Plant Talk

Naming Nature

"What's the use of their having names, the Gnat said, "if they won't answer to them?"

 "No use to them," said Alice; " but it's useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do they have names at all?"

 "I can't say," the Gnat replied.

Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking-Glass

In "Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science," a biologist and New York Times science writer (who lives in Bellingham) brings a fresh perspective to the naming of plants and creatures.

Carol Kaesuk Yoon takes a literary approach; from her very first sentence, you know this is a scientist who can speak to non-scientists.

"More than two hundred years ago, scientists began a quest to order and name the entire living world - the whole squawking, scuttling, blooming, twining, leafy, furry, green and wondrousness of it."

Yoon sees taxonomy as part of the deeply felt human need to order and name the living world around us. She evokes the vast diversity of all earth's living things, and reveals how humans around the world and throughout time have struggled to understand and make distinct  this overwhelming abundance. I love this approach to natural history - it's like reading the backstory to Linnaeus, which  not only gives a larger perspective to botanical names, but also awakens us to the nature's myriad wonders.

The Forgotten Garden

Unless you garden with a headlight strapped to your hat (I've seen it done, and even resorted to it myself) it's time to come indoors on these long, dark evenings and get to reading. If you loved "A Secret Garden", you'll probably enjoy Kate Morton's fat, juicy, nostalgic brick of a novel "The Forgotten Garden" inspired by Morton's own childhood love of contrary Mary's adventures in bringing a lost garden back to life. 

This is truly an old-fashioned novel, with a mystery to keep you reading, complicated twists-and-turns of plot, a maze, and a lost child. I downloaded it to listen to on my iPod, and enjoyed the English and Australian accents of the reader - yes, the action goes back and forth between Cornwall and Brisbane, over several generations. It's all a little sweet, complete with a mysterious poetess, abandoned cottage, and clues embedded in fairy tales, yet I enjoyed the settings, the leisurely pace, the eccentric women characters....and the emphasis throughout on antiques, writing, gardens and the natural world.

Seeing is Forgetting....

I always think that art, architecture and interior design books and magazines can teach us more about gardening than most things written with gardeners in mind.

 One of my great frustrations when I worked at the University of Washington was the many experts who knew so much about plants, yet so little. They studied plants; they rarely smelled, felt, appreciated or nurtured them. This whole idea of the experiential versus the theoretical/conceptual is at the heart of a fabulous book I'm reading called "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin." (by Lawrence Weschler, University of California Press, 2008).  Isn't that title in itself a masterful rebuke of taxonomy?

The book is worth reading just for the chapter ("When Fountainheads Collide") on how Irwin won the commission for the garden at the Getty, and how he pulled it off. Most of all I love how he defines modernism as not being any particular style, but rather a way of engaging the world.....

Here's one of my favorite photos of the controversial garden Irwin designed for the Getty Museum; the story of how he went about it (beginning with cutting up plant books and rearranging the photos into collages) is fascinating....

Color Crazy

I just reviewed California artist and garden designer Keeyla Meadows's new book on color for the Seattle Times (it'll run in Pacific's fall home design issue on October 11 - yes, I really do have that long a lead time...).

The lively, lovely exuberance of "Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener’s Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel”, to be published later this autumn by Timber Press, inspired the flower arrangement below. The vase is "Carrot Top" by Johanna Nitzke Marquis, and the mix of maroon, orange and pink (agastache, crocosmia, sweet peas, Astrantia 'Hadspen's blood') is so....well....so Keeyla, who seeks inspiration from flowers' own fearless color combinations.

Happy May Day &..... Read This

Here's a May Day bouquet for you - narcissus, euphorbia, purple pasque flower, and Spirea 'Magic Carpet'. I wish I could leave one on each of your porches...Remember when kids used to leave  wilted little nosegays on neighbors' porches on May 1? 

Even though it seems like spring just got its belated start, May Day marks the half-way point between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. All of a sudden the garden blooms generously enough to cut armfuls of flowers. Even if this year we need to coax the lilacs along -  I have a bunch sitting in a bucket of warm water in hopes their buds will open.

And here are a couple of new books that offer simple plants and garden projects - in case you're feeling only so ambitious (that would be me).

Tracy Disabato-Aust has written two big tomes on how to care for perennials, but in her new book she's shifted gears to write about plants that need little care. "50 High -Impact, Low-Care Garden Plants: Tough-but-Beautiful Plants That Anyone Can Grow" (Timber Press,  $16.95) has luscious, full-page color photos and clear advice on how to grow a somewhat puzzling choice of plants. From meadow rue to conifers, bamboo to bleeding heart and asters, the choices seem a bit random, but nevertheless these are all garden-worthy plants.

I'd never heard of Sean Conway - Target design consultant and TV host - before I picked up his new book
"Sean Conway's Cultivating Life: 125 Projects for Backyard Living" (Artisan Press, 2009, $22.95). The book is so much better than its title - and like most books from Artisan Press, it's lovely and filled with projects you might really want to do. From planting a bog bowl of carnivorous plants to building a salad table or cold frame, the projects use few tools, and each includes a materials list, step-by-step directions and inspiring photos, like the one below for a tabletop rice paddy...which, like the book, looks so much better than you might expect....