted from the Fall 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Leaf-out date for deciduous trees

Can you direct me to a list of deciduous trees whose leaves generally emerge in early spring, or a list of trees ranked in order of their leaf emergence? I know this will vary from year to year and from individual tree to individual tree due to climate and genes, but if there is a list out there with a general sequenced time schedule, it would be a great tool for design.

 

An early American observer of the varying timing of leaf emergence was Henry David Thoreau, whose journals list leaf-out dates for the trees and shrubs he saw in Massachusetts in 1854. In fact, his data is now being used in climate change research. Though it’s a subject that hasn’t been much approached from a garden design standpoint, the increased interest in climate change means that more research on phenology and the leafing out sequence is becoming available. There are several articles by Richard Primack in the Arnold Arboretum newsletter, Arnoldia. Primack (of Boston University) is a specialist in this topic. Primack and Caroline Polgar co-authored “Leaf-out phenology of temperate woody plants: from trees to ecosystems” (Arnoldia, Volume 68, Issue 4,2011) which states that “maples (Acer spp.), birches, alders (Alnus spp.), and poplars” tend to leaf out earlier, while “oaks, ashes (Fraxinus spp.), and hickories (Carya spp.)” are among the later-leafing trees.

The article “Why Do Temperate Deciduous Trees Leaf Out at Different Times? Adaptation and Ecology of Forest Communities,” (The American Naturalist December 1984, Martin J. Lechowicz) has a chart (p. 825) showing the tree species the author studied leafing out in this order:

 

  • Acer rubrum
  • Populus tremuloides
  • Betula papyrifera
  • Sorbus americana
  • Acer saccharinum
  • Betula alleghaniensis
  • Ulmus americana
  • Tilia americana
  • Quercus macrocarpa
  • Fraxinus pennsylvanica
  • Populus grandidentata
  • Fraxinus nigra

 

 

Another chart on the same page compares 1980 and 1981 leafout dates, with Populus tremuloides and P. balsamifera and Betula species consistently leafing early, followed by Acer and Prunus, then Fagus and Populus grandidentata, then Fraxinus and Tilia, and finally Carya and Juglans.

You may want to read a short article in the March 11, 2015 online version of Conservation Magazine on predicting the future of forests, based on two centuries of data from citizen scientists in England. Here is an excerpt:
“It is likely that the variation in each species’ sensitivities to both spring forcing and winter chilling will mean that forests will look quite different in the future. Those species for whom spring forcing is most important will grow leaves earlier in the year; those for whom the autumn and winter chill is more critical could leaf later in the year. Eventually, a late-leafing species like oak might wind up growing its leaves earlier than an early-leafing species like birch.”

Another resource that may help you determine the leaf-out date of specific trees is The Botanical Garden: volume 1: Trees & Shrubs by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix (Firefly, 2002). The book presents photos of branch samples from many tree species, often showing the young leaves associated with a date (though not with the geographical location; bear in mind that the authors reside in England). While it doesn’t have such a photo for every tree, it might have enough trees for you to get useful data.

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Tree transplant tolerance

Can you direct me to information available on the transplant tolerances of different tree species?

 

There is a table on Ease of Transplanting from Principles and Practice of Planting Trees and Shrubs by Watson and Himelick (International Society of Arboriculture, 1997). It is the longest list of any I have found that covers this topic.

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Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand and Supplement

Audrey Lily Eagle (born 1925) was born in New Zealand, but spent her adolescent years in Oxfordshire, England.  There she learned a love of plants and began to draw and paint them.  She also took training in engineering drafting, a skill that is apparent in the precision of her later work.  When she returned to New Zealand, it became her passion to illustrate almost all of the woody flora of New Zealand, “over 800 species, subspecies, and unnamed plants.  It is assumed that the number of any new finds is certain to be small.”

This passion took 54 years to complete.  During that time, samples of her work were published in smaller books, but the project culminated in “Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand.  Published in 2006, this two-volume work plus a supplement, was a gift to the Miller Library by the Seattle-Christchurch Sister City Association.

Initially she used her art as a way of learning plants, figuring that the time it took to paint a plant would fix the name and its distinctive features in her memory.  She also studied botany and wrote the painstaking descriptions and sources for her subjects that accompany her illustrations.  She insisted on painting live specimens, often done on family camping trips with her husband and two children throughout the North and South Islands.  “My children, Alison and Paul, have endured my preoccupation with painting all their lives: ‘Don’t jog the table’, ‘stop the car I want to look at a plant’, even to the present time.”

The illustrations are almost all of natural size, with separate, enlarged illustrations of tiny flowers.  Maori names are included when known.  The native ranges, often given in both latitude and altitude, create an appreciation for New Zealand topography.  For most entries, there are bibliographic references for more information.

The supplement is especially fascinating, showcasing Eagle’s keen interest in her subjects through years of networking with the botanical organizations and individual botanists of New Zealand.  Here are the notes that wouldn’t fit in the illustrated volumes.  For example, the habitat of Fuchsia procumbens, an easily grown groundcover in Seattle gardens, is described from a personal communication with one of her colleagues:  “On beach terraces, banks, small gullies, and creek beds behind the beach and at base of pohutukawa trees (Metrosideros excelsa).  It also grows in the coastal forest, estuary margins and scrubland, preferring dampness or some shelter.”

 

Excerpted from the Winter 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

All about Magnolia grandiflora ‘Alta’

I was reading an article in the local paper that mentioned Magnolia grandiflora ‘Alta’ and was hoping that you could tell me more about and its hardiness in the Pacific Northwest and what its mature dimensions would be.

Magnolia grandiflora ‘Alta’ is a trademarked Monrovia introduction. According to their website, it is “very slow growing to 20 ft. tall, 9 ft. wide in 10 years.” Since this is a relatively recent introduction, there is not going to be much information about its hardiness in our area until more gardeners have grown it and shared their experiences. The longevity of the species Magnolia grandiflora and its cultivars can only be estimated (between 50-150 years, according to SelecTree.) Trees grown in urban settings are often affected by root disturbance, pollution, and the like, so their lives may be somewhat toward the short end of the expectancy range.

The local website of Great Plant Picks lists two different cultivars of Magnolia grandiflora, which may give you some idea of how well they do in our area. Here is an excerpt:

“Provide southern magnolias with good drainage and full to partial sun. They thrive in hot spots, where the extra heat encourages better flowering. These flowering evergreens prefer well-drained, sandy soil, but they tolerate average garden soil. Best growth and flowering requires occasional summer watering, but once established, southern magnolias withstand considerable drought. Garden gently under magnolias, for they have fleshy roots that can easily be damaged. The best approach for companions plants is to tuck in natural spreaders and let them flourish untouched.”

From my observations, they do not do well in the occasional winters when we have heavy snowfall, as their evergreen leaf-laden branches are prone to breaking under the weight of snow. Otherwise, they seem to survive here.