Olympic National Park : a natural history

Olympic National Park book cover “Olympic National Park: A Natural History” was first published in 1996. Author Tim McNulty and University of Washington Press have now come out with the fourth edition (2018). It’s no wonder this book has been so popular. McNulty is an excellent essayist and the subject is a mostly unspoiled, large-scale ecosystem, from seashore to mountaintops, the latter easily seen on a clear day from Seattle.

This is not an identification book or field guide. There are photographs, but they mostly set the mood of the book by being clustered up front. Instead, this a reading book, intended to be savored cover-to-cover, to gain an understanding of the flora and the fauna in broad settings: the mountains, the forests, and the coast. The author concludes with the human history of the region, especially pre-European, and the much more recent struggle to establish and maintain the integrity of the national park and its ecosystems.

This newest edition is the same as the previous (2009) in large part, but includes the story of the removal of dams on the Elwha River. It also updates efforts to restore the animal life as found prior to the influence by European and eastern North American settlers, with the reintroduction of fishers and the removal of non-native mountain goats.

The Olympic Peninsula is sometimes described as a refugia, a place where plant and animal species survived while disappearing from nearby locations. This is in part because of the wide range of topographical niches, caused by extreme changes both in elevation and rainfall over short distances. Species could adapt by moving to nearby, suitable habitats.

Earlier history is part of this story, too. While much of the peninsula avoided glaciation, “the ice age and the climatic upheavals that preceded them have reshuffled the deck of plant and animal communities wildly in the Olympic Mountains…alpine and sub-alpine species mixing willy-nilly with lowland plants and varieties.” This gives hope that these mountains and lowlands will continue to provide refuge for plants during future climate change.

Excerpted fom the Spring 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.

Buzz : the nature and necessity of bees

Buzz book cover I was very impressed with the story-telling skills of Thor Hanson that I discovered when reading his “The Triumph of Seeds” (see review in the Fall 2015 issue of the “Bulletin”). He makes scientific research easy to understand and an adventure that’s fun!

“Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees” is Hanson’s newest (2018) book. As before, he combines just the right touch of personal, local experience – he lives on an unidentified island in the Pacific Northwest – with wide-ranging research. For this book, he traveled to Sri Lanka to investigate a bee-like wasp, and to southern Africa, one of the ecosystems where honey bees are native.

“Bees are the vegetarian descendants of a sphecid wasp ancestor from the mid-Cretaceous. That much is known.” As these wasps are not vegetarian, why and how did bees make this dramatic lifestyle change? This is still a mostly unanswered question, but Hanson seeks out some of most recent research and insightful researchers to explore the possibilities.

This led him to participate in “The Bee Course”, a nine-day, intensive study set in the Arizona desert in August. Why there and then? Arizona has the highest concentration of bee species (1,300) in North America and unlike tourists, they don’t mind the heat and are particularly busy during the flush of flowers by many cacti and other wildflowers at that time of year.

During the course, Hanson became smitten with an alkali bee (Nomia sp.), a genus that has an opalescent exoskeleton, “flashing a rainbow of colors that shifted and swirled in the light.” While this species was a rare treasure from his visit to Arizona, he discovered later that near Touchet, Washington, alfalfa farmers have learned to create an environment to nurture native species of alkali bees in exchange for pollinating their crops. This is not a small-scale operation. There are an estimated 18-25 million nesting female alkali bees scattered over 300 acres.

There are other local connections, too. The author profiles Brian Griffin of Bellingham, well-known amongst gardeners and fruit-growers for his commercializing and promotion of keeping orchard mason bees. Hanson also made his own discovery, finding a cliff on a neighboring island to his own that is home to 400,000 digger bees – the largest know population of such bees – amongst a complex community of several other types of bees, wasps, flies, and beetles.

Excerpted from the Spring 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.

Pacific Northwest Insects

Pacific Northwest Insects book cover Fascinated by all the small life forms you find in your garden? Perhaps not, but it is still valuable for gardeners to know about them. “Pacific Northwest Insects” by Merrill Peterson will help. This excellent new field guide provides incredible color photos of over 1,200 species native to our region. The scope is the phylum Arthropoda, so this includes all the true insects (bees, beetles, butterflies, flies, etc.) plus centipedes, sow bugs, spider mites, and even spiders and ticks (yikes!).

This wider scope means this book provides better coverage of the many “bugs” you’ll find in your garden. Peterson recognizes the importance of plants to the insect world and visa-versa. “Given the specialized associations between insects and plants, it is no wonder that many entomologists are skilled field botanists.” This book is the most comprehensive in the Miller Library collection for this region and our reference copy will help you with any identifying invertebrate visitors to your garden.

If you can get past the creepy factor, there’s also a lot of fascinating facts to discover. Did you know that moths are a significant food source for grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains fattening up for their winter hibernation? Or that beetles are the most diverse and numerous order of multicellular animals in the world, making up 20% of all species? Many visitors think the Pacific Northwest has limited insect life. That’s not true – this book will help you identify over 3,000 species – but we lack many “huge or gaudily colored insects.”

Excerpted from the Spring 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.

The Brother Gardeners

[The Brother Gardeners] cover

The Brother Gardeners tells the story of how the English garden came into glorious maturity in the 18th century. But its focus is on the men (alas, almost no women) who brought that garden into being, constructing it to include seeds and plants from the American colonies, and eventually from Australia, South America, Asia, and Africa.

Wars are treated by the brothers as annoying obstacles to be overcome. Political divisions are ignored in order to keep governments friendly to plant transport.

Wulf does a superb job of bringing to life the personalities of the gardeners: Linnaeus, John Bartram, Joseph Banks and numerous others. They all work indefatigably, write each other reams of letters, bicker, fail and try again throughout this book, as they serve the goddess of botany.

Linnaeus, without whose organizing system the huge explosion of new species imported by England would not have been manageable, was not always treated well by his English and Swedish beneficiaries. John Bartram, the American farmer, sought out new species all over the colonies and sent them to England. As a result, American plants became essential to English gardens. Joseph Banks, who focused both his energies and his fortune on collecting plants, spread his passion for botanizing until it became an English mania, and promoted successfully the development of an English policy of plant distribution to and from its colonies.

By the end of the 18th century, Continental gardeners were clamoring to create English gardens rather than the other way around, as had been past practice, and New World plants grew abundantly throughout the Empire.

Wulf describes all this in winningly readable, impressively researched prose. Added benefits are the 18-page glossary of plants and an index which includes both Latin and common plant names. The whole book is a delight.

Published in the March 2019 Leaflet Volume 6, Issue 3.

Designing with Palms

“Designing with Palms” by Jason Dewees is by a San Francisco based author, who profiles garden motifs evoked by palms across the country. For instance, Chamaerops humilis suggests a Mediterranean garrigue, an ecosystem with low shrubs, including rosemary and lavender, like one might find in a Seattle landscape.

While the author’s examples do not include a garden in the Pacific Northwest, those in temperate areas do give guidance for those who wish to try these iconic plants in our climate. I found the Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia, South Carolina especially instructive, perhaps because Jenks Farmer, a Master of Science graduate from the Center for Urban Horticulture in 1993, had a major role in its design.

Dewees is well aware of the practical side of a garden with palms. His copious species notes include hardiness ratings – fined tuned to the exact minimum temperature – and many cultural and aesthetic tips. On caring for Trachycarpus fortunei: “Give them an updated look by pruning off the gorilla-hairy leafbases to reveal their smooth, ringed trunks…or leave them natural and tuck epiphytes such as bromeliads, orchids, and ferns among the fibrous leafbases.”

Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Spring 2019

The Organic Profit: Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism

[The Organic Profit] cover

The Rodale name has long been associated with organic gardening, and books from Rodale Press make up a significant part of the Miller Library’s section on this subject. The company’s magazine Organic Gardening, under that name and similar titles, was a mainstay of garden periodicals from the mid-20th century until it ceased publication in 2017.

What is the bigger story behind this name? The Organic Profit, written by Andrew Case and published by University of Washington Press, delves into this history. In part, this is a biography of J. I. Rodale (1898-1971) and his son, Robert Rodale (1930-1990). It also is an analysis of the mid- to later 20th century movement, in many ways sparked by this family effort, for self-improvement through healthy life choices, including gardening practices and diet. Reading this history, I particularly enjoyed a study of the etymology of the word “organic.”

As the play on words in the title would suggest, the family’s story is not completely altruistic. There was a market for their products and they were eager to meet and promote customers’ demands. However, this grew out of zeal for sharing their personal beliefs. “In his [J. I. Rodale’s] estimation, soils, plants, animals, and people all had a proper diet. Those proper diets were disrupted in the age of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the health of people, plants, animals, and soils was breaking down as a result.”

The author also analyzes the role the Rodales played in the broader environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. For all who are researching or working in fields that were affected – or even created – by the changes in societal attitudes towards our collective stewardship of the environment at that time, this is an important history to know.

Published in the February 2019 Leaflet for Scholars, volume 6, issue 2

Flora of Middle-Earth

[Flora of Middle Earth] cover

Why would the Miller Library add a book about the flora of a legendary place? Until I was given a personal copy of Flora of Middle-Earth, it was not an obvious addition to our collection. Written by botanist Walter S. Judd and richly illustrated by artist Graham A. Judd, this American father and son have created a beautiful book, featuring botanical woodblock illustrations – but it is very much more.

The authors write in their introduction, “It is obvious from even a cursory reading of The Lord of the Rings that the book was written by a person who was botanically knowledgeable—but more than that—a writer who really loved plants!” J. R. R. Tolkien also made this last point very clear in his non-fiction writings. He developed many languages and customs for his created peoples of Middle-Earth – why wouldn’t he develop this world’s plant lore, too?

Most of the plants in Tolkien’s legendarium can be found in his native Great Britain, but even the best botanists will not find majestic mallorn trees or the delicate elanor and niphredil flowers that bloom beneath them, as in the land of Lothlórien. However, in some ways you just might. Based on Tolkien’s writings about his fiction, Walter Judd has deduced that the niphredil is based on the common snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis), while elanor is akin to pimpernels, in the genus Anagallis.

Herein lies the value of this book to the average botanist or gardener. Tolkien’s lore is closely tied to his British heritage; he essentially created the ancient mythology that his country mostly lacked. The authors carefully, and in great detail, combine both natural and legendary history, to enrich the plant-loving reader’s appreciation of both.

This is a book to savor when you’re inside by the fire, waiting for winter to be over. So put on your old “Frodo Lives!” t-shirt and begin reading!

Published in the January 2019 Leaflet, Volume 6 Issue 1.

Flora of the Pacific Northwest, 2nd edition

[Flora of the Pacific Northwest] cover

For Pacific Northwest botanists of all levels, the one-volume book informally known as “Hitchcock” has been standard equipment since its publication in 1973. This work, Flora of the Pacific Northwest: An Illustrated Manual by C. Leo Hitchcock and Arthur Cronquist, was intended as a field version of the five-volume flora Vascular Plants of the Pacific Northwest, written by the same authors with two additional botanists and two illustrators from 1955-1969.

“No scholarly endeavors are immune to the advancing frontiers of knowledge.” This quote is from the introduction of the new, second edition of the one-volume Flora, expanded by a team of four editors with two new illustrators. Changes in taxonomy, especially from molecular studies, plus newly described taxa and the establishment of non-native species (which this flora includes) have created a long overdue need for an update.

Like the first edition, this book attempts to be comprehensive in its presentation of species, subspecies, and varieties throughout Washington, most of Oregon and Idaho, the western part of Montana, and southern British Columbia. The first edition introduced the new (at the time) idea of embedding the species descriptions and illustrations within the taxonomic keys. This proved to be a good decision. It has remained a best-seller for University of Washington Press for the last four decades.

At 882 pages (the first edition had 730), it is perhaps a bit hefty for field work, but this is a must for your work desk. The Miller Library has a lending copy of the new edition, and keeps non-circulating copies of both editions and the earlier volumes of Vascular Plants. Be sure to take a look at this new standard for our regional botany!

Published in the January 2019 Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 6, Issue 1.

Lady with green fingers; the life of Jane Loudon

Bea Howe captures much of the story of writer Jane Webb Loudon in “Lady with Green Fingers,” especially the practical nature of her advice for both garden culture and design, and her “fresh and entirely unsentimental approach to flowers and plants.”

Excerpted from the Winter 2019 Arboretum Bulletin.

Abernethy Forest: The History and Ecology of an Old Scottish Pinewood

[book title] cover

Ron Summers writes about a very different ecological history in Abernethy Forest: The History and Ecology of an Old Scottish Pinewood (2018). This is an effort to understand and protect a barely surviving old ecosystem, mostly destroyed by centuries of human activities. This small subject, about 38 square kilometers, or just a bit bigger than Mercer Island, includes the fast-flowing River Spey and Loch Garten, which at 47 hectares is about half the size of Green Lake.

While small, Abernethy includes “the largest of the remaining fragments of the pine forest that once extended across Highland Scotland” and is “incredibly rare in Britain and therefore precious for nature conservation and science.” It is also beautiful, as I have discovered over several visits in the last 20 years, and supports some fascinating animals, including the Capercaillie (the largest member of the grouse family), three species of crossbills that are well-suited for extracting the seeds of pinecones, and the Scottish wildcat, described as resembling a robust domestic tabby.

Published in the December 2018 Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 5, Issue 12.