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Arboretum Library October E-News

October 13, 2009

News from the Library

Hello all and welcome newcomers:

Here is the new titles link to the online catalog.  There are some interesting magazine articles.  The Botanical Society of South Africa’s Veld & Flora comes through again with a wonderful story about a very dramatic looking plant that was thought to be extinct.  Fire brought it back.

This month, library volunteer, Pamela Wolken reviews Amy Stewart’s first book:


Covoer of The Earth Moved 

     "The whimsically provocative title The Earth Moved (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005) opens the door to about 1.5 centuries of earthworm scholarship.  Amy Stewart does a superb job of framing a huge subject into a readable, informative, encouraging tale of an ancient creature perfectly suited for the 21st century.  A vermicomposter for seven years (or so, at the time of her writing), Ms. Stewart is sparked to study by the story of Charles Darwin after the voyage of the Beagle.  His uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, observed that objects left on the ground, would be covered in soil.  He hypothesized that he was seeing the work of earthworms.  The rest, as they say, has become “common knowledge” of an uncommon creature: worms are good for the Earth.
     Modern oligochaetologists (from the worm’s taxonomic class: Oligochaeta) have continued the work of this ubiquitous and elusive subject that eschews light while busily digesting all manner of soil and toxins.  Not all is rosy, and there are plenty of cautions against dumping left over live fishing bait willy-nilly in the environment.  There are studies in Michigan of non-native worms destroying forests in ways unimagined, yet observed by Darwin. 
     Meanwhile, worms go on about their business whether on their own, in captivity for fertilizer, or in the service of scouring up the messes of people from DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and biosolids (human excrement).  Worms are able to ingest environmental toxins with no harm to themselves, which can not be said of the worm’s predators.  Birds dead of eating toxic worms helped lead to the banning of DDT and PCBs in the 1970s.  Wetlands are being restored and rebuilt with the inestimable assistance of earthworms who, to date anyway, don’t seem to mind being exploited as long as they have adequate conditions for their own prosperity.
     Read this book.”


Our current exhibition on mushrooms in the Library Reading Room will be here until the end of the year. Come and visit.

The Arboretum Library hours are:

Tuesday-Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Saturdays, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Sundays, 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Remember we are circulating to Arboretum members.  The circulation period for books is 3 weeks with 2 renewals if no one else wants the item.  You can renew by e-mail, phone or in person.  The circulation period for current magazines is 3 days with 2 renewals if no one else wants the item.

Our Botanical Information Consultants (for plant advice) are currently available seven days a week. David.Lofgren@Arboretum.org or Frank.McDonough@Arboretum.org or 626-821-3239.

Happy reading!

Arboretum Library September E-News

September 18, 2009

News from the Library

Cover of Blue Potatoes, Orange Tomatoes by Rosalind Creasy

 

Thank You Rosalind Creasy

by Susan C. Eubank, Arboretum Librarian

     I’ve been enjoying a trip through the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder with my nine year old daughter.  I read aloud to her every night before she goes to bed.  Not that I’ve read the series in its entirety.  My daughter leaps ahead by reading on her own, so I only get pieces of each story.  She fills me in on the really big events that happen in the sections that she reads.  What strikes me in volume after volume is Ms. Wilder’s ability to give such vibrancy and meaning to what my mother’s memory care facility (read ‘nursing home’) caregivers dryly refer to as the “activities of daily living.”  There are glorious tales of cooking, eating, and gardening.  Yes, gardening, too!

     When Rosalind Creasy became one of the honorary chairpersons of the 2009 LA Garden Show, I was asked to ask her to write for the premier issue of our new magazine.   I knew it would be tough to convince her to put another thing into her incredibly tight schedule of designing gardens and putting the final touches on her latest book.  Indeed, when I made the telephone call she, told me she got a “touch of the vapors” just thinking about adding one more thing to her to-do list.

     That’s my first “thank you” to Rosalind.  I was moved by her response to switch into library researcher mode and felt I should work my way through her bibliography to get a better sense of who she is, even though I already knew her legendary status in our field.  We are privileged here in the West to have online access to the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture at San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum.  Barbara Pitschel, head librarian, has been steadily accruing bibliographic citations to the magazine literature on subjects of interest to West Coast gardeners and plants-people for more than 25 years.  This means that Rosalind Creasy’s bibliography is just fingertips away on the internet, because Rosalind’s home base is the Bay Area, and Barbara knew from the beginning that she should follow the trail of this writer.  Here is a link to the Helen Crocker Russell Library online catalog.  To search for articles include the word "citation" in your search.  Here is Rosalind Creasy's search.
    Since the late 1970s to 2004, our former librarian, Joan DeFato, has carefully accrued and preserved the Arboretum Library collection, and her predecessors did the same. Consequently, all I had to do was take the citations from Barbara and gather the materials from our Library and then do my final piece of internet research to make sure I had Rosalind’s most current information.   That afternoon I browsed and re-read much of her entire written oeuvre.
     I thank Rosalind for all that hard work.  Her articles, books, garden designs and consultations with chefs have through the years carefully encouraged all of us to garden and eat the products of our gardens.  Her work is a step-by-step guide on how to do that; how to bring that meaning back into our lives and how to take joy from the “activities of daily living”.

Cover of Recipes from the Garden by Rosalind Creasy
      I was also struck by the fact that her early writing from the 1980s is just as relevant in 2009 as her current writing is.  That was made clear in her current garden blog at Organictobe.org because some of the same sections that I was enjoying from her original Complete Book of Edible Landscaping (Sierra Books, 1982) are reprinted in their entirety there.  That book, even in 1982, had a sense of the “effort level” each particular plant requires.  She knew that gardeners need to know that gardening at your own home affects the planet as a whole; that it’s your contribution to your local ecology as well as the global ecology.  She knew gardeners can enjoy sophisticated and easy recipes using the by-products of those gardens.  She knew that as a result, gardeners can eat better-than-average. She also knew that gardening is economical.  And, yes, I was salivating at the end, from reading her recipes from her latest book, Recipes from the Garden (Tuttle Publishing, 2008).
     I thank Rosalind Creasy for not being afraid of detail in her writing.  These days we are all confronted with the shortened “blurb”, be it a “sound bite”, a “factoid”; everything long is considered too long for our “shortened attention span.”  Thank you, Rosalind Creasy for articles such as your in-depth exploration of chives in the February/March 1997 issue of Herb Companion.
     I also want to thank her for being one of the women who make a difference in our lives.  She is a role model for my daughter.  One day when I was volunteering at my daughter’s library at her elementary school, I was disturbed at a book display about the U.S. presidents, one book on each president.  I had asked the library manager there to consider revising the display to show some women politicians as well.  But I didn’t need to do that.  I can, instead, tell my daughter about Barbara Pitschel, Joan DeFato, Rosalind Creasy and Laura Ingalls Wilder, all of whom have spent their lives making our lives better through their work. 
     Thank you, Rosalind Creasy, for your contribution to our lives, and thank you for helping me reach this epiphany.

Check out our entire Rosalind Creasy collection as well as other new books, articles and websites in the September new titles list of the online catalog.

Our current exhibition in the Library Reading Room is all about mushrooms.  Come and visit, especially during our expanded weekend hours.

The Arboretum Library hours are:

Tuesday-Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Saturdays, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Sundays, 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Remember we are circulating to Arboretum members.  The circulation period for books is 3 weeks with 2 renewals if no one else wants the item.  You can renew by e-mail, phone or in person, but not on the online catalog.  The circulation period for current magazines is 3 days with 2 renewals if no one else wants the item.

Our Botanical Information Consultants (for plant advice) are currently available seven days a week. David.Lofgren@Arboretum.org or Frank.McDonough@Arboretum.org or 626-821-3239.

Happy reading!

 

 

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