"Book" found !

Anne Marie Wood wins the "Best Supporting Snooper Award" for her idea to contact the librarian at the UW's Center for Urban Horticulture, which I did, and within a half hour got my answer. The "plant line answer librarian", Rebecca Alexander, sent me an email which began "Dear Jeff. I have a feeling that this is what you mean", followed by the title, which was what I meant. Sure google and all that is cool, but no substitute for a librarian with intuition! So Elizabeth C. Miller Library at CUH gets a big award for public service. They could use donations, which I plan to contribute to when I go check out that paper.

The title, which I suspected might be a paper, is "The Flora of Seattle in 1850: major species and landscapes prior to urban development" a thesis written by Raymond James Larson in 1995. Two copies are available at the Miller library which can be checked out by anybody who fills out a registration form. I look forward to reading this paper - I'm sure it took a lot of detective work to write.

Thanks to the Tweeter community for all sorts of great book and research suggestions about this subject. Art Kruckeberg, Authur Lee Jacobsen, and Eugene Kozloff, were authors that many folks pointed to, and rightly so for anyone interested in our native plants. All the other suggestion were good ones too.

Another great public service the UW provides is out of the Burke Museum. If you go to their website, click on 'research and collections', and then 'field guides', which includes 'plants of Washington' which is a great resource for checking out Washington state native plants. Lots of photos. Also links to the UW herabarium which has records going way back. I've found a lot of very interesting stuff on that site.

A lifelong Puget Sounder and naturalist, I've always been intrigued by what might have been here originally. While getting historical photos for the walls of the Anchor Pub a few years ago, I spent quite a bit of time snooping thru Everett Public Library's great historical photo files. On a number of photos around the 1890's some bits of original vegetation are shown- just before they cut the whole darn forest down. In that ragged old growth was quite a bit of diversity - it wasn't just endless big trees, but a mix of tall conifers and other stuff. Post fire growth etc. The extent of total razing of Everett's native plants left sort of a blank slate, which was of course largely filled in by urban development, thus cutting off sources of native reseeding. Like Seattle, our 'greenbelts' here are largely deciduous Maples and Alder - the trees that filled in first. The Snohomish river delta has some intriguing plant remnants I continue to snoop out- Sitka Spruce, Maritime Junipers (used to be Juniperus scopulorum), and Shore Pine, along with interesting herbaceous plants. In Seattle there was a bit of "Oak Prairie" around Seward Park around 1850 - a few Oregon White, aka Garry, Oaks out there still. That's one tidbit I've discovered- now I gottta read that thesis!



Thank You Tweeters for your helpful emails!


Jeff Gibson
Everett Wa





From: gibsondesign at msn.com
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2013 08:42:17 -0800
Subject: [Tweeters] Looking for a book on Seattle plant history.





Dear Tweeters

Being interested in finding out more about our local natural "history", I was intrigued a few years ago when listening to our local NPR station and there was an interview with this fellow who, I think, wrote a book on Seattle plants, with a historical perspective. A perspective of what was growing here before being folded spindled and mutilated, i.e. "developed" by our "settler's". As I was driving at the time, I never got the dudes name.

I think this guy, out of the UW I think, wrote an actual book, although it may have been a research paper, or maybe only a lecture. I've googled etc everywhichway and can't find any leads online. If anyone out there in Tweeterland knows anything about what I'm referring to, could you drop me an email? I'd really appreciate it!

Thank You
Jeff Gibson
Everett Wa


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