Archives: Book Reviews

Do you own a vasculum? If you were an active field botanist a century ago, the answer would undoubtedly have been a resounding yes!

Also known as a botanical box, these cylindrical, metal containers that opened along one side were used for temporary housing of collected plant specimens, protecting them from being crushed. They also provided a humid environment until the plants could be pressed into herbarium specimens.

One of the newest and most unusual books in the Miller Library is The Vasculum or Botanical Collecting Box, which tells the history of these scientific tools, beginning in the 1700s. Makers of early examples experimented with different construction materials, with tinplate becoming the most common, although some were made of wood, canvas, or other metals.

In the 20th century, their original purpose waned, but strapped over a shoulder, they became a pre-backpack accessory for children. Many were highly decorated or painted with bucolic scenes. Today, they are valuable collector’s items!

Régine Fabri, the retired former head of the library at the University of Liège in Belgium, researched and wrote this book in French. She inherited her grandmother’s vasculum dating from around 1900 and “had no idea that my grandmother’s beautiful box was not just a child’s toy, but a piece of real scientific equipment.”

In an unusual publication twist, the English edition was first written by DeepL Translate, a machine translation service. This draft was then proofread and revised by Henry Noltie from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Winner of the 2025 Annual Literature Award from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, the book’s text is extremely well-researched and documented with extensive notes and a bibliography. However, it is the over 300 photographs and other images that will catch your eye. They document how this scientific tool became a cultural icon, extending even into the 21st century as stylish handbags or baskets. Who knew that botanists could become fashion trendsetters!

Reviewed by Brian Thompson

Excerpted from The Leaflet, Volume 12, Issue 11, November 2025

The multiple botanic gardens established mainly under the direction of Sir Joseph Banks at Kew “helped to underpin the [British] Empire’s commercial success and were also instrumental in furthering botanical knowledge around the world,” (p. 23).

In This Infant Adventure Christian Lamb takes the reader to ten of these offspring. Her focus is on the commercial purposes of the gardens and especially on the botanical explorers who worked at and adventured from them. For each garden Lamb describes its history, often noting the tension between those who saw the goal as a pleasure garden only and those who sought scientific collection methods and commercial uses.

Particularly entertaining are her narratives of botanists. In the chapter on the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, Lamb recounts the travels of Captain Bligh and the efforts to transfer breadfruit plants from the East Indies to the West Indies. Her retelling begins with the need for food for sugar cane workers. She acknowledges Bligh’s shortcomings, which led to The Mutiny on the Bounty, but balances his negatives with his efforts to care for his crew and his amazing navigational skills.

In Australia the chapter on the Melbourne Botanic Garden deals mainly with the adventures, accomplishments, and failures of Ferdinand von Mueller, a German who made many plant discoveries and managed to alienate almost everyone.

Lamb writes of her own visits to these gardens. The dust jacket notes that the book was published in her ninetieth year. This reviewer, ninety now, remembers a world in which the British Empire was more widely admired than at present. Lamb’s book carries echoes of that era. She uses place names which have been changed, Ceylon instead of Sri Lanka, for instance. Some of her references to nonwhites reflect formerly common practices now widely viewed as racist. Even so, This Infant Adventure offers riveting stories and a useful perspective on these wonderful gardens.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy

Excerpted from The Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 12, Issue 11, November 2025

We love all our new books, but some stand out.  The Journey of Neil, the Great Dixter Cat, presented to the library by Fergus Garrett during his September visit to Seattle, tells the fascinating story of a kitten from the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan who came to be a popular fixture at the well-known garden in Sussex. Written by Honey Moga, the kitten’s naming, personality, friendships with Fergus and others at Great Dixter, and adventures with the garden’s resident dachshunds, Conifer and Miscanthus are all presented in Dabin Han’s lively illustrations, along with key elements of the history of Afghanistan. Check it out!

Reviewed by Laura Blumhagen

Excerpted from The Leaflet, Volume 12, Issue 10, October 2025

Whenever overwhelmed by news of a new climate-related disaster, John Hanson Mitchell buys a new rose bush. He explains it as a philosophical statement of resistance.

The Garden at the End of Time combines descriptions of climate-related problems with an account of his own gardening response. Each chapter is named for his latest rose purchase. Near the end of the book, in “Reine Marie Rose,” he never names the rose in the chapter; he just assumes you know that is what he bought.

Mitchell builds his theme around the last chapter in Voltaire’s Candide. There, after surviving multiple disasters, such as the huge 1755 earthquake in Lisbon (real), Candide (fictional) retreats to cultivate his garden. Mitchell reports his own conversations with a real ecologist he calls “Pangloss Rosen,” named for the Pangloss who accompanied Candide and tried to convince him that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”

The book includes a history of gardens, a history of sanctuaries, and many accounts of contemporary climate problems. One positive example is rewilding, a project to return farmland, the Knepp Estate in England, to its status before it was farmed. A history of English agriculture, beginning in the Stone Age, follows.

For all its weighty messages, The Garden at the End of Time presents its material lightly. To gardeners it brings more reasons to keep on cultivating.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy

Excerpted from The Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 12, Issue 10, October 2025

Conrad Loddiges (1738-1826) was born in the Kingdom of Hannover, now part of northern Germany, but after training in Holland, he moved at age 19 to the village of Hackney, now part of northeast London.  He purchased a seed company, eventually turning this into Loddiges Nursery, one of the most prominent in Europe.

Loddiges of Hackney by David Solman is the history of this business.  It was known for an array of large greenhouses, including a palm house 40 feet high that incorporated innovations such as steam heating and rain-like irrigation – allowing the raising of tropical palms, orchids, ferns, and carnivorous plants.  A cooler, camellia house was created for this genus, allowing winter blooming.  Sadly, none of these greenhouses have been preserved.

Outside, the nursery maintained a large planting of trees and shrubs.  To this the term “arboretum” was first applied by a leading horticultural writer of the day.  However, unlike the Washington Park Arboretum, this was a commercial venture, and these plants were displayed to promote sales.  In the 1820s, Loddiges catalog had 2,664 hardy trees and shrubs, including roses and vines.

Loddiges Nursery was instrumental in providing live subjects for William Curtis and his Botanical Magazine.  When Conrad’s son George Loddiges (1784-1846) began publishing a nursery catalog, titled The Botanical Cabinet, in a similar format, he hastened to assure Curtis’s successor as editor that this was not a rivalry.  He wrote a conciliatory note observing “the boundless variety of the vegetable world is doubtless sufficient to afford subjects for us all.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on September 15, 2025

Excerpted from the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal – Book Club of Washington

Sydenham Edwards was born the small town of Brynbuga (Usk in English) in southeast Wales in 1768.  His father was a schoolteacher and church organist.  By the time he was only 10 or 11, he began copying botanical illustrations.

By happenstance, a friend of William Curtis visited the area and was impressed by the boy’s work.  After seeing some examples, Curtis invited Edwards to London to train his obvious skill.  They became close friends, typically going together on botanical collecting trips.  Edwards became the principal artist for The Botanical Magazine and of the over 1,700 illustrations in the first 28 years of publication, he created all but 75.

He stayed for 16 years after William Curtis died, but after a disagreement with the new editor, began his own publication, The Botanical Register, in 1815.  Although he only lived another four years, the publication always had his name associated with it for its run of more than three decades.  It is noteworthy for lengthy descriptions, in English and Latin, and information about origins of the plant used as the model.

Edwards was prolific artist and had wide range of interests, including as a noted illustrator of birds, several works being exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts.  In the January 2024 issue of The Orchid Review, Clare Pritchard says his illustrations “have aesthetic appeal without sacrificing botanical value, bringing plants to life from the page.”  Other than plants, he is best known today for his paintings of dogs.  His book Cynographia Britannica about the breeds of dogs at the time, is rare and highly valued.

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on September 15, 2025

Excerpted from the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of the Book Club of Washington.

For some authors and illustrators of botanical and horticultural periodicals from the 18th and 19th centuries, there is little biographical information available.  This includes Henry C. Andrews.  As recently as 2017, his date of birth was unknown, as was his full middle name.  But careful review of genealogical records, including documents that record both his marriage and his death, show that he was born about 1759, died in 1835, and his middle name was Cranke, instead of Charles as was assumed in earlier biographical references.

There still is nothing known about his place of birth, or little else before he became an active illustrator.  In 1797, he began publishing The Botanist’s Repository, the first significant rival to The Botanical Magazine by William Curtis.

Andrews notes in his first volume that Curtis’s work “consists of those well-known common plants, long cultivated in our gardens”.  By contrast, his work will include “Coloured Figures of such Plants, as have not Hitherto appeared in any similar publications.”  It was also bigger, quarto size or 9.5”x12”.

Unusual for his time, Andrews drew, engraved, printed (in green ink), and colored all his illustrations.  The descriptions, both in Latin and English, were for the first five volumes attributed to his father-in-law, John Kennedy, who was a nursery owner, although others possibly contributed.  Horticultural information is limited, but more attention is paid to the discovery and introduction of featured plants.

Andrews is perhaps better known for his later work on heaths (Erica species), responding to craze for these South African plants that had gripped the gardening community in England.  Regrettably, the Miller Library does not have this work, or his other books on geraniums or roses.

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on September 15, 2025

Excerpted from the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of the Book Club of Washington.

 

William Curtis (1746-1799) was born in Alton, England, about 50 miles southwest of central London.  His father was a Quaker tanner.  He was apprenticed to his grandfather, the local apothecary, at age 14, but he was more interested in the natural history learned from the groom at the inn next door, who was an admirer of the writing of John Parkinson.

Curtis moved to London, becoming by his mid-20s a partner in an apothecary practice, but he soon gave this up.  At first, he worked at the Chelsea Physic Garden as a “demonstrator of botany” soon after Philip Miller retired.  Next, he established his own garden in London, open by subscription.  He gave lectures to members along with seeds and plants from the 6,000 species of plants he grew.

Curtis collected a library of 250 books and was an active writer, publishing papers over a range of natural history subjects.  This included an attempt to write the flora of all the plants native within a ten-mile radius of London as he was an early conservationist and concerned with the loss of plant habitats as the city grew.

The Miller Library does not have a biography dedicated to Curtis alone, but his story is at the core of “A Celebration of Flowers.”  Author Ray Desmond tells how this effort to produce a London flora was never completed because of repeated delays in production and disinterest from potential buyers, who were more interested in exotic plants than those they regarded as local weeds.

Curtis was instead encouraged to begin a monthly magazine with illustrations of garden plants, both native and long-established.  The focus was on the quality of the hand-colored prints.  The text, often borrowed from Philip Miller, was supportive but not extensive.

The new publication was well-received.  What is now known as “Curtis’s Botanical Magazine” began with a circulation of 3,000 each month, but was increased to 5,000 because of demand.  Most amazing, it is still being published 237 years later!  Many of the 20^th and all of the 21^st century issues are available in the Miller Library.

A listing of the artists that contributed to “Curtis’s Botanical Magazine” includes most of the best botanical illustrators in Britain.  Most of them were men until the 1870s, but after that it has mostly been women.  The illustrations were almost always drawn from live plants.

At the beginning, 30 people engaged in coloring of the plates printed from this original art.  Typically, women and young children were doing this very repetitive work.  Ray Desmond notes the “Magazine was hand-colored until 1948, a process in the later years in a factory setting with each worker coloring one part of one plate over and over again, before passing it on to the next worker.

Of this dreary process, Desmond continues, “With a relentless pressure of work it was no mean achievement that a creditable level of care and finish was maintained by most colourists.  Where there were lapses it should be remembered that the low wages paid did not encourage them to excel.”

Reviewed by: Brian Thompson on February 24, 2025

Excerpted from the Spring 2025 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

At home, “stuck like a schlump on this recliner,” Elspeth Bradbury read travel books and yearned for the adventures she wasn’t having. Then she “hatched a plan” to make small journeys to her back yard, writing about them in the spirit of those travel books.

Two- or three-page entries about those mini trips make up Journeys to the Nearby. Bradbury uses a variety of approaches one might find in travel journals, as she explores her yard. She has fun as she goes.

In one chapter she describes her failed efforts to convince a clematis to grow over a pergola crossbeam. The polite but uncooperative plant reminds her of Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey murmuring, “My dear, I told you so.”

On another adventure she accidentally sits on a favorite woodland peony bush, squashing it. Consoling herself, she contrasts Giotto’s hovering angels to the necessary destruction caused by humans, who cannot hover but must walk on the ground. From there she’s reminded of Gertrude Jekyll’s boots, now preserved at the home of that famous English gardener. Plants, fine art, a garden icon – lots of ways to think of a short trip outdoors.

As in many travel journals, the reader gradually learns the author’s personal history – Scotland, England, New Brunswick, and eventually Vancouver, BC. In her garden at night, she remembers commuting by bus in the dark to her mindless job in a cornflake factory, when she was a student. That memory leads her to Video Night in Kathmandu, a travel book that suggests many cultures now survive only at night and in shadows.

Several chapters deal with animals and birds – chipmunks, deer, and particularly hummingbirds. A favorite was Alf, an alpha male Anna’s, who ferociously drove interlopers from the author’s garden feeder.

Journeys to the Nearby makes a strong case for paying close attention to the neighborhood one happens to live in – watching, listening, making connections to other parts of one’s life. And not taking any of it too seriously.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy

Excerpted from The Leaflet, Volume 12, Issue 9, September 2025

The Miller Library has a very large collection of books on ferns, reflecting the intense interest in these plants by area gardeners, especially members of the Hardy Fern Foundation, an international society based in Seattle.  However, these books mostly describe the aesthetics of ferns and the growing requirements in temperate, sufficiently moist gardens.

“Ferns: Lessons in survival from Earth’s most adaptable plants” by Fay-Wei Li and Jacob S. Suissa and illustrated by Laura Silburn takes a different approach.  This is a study of the impressive evolutionary and adaptability history of these plants, that can be found throughout the world in almost every climate and ecosystem.

“Ferns have learned how to climb, creep, and swim their way across our planet.  They have formed intimate relationships with animals, fed societies, and have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.”

How did they do this?  By evolving in ways to survive, even while flowering plants became dominant.  This is why many are adapted to shade, being better able to use the limited light found under large trees than most other vascular plants.

In dry, desert climates, ferns use various strategies to survive.  Some do this by various means of reflecting sunlight away.  Especially amazing are those are desiccation-tolerant – able to lose almost all internal water, yet revive when water becomes available again.

Few plants are used as mascots for sports teams.  But the All Blacks, a powerhouse rugby team from New Zealand, have discovered the strength of these remarkable plants by using the silver fern (Alsophila tricolor) as their insignia.  “The opposing team surely cowers in fear at the terrifying frond.”

Reviewed by Brian Thompson on August 2, 2025

Excerpted from The Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 12, Issue 9, September 2025.