I reviewed the first book by Colin McCrate and Brad Halm, “Food Grown Right, in Your Backyard,” in the Winter 2013 issue of the “Bulletin”. This reflected their efforts as the founders of The Seattle Urban Farm Company to encourage people to grow food, no matter what their limitations of space or experience.
Their second book, “High-Yield Vegetable Gardening,” addresses a more experienced audience – gardeners who want the maximum yield from their space, no matter how large or small. Their ideas would work throughout most of North America, although here and there it reminds you of its Seattle roots, to the benefit of local readers.
They have selected three real examples (with pseudonyms for the owners) of gardens of varying sizes, one each in an urban, a suburban, and a rural setting, and use these as examples throughout – an effective approach. You’ll want to keep this book handy and use it for notes; there are many spaces for you to fill in blanks for your specific climate and harvest needs.
Excerpted from the Winter 2017 Arboretum Bulletin.
Do you read poems with the children in your life? Whether they are already poetry lovers or you would like to raise their consciousness about poetry, Julie Fogliano’s 
For anyone who would like to understand more about the empowering effect of programs like Seattle Youth Garden Works and the UW Farm, I highly recommend Illène Pevec’s 
In my work as a horticulture reference librarian, I am often presented with a scrap of leaf or flower or twig, and asked to identify it. Although I have a pretty good visual memory for plants and their names, I have no formal training in botany. A Botanist’s Vocabulary by Susan Pell and Bobbi Angell (Timber Press, 2016) is a useful tool not just for botanists but for all who work with plants—home gardeners and professionals alike. The book is arranged in straight alphabetical dictionary order, which makes it easy to look up a term you may have come across in the course of learning about a plant. It complements a book like The Cambridge Illustrated Glossary of Botanical Terms (Michael Hickey and Clive King, 2000), which is organized by the parts of a plant—the roots, seeds, flowers, leaves, fruits, and so forth. The pen and ink illustrations by Bobbi Angell are very clear, and red arrows or markings indicate the part of the plant referred to by a term, when such clarification is needed. The definitions are also concise, and include synonyms or in some cases antonyms, as relevant. I found familiar as well as unfamiliar terms, and as a word-nerd this is the kind of reference book that is a great joy to browse. The only desired feature the book lacks is consistent identification of the plant or plant family shown in each illustration. Some are named, but many are not. It would be helpful, once one has looked up the word, to have at least one example of which genus or family exhibits the characteristic being described and defined.
The Miller Library receives many donations of books each year, and sometimes we open a box and a particular book enchants us. A recent example is a small volume entitled Wild Flowers of the Undercliff, Isle of Wight, published in London in 1881. It is a field guide to a small area of the southern coast of the Isle of Wight, England. The region is prone to landslides and possesses a unique microclimate, as it is protected beneath an escarpment, facing south. The authors, Charlotte O’Brien and C. Parkinson, hoped the book would enable temporary residents of the Undercliff to acquaint themselves with the various plants blooming throughout the year. “As a rule, they are very timid, these ‘wildings of Nature,’ and recede before the advances of man and his bricks and mortar,” and this book seeks to help “seekers after one of the purest of earthly pleasures” [wildflowers] find them.
Now that I had birth and death dates and a first name, I used genealogy resources like Ancestry.com and found that Cyril had a sister Marian who lived with him for a time, and she was undoubtedly the illustrator whose signature is in our copy. Census records indicate that she was a woman of “private means,” and this squares with the family’s history as landed gentry with their own coat of arms. At the time of the book’s publication, the 1881 census lists Cyril as a tile manufacturer living with his unmarried sister Marian in Bournemouth, not terribly distant from the Isle of Wight. Their parents were John and Catherine Parkinson of Southwell, Nottinghamshire.