Intricate Chains of Connection

“In the late 1980′s, a series of bark beetle plagues exploded across the West with locust-like ferocity. The beetles, mostly Dendroctonus ponderosae and Dendroctonus rufipennis, attacked conifers in swarms so large that they appeared on local airport radars to be rainstorms. Some beetle flights caught updrafts and crossed the Rocky Mountains, traveling distances of over 175 miles. What some called the ‘Katrina of the West’ attacked mature forest and young plantation trees until there was nothing left for the bark borers to eat. By 2010, the insect had girdled and killed more than 30 billion lodgepole, pinyon, ponderosa, and whitebark pines, as well as White Spruce and Engelmann Spruce. Human loggers destroyed almost as many in a vain attempt to stop the invasion.” — from Empire of the Beetle

An insect the size of a match-head has killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska to New Mexico. Its likely co-conspirators? Science points to a hundred years of fire suppression, and the advance of global warming as the chief culprits.

At long last, we have a comprehensive study of the great change sweeping across the West — Andrew Nikiforuk’s Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests. Nikiforuk provides a fascinating natural history of the bark beetle, along with the un-natural history of our western forests today. That tragic combination can be seen in countless dying stands of flaming red trees across the Rockies.

At one point in Empire of the Beetle, Andrew Nikiforuk offers this unexpected and very telling quote:

“You get tragedy when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein.

And here’s the first children’s book we’ve seen on the bark beetle epidemic, now housed at our Kids Nature Library in Waterton Canyon:

The Mountain Pine Beetle: Tiny But Mighty by Kay Turnbaugh & David Brooks — this book is full of up-close photos of what the beetles naturally do.

“There is no human being who is not directly or indirectly influenced by animal populations, although intricate chains of connection often obscure the fact.” — Charles Elton, from his classic book Animal Ecology

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Philip Currie & the Power of Books

“I was only six years old when I ‘dug up’ my first dinosaur from the inside of a cereal box. The plastic model inspired my imagination in a powerful way that led to regular visits to the dinosaur galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. Several times a week, I would go to Sixteen Mile Creek near my home to scramble up and down the cliffs of Ordovician sediments, collecting marine invertebrate fossils while I fantasized about discovering dinosaurs. I read (and reread) every book that was available to me about any fossils from anywhere. After reading All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews when I was 11 years old, I knew that I wanted to be a dinosaur hunter. Such is the power of the written word.”

From that start, Philip Currie went on to help found the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, and is now a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He has worked extensively in China, and helped describe some of the first feathered dinosaurs. Philip is also the co-author of several books including The Flying Dinosaurs, and Dinosaur Provincial Park: A Spectacular Ancient Ecosystem Revealed.

And here’s the book and author that inspired Philip Currie. Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) was best known for leading a series of expeditions to Mongolia and the Gobi Desert — bringing home the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs. Eventually Andrews became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He was also a prolific author for both adults and children.

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Plant Hunters Enriching Our World

One of our favorite sections of the Land Library tells the tales of legendary plant hunters of the past few centuries. Their stories are equal parts natural history and adventure. Many of the plant hunters faced considerable hardship, and beyond a doubt, they greatly expanded our appreciation for the seemingly endless diversity of plant life.

Here are just a few of our favorite volumes, starting above with Philip Short’s In Pursuit of Plants: Experiences of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Plant Collectors, which taps into the correspondence and journals of intrepid naturalists in exotic lands. Also pictured above: Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage through Plant Exploration by Sandra Knapp — a beautifully illustrated book that celebrates the botanical artists who accompanied naturalists on their plant collecting treks.

There is one particular plant hunter who has earned a shelf of his own at the Land Library:

Frank Kingdon-Ward (1885-1958) took part in over 25 expeditions, exploring Tibet, northwestern China, Burma, and India. Among his most significant finds was the first viable seed of Meconopsis betonicifolia — the Himalayan blue poppy. And somewhere along the way, Frank Kingdon-Ward also carved out time to be a spy for the British in India. A full life indeed!

In the Land of the Blue Poppies: The Collected Plant-Hunting Writings of Frank Kingdon-Ward provides an excellent introduction to a remarkable life. As does A Plant Hunter in Tibet, an adventure filled account of his 1933 expedition. Filling out our Kingdon-Ward shelf are a few more classic volumes: Mystery Rivers of Tibet, Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, and Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World.

And here’s two more plant explorers of note:

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker: Traveller and Plant Collector by Ray Desmond (Hooker was one of Charles Darwin’s closest collaborators, and his travels took him to the Himalayas, the Middle East, Morocco, and the American West), and The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest by Jack Nisbet (Douglas, 1799-1834, also botanized in his native Scotland, and in the distant isles of Hawaii).

The Land Library also strongly recommends two excellent overviews of the golden age of botanical exploration:

The Plant Hunters: Tales of Botanist-Explorers Who Enriched Our Gardens by Tyler Whittle, and Flower Hunters by Mary & John Gribben.

Of course, plant hunting continues to this day, most notably in pursuit of medicinal cures. But there’s another global search afoot, the subject of the Land Library’s most recent addition to its Plant Hunting Collection that we hope continues to grow and grow:

The Last Great Plant Hunt: The Story of Kew’s Millenium Seed Bank by Carolyn Fry, Sue Seddon, and Gail Vines. With partners in over 50 countries, the Millenium Seed Bank seeks to preserve the seeds of the globe’s most threatened plant species.

For more on this ongoing effort, be sure to visit the Millenium Seed Bank website!

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Eudora Welty & the Power of Books

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time to day, was there to read in, or be read to. My mother read to me. She’d read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story. She’s read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with ‘Cuckoo,’ and at night when I’d got into my own bed. I must have given her no peace….It has been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass….”

Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Eudora Welty.

Next Week: Paleontologist Philip Currie & The Book That Shaped His Life

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The Earth is Faster Now

“After a two-night battle with the Chukchi Sea, the message was clear: the village of Kivalina must be moved. Adapting to our environment was no longer possible. The only option left for the Inupiaq people of Kivalina was to get out of the way and let the impacts of climate change take their toll on the small barrier island.” — Colleen Swan, Kivalina Tribal Administrator

Coastal communities across the globe are serving as climate change’s canaries-in-the-mine. The tiny Alaskan village of Kivalina has been feeling the change for many years now. Sea ice no longer protects Kivalina from savage storms, and more and more of the island falls into the sea.

And, there are other signs of a new world coming. Tribal Administrator Colleen Swan:

“… for decades the people of Kivalina had noticed subtle changes that indicated a warming climate. These included poor ocean ice conditions that changed the way the community hunted on the ocean, and melting permafrost in many areas of Alaska, including the Inupiaq people’s aboriginal territory. Other changes included earlier than normal migration of sea mammals — a main staple of the Inupiaq people’s diet — and unpredictable weather conditions…“

Christine Shearer’s Kivalina: A Climate Change Story tells the Inupiaq’s story — a frustrating tale of environmental injustice, one that government, business (and all of us) have yet to address.

Also pictured above: the stories and photos of Climate Refugees (by the journalists & photographers of Collectif Argos) offers a global perspective on the first populations facing displacement by climate change — communities from Africa and the Himalayas, to the South Pacific and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.

And here’s two more volumes from the Land Library’s shelves, full of early warnings from the field:

The Big Thaw: Travels in the Melting North by Ed Struzik (“Stuzik’s thoughtful reportage offers readers an arresting portrait of how quickly the northern landscape, including every ecological nook and cranberry bog that humans and other species inhabit, is being transformed.” — Canadian Geographic), and The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change, edited by Igor Krupnik & Dyanna Jolly (an incredibly valuable resource!).

For more on the early signs of climate change, please read our earlier post on one of the most thought-provoking books of the past year:

–The Fate of Greenland

We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a “slowmotion catastrophe” one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly. — David Suzuki

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Michael Sims & the Power of Books

“My mother introduced me to books by holding me on her lap and reading to me. I remember watching the odd black marks on the page as she translated them for us night after night. Eventually the letters and their groupings were no longer like animal tracks in the mud around a pond, those Babylonian indentations that mean nothing until they’re deciphered. The marks finally matched up with the comforting drone of my mother’s voice in my ear.

I could feel her voice through my back and side. Her body was a part of the story and she made me a part of the story. When my mother paused to take a deep breath, my body rose up a little with hers. One way that reading to a child invites participation in a book is this physical manner of sharing excitement through the body of the reader. Is this experience why I have never lost a visceral sense of the talismanic magic of a book? I believe with a pagan zeal in a book’s ability to hoard another’s experience and voice, and its willingness to sit with mythological patience on a shelf until you come along and touch it and it speaks to you — to you, specifically, because it was waiting for you.”

Michael Sims is a wonderful, and always surprising writer, and here are three of our favorite volumes from the Land Library’s shelves:

Apollo’s Fire: A Journey Through the Extraordinary Wonders of an Ordinary Day, Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts, and The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic (Michael Sims’ latest book, and one we hope to return to in future posts!).

Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Michael Sims.

Next week: Eudora Welty & Books as Natural Wonders, Coming up like Grass

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Some sort of Greening

“If there is one message to come out of this book, it is that making a green roof does not have to be a mysterious or complicated matter, nor does it need to be expensive. Most structures open themselves to some sort of greening.” — from Small Green Roofs

Here is one of the most exciting new volumes on the Land Library’s shelves, Small Green Roofs: Low-Tech Options for Greener Living by Nigel Dunnett, Dusty Gedge, John Little & Edmund C. Snodgrass — the first book to deal specifically with small-scale and domestic green roofs. This well-illustrated book profiles more than forty projects: sheds, garden offices, studios, garages, houses, bicycle sheds, and more. Along the way, you’ll be introduced to the many plants choices ideal for roofs: grasses, succulents, sedum (pictured above), flowering herbaceous species and alpines, native wildflowers, small bulb varieties, moss, and much more.

Beyond the hobbit-like aesthetic benefits, the authors show how green roofs contribute to better rainwater management, cooling and energy conservation, noise insulation, and increased biodiversity:

“…flowering plants will encourage insects such as bees and butterflies to feed on the nectar. Seed-eating birds such as finches and sparrows will come in autumn and over the winter. Beetles, spiders, and other invertebrates will make their homes among the foliage. But it’s not just animals that are drawn in: green roofs can be havens for rare plants or for native plants that are typical of your region.”

Of course, adding a bit of turf over your head is an ancient worldwide tradition. Here’s a couple of especially lovely examples:

The Sod Roofs of Scandinavia: Skansen, Sweden, & Gudbrandsdal, Norway.

For more on green roofs, here are two more excellent resources from our shelves:

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Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls by Nigel Dunnett & Noel Kingsbury, Green Roof Plants: A Resource and Planting Guide by Edmund & Lucie Snodgrass.

Visionary Austrian artist and designer Friedensreich Hundertwasser created several buildings with rooftop garden/forests. Here’s what he had to say about green roofs:

“The true proportions in this world are the views to the stars and the views to the surface of the earth. Grass and vegetation in the city should grow on all the horizontal spaces, that is to say, wherever rain and snow falls vegetation should grow….I’ve worked a great deal with grass roots, putting soil on top and having things grow, but there is something strange in this, more than ecological. It is a religious act to have soil on your roof and trees growing on top of you — the act reconciles you with nature — a very ancient wisdom.“

Definitely NOT a small roof, but here is Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Waldspirale (forest spiral), a residential complex in Darmstadt, Germany. Completed in 2000.

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Chet Raymo & the Power of Books

Chet Raymo has long been a favorite of the Land Library. His writing offers a unique combination of science & spirituality — and what a beautiful writer! Here’s Chet Raymo on the roots of wonder:

“I have had occasion over the years to make reference to Dr. Suess, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Lewis Carrol’s Alice books, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Felix Salten’s Bambi, and other children’s books. In writing about science I have made reference to children’s books far more frequently than to adult literary works. This is not an accident. In children’s books we are at the roots of science — pure, childlike curiosity, eyes open with wonder to the fresh and new, and the powers of invention still unfettered by convention and expectation.”

Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Chet Raymo.

Next Week: Michael Sims & the Sensual Sharing that is Reading

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The Never-Ending Journeys of Marianne North

Marianne North (1830-1890) was a legendary Victorian traveler, an accomplished painter, and an extremely knowledgeable botanist. After many years of caring for her father, Marianne (at the age of forty) began an astonishing series of trips around the globe. Her primary goal was to paint plants in their natural habitats, and for the next fourteen years she trekked to Canada, the United States, Brazil, Tenerife, Japan, Singapore, Borneo, Java, Sri Lanka, India, Australia, South Africa, the Seychelles, and Chile.

Luckily, North was also a prolific diarist. A new selection of her writings has just been published, Abundant Beauty: The Adventurous Travels of Marianne North, Botanical Artist (pictured above), condensed from her three-volume Recollections of a Happy Life.

Marianne North was especially known for the scientific accuracy with which she painted her botanical subjects:

Several plants that Marianne North painted were new to science, and many were eventually named in her honor, including Nepenthes northiana (pictured above), a new pitcher plant found in the limestone mountains of Borneo — alongside North’s painting of the fruit and foliage of Sterculia parviflora.

As remarkable as her globe-trotting travels were, Marianne North began one of the most important chapters in her life when she returned home to England for the last time. In her last days, Marianne oversaw the design and construction of a gallery to house her work, all of which she donated to the Royal Kew Gardens. She arranged the paintings and hung them herself, as well as painting the decorative panels surrounding the doorways. The gallery first opened in 1882, and was an immediate sensation, bringing exotic lands and plant forms home to Victorian England

Michelle Payne’s Marianne North: A Very Intrepid Painter provides a wonderful visual tour of North’s life, and of the Marianne North Gallery at Kew. Over 800 paintings are hung edge to edge, in one of the most impressive displays imaginable.

Many, many years ago we literally stumbled into this gallery, totally unaware of Marianne North or her work. Thus began one of the most memorable gallery visits of our lives:

The Marianne North Gallery recently underwent a complete renovation. The tile floors returned, and the gallery has never looked better. Take a quick tour for yourself!

Marianne North in Jamacia: Leonotis nepetaefolia & Hummingbirds:

“Marianne North finally reached her long-dreamt-of tropics on Christmas Eve 1871, when her steamer docked at Kingston Bay. Despite feeling ‘entirely alone and friendless’ upon arrival, in the end she stayed for five months.
She quickly established herself in an enormous ramshackle house in the old botanic gardens….She used the large upper-floor veranda, which opened to a spectacular view of the valley, as her main living space. The valley’s vegetation was so rich and varied it overwhelmed Marianne, who recalls being ‘in a state of ecstasy,’ declaring in her Recollections that she ‘hardly knew what to paint first.’ She quickly established a daily routine of going out to paint at daylight and returning at noon. In the afternoons, when it often rained, she stayed at home but continued painting from inside the house. Then, after sunset, she would take an exploratory walk, returning home in the dark.” — from Marianne North: A Very Intrepid Painter by Michelle Payne.

For much more on Marianne North’s life and work be sure to visit the Kew Gardens website — it’s a terrific site!

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