The Latest Word—Books, Web Sites & CD-ROMs
Plants & Gardens News Volume 18, Number 3 | Fall/Winter 2003
by Patricia Jonas
Fawning Over Flora
In the six years I have been writing the reviews for Plants & Gardens News, I have always stacked the books I am considering on my desk. Never has one attracted as much attention as Flora: A Gardener's Encyclopedia. It is as if the Roman goddess of flowers herself were sitting here vamping. The classical Flora was only responsible for bringing some hundreds of plants into bloom, since she didn't have the floral treasures of the New World to worry about. This Flora, on the other hand, means to seduce us with more than 20,000 plants decked out prettily with 11,000 photographs in two eye-catching, hefty, slip-cased volumes. Don't let the plant-count dazzle you, though, because you'll never see more than a fraction of these plants in North America, even in botanic gardens.
This Flora represents New World plants pretty well—but particularly those of Australia, as I discovered quickly while browsing the entries for "A." Three pages of Abies (fir) are followed by eight pages of Acacia (a genus dominated by Australian species), which precede a little more than a page each for Aesculus (our cool-temperate-climate buckeye) and Agathis (a tropical conifer I have never seen in the United States). The "B" section offers almost two pages of Banksia, an exclusively Australian genus. In short, the flavor here is obviously Southern Hemisphere. This may appeal to disgruntled West Coast gardeners who often face an East Coast bias in horticultural publishing, in which case it seems fitting that Oregon's estimable Timber Press is the U.S. publisher. But the originator of the project is Global Book Publishing of Australia, which describes its mission as "packaging large, 1,000-page illustrated reference books of about 400,000 words. Each book comes with a carry-case and CD ROM." And that doesn't sound like Timber's typical publishing project.
Some new gardeners may find the "Plant Chooser" feature of the CD-ROM useful; more experienced gardeners will be disappointed. If, say, you want recommendations of cacti and succulents for containers in a sunny location in Zone 7, Flora offers an inadequate list of just 18 plants (including ocotillo, which I would not put in that group). Among its 43 recommended fragrant plants for autumn bloom in Zone 7, Flora lists some lovely, rarely grown plants, but it also includes one of New York State's most invasive, Lonicera japonica, which is described as being a "troublesome weed in southeastern USA." Obviously, this plant is a serious problem elsewhere too, and one doesn't have to dig very deep to learn that. So then I checked Flora for New York's top 25 worst invasive plants (as compiled by the New York Invasive Plants Council) and found that only 7 are not included, and of the remaining 18, just 5 have even encoded warnings like "robust," "seeds prolifically," or "strong-growing."
The CD-ROM offers links to web sites, but these are poorly considered. It appears that the editors meant to include the USDA's incomparable online Plants Database (http://plants.usda.gov) but listed the wrong URL. The Encyclopaedia Britannica web site is included, but it requires a subscription to access full articles.
I love Beth Chatto and Heronswood, but why include them in "Botanical Gardens and Arboreta" and then omit Brooklyn Botanic Garden and many other important public gardens? Another questionable feature in the book is "Plants Through the Seasons," an odd and unsatisfying animation of 36 plants. Here, the garden context is often unattractive, the plants' most appealing traits unapparent, and the reasons one might want to grow any of the plants unclear.
The book's 15 U.S. contributors, who are prominently profiled after the copyright page, are a group of horticultural worthies known to gardeners by their books and numerous articles in regional and national periodicals. But it seems unlikely that these 15 had much impact on Flora's overall form and substance. My guess is that they contributed to the narrative sections, which would explain inconsistencies like using a western U.S. native poached-egg plant (Limnanthes) as an example of an ephemeral annual in the "World of Plants" section, when it is not included among Flora's 20,000-plant master list.
Such missteps aside, it's not even clear who this encyclopedia is for. For example, why have more than six pages been devoted to dahlias? That is both too few for dahlia partisans, who will want more comprehensive treatment of the subject, and too many for nonsectarian gardeners. Moreover, the book does not satisfy botanists because it lacks the scientific detail of a true flora; and it fails horticulturists because it has so little cultural information.
Less Is More
For North American gardeners, novice and experienced alike, there is a less flashy and more practical encyclopedia, with a familiar pedigree, available this year. Taylor's Encyclopedia of Garden Plants is a lap-size 447-pager, which nevertheless includes the western native Limnanthes; it has just over a page of Abies, a half page of Acacia, a page of Aesculus, and doesn't have Agathis or Banksia. And it has this to say about Lonicera japonica: "This rampant, weedy vine with fragrant flowers has been grown throughout North America for well over a century…Once given a toehold in the garden it is extremely hard to eliminate."
The plants included in any encyclopedia reflect editorial choices, and as Frances Tenenbaum, the Athena of garden-book editors, writes, "more is not necessarily better." While this book's 1,000 plants may seem modest next to Flora's 20,000, it has a more sensible criterion: "desirable plants for American gardens." The design is clear and readable, and there is more cultural advice here than in all of Flora, and more than one usually finds in encyclopedias of this size. There is a pronunciation guide for each plant name, and the family name follows under the genus (the family is not as easy to spot at a glance in Flora).
Enslaved by the Rose
Lap-size though it is, Taylor's is not bedside reading; Roses: A Celebration, edited by Wayne Winterrowd, is, and makes the finest of gifts for any gardener or lover of the essay. All but one of the book's 33 pieces (Michael Pollan's, which is excerpted from Second Nature) were written at Winterrowd's behest. The writers—asked to identify the roses that matter most to them, the roses "on which to hang both memory and desire"—have collectively produced a very original floral history and a most beguiling answer to Graham Stuart Thomas's question, "What is this ROSE that enslaves gardeners?"
Like any essay collection, this one can be read in any order. And one will be tempted to go immediately to a favorite writer or favorite rose: Allen Lacy ('Ginny'); Ken Druse (Rosa banksiae 'Lutea'); Jamaica Kincaid ('Alcymist'); Lauren Springer ('Mister Lincoln' and 'Harison's Yellow'); or Joe Eck and Winterrowd (Rosa glauca). Still, reading the essays in sequence, beginning with Winterrowd's scene-setting introduction, will reveal complex patterns of personal history and experience that complement and echo each other. Luckily, I am not forced to choose a favorite, but Winterrowd's own essay on 'Comtesse du Caÿla' is as skillfully wrought as the beautiful marble bust of the Comtesse at New York's Frick Museum, where the author begins his story.
Unlike most books on roses, there are no photos. Instead, each flower is illustrated by a botanical painting from noted artist Pamela Stagg—an alternative that suits the collection marvelously well.
Rewriting History
We would not expect to understand the history of roses by looking only at their use in great gardens, but the "great garden" approach is precisely what most books on garden history take. It's a limiting approach, focusing attention on individual designers and their grand art objects and blinding us to "gardening practice as an art." A more nuanced garden history considers a wide range of other sources, including painting, poetry, the commercial records of breeders, growers, and merchants, the memoirs of gardeners, garden writing in the popular press, and so on.
Rebecca Bushnell's Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens is a provocative antidote to such narrow history. In it, she examines the role that books, specifically 16th- and 17th-century gardening manuals, played in the development of the English garden. These colorful, idiosyncratic treatises were not only full of practical gardening information, they also helped define their readers' relationship with nature. Bushnell argues that the plantsmen who wrote the manuals, though not superstar designers, nonetheless had an important role to play in developing the art of gardening. It's a fascinating story.
Patricia Jonas is a horticulturist, writer, and director of Library Services at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is a regular contributor to Plants & Gardens News.