Lotus Quest: a book review

One of the most pleasant ways to come across an enjoyable book is to be given it by someone who not only has just read it, but who has been talking about it enthusiastically over recent conversations. My Pam is a great reader, but not necessarily a great one for talking about the books she enjoys. Mostly she just likes to enjoy her many and varied books quietly, offering up simple summaries which end in "you'd enjoy it, I did."

This book which she handed to me a week or two ago is an exception to that rule. It has been coming up in her conversation spontaneously at all sorts of odd times; it's one of those books with lots of anecdotes, new stories about amazing people you have never heard about before. You keep on thinking about passages in the book long after you have put it down.

And so, for the formal introductions, this enthralling new book is called 'Lotus Quest', by Mark Griffiths, a British horticultural writer whose credits are many, but in the book department have previously been in the line of writing learned Royal Horticultural Society dictionaries and guides to growing beautiful plants such as orchids.

This book is different, it's all about his passion for the lotus (Nelumbo), a quest that takes him travelling the world, with his longest stay and most enjoyable chapters about his experiences in Lotus Land, Japan.

If Pam hadn't given me this book, I would probably have bought it on the strength of its topic – I love plant explorer stories – and it would have romped in my other bookshop tests of reading the first paragraph, then random paragraphs here and there.

He passes all those tests with aplomb, but it's the first chapter that had me hooked after Pam handed me her copy of the book. One of his Japanese friends sent him three lotus seeds, which he describes as 'diamond-hard'. So he took a file to them to work a nick into the outer shell, then soaked them. Later, 'an emerald comma' of growth appeared. Life! Then he grew the seedling on. As lotuses do, it died back over winter, then next spring, new growth appeared. And the following summer, beautiful yet short-lived lotus blooms which, they say, make an audible 'pop' at dawn as they open.

So far so great, but where did the seeds come from? His Japanese correspondent mentioned something about "an archaeological dig" in her reply. Yikes! It turns out the original seeds from the dig were 3,000 years old. They were successfully struck in the 1950s, and the seeds sent to him were from the original 3000-year-old-timer that is still growing happily in Japan.

I was hooked. Seeds that are still viable after 3,000 years! It turns out that lotus seeds are famous for this ability to survive vast periods of time, but this book then tells so many other stories, of the central place of the lotus in so many religions, cultures and cuisines, from the Mediterranean all the way across the Middle East, India, China and through to Japan. It's a food plant, a sacred religious plant, and a botanical marvel able to withstand any amount of winter cold, and survive millennia underground, waiting for its chance to live again.

The lotus's place in Japanese culture, religion and horticulture is the final half of the book, and it is definitely the highlight. This is a book which gets better as it goes on. My favourite chapter is probably the one set in a restaurant which specialises in lotus-based dishes. His descriptions of the way the Japanese turn food into high art would normally be delicious enough to make the whole chapter very satisfying, but they're just the entree. The main course is his conversation with his two Japanese dining companions, who explain the intricacies of the lotus's various names and meanings, its history, and much more over the course of the meal.

That's always the theme that comes up in any prosaic description of a chapter's contents in this book. Beyond the simple description, you always have to add "and much more".

Finally, there's a spiritual significance of the lotus that is central to the book's quest for the 'sacred lotus'. Now, I'm not much of a religious or spiritual person, but I've always been attracted to the philosophies of Zen Buddhism (as understood by a middle-class Aussie with a love of gardening and nature, that is), and I had a good laugh at his line about Buddhism which goes: "It's an appealing spirituality for someone who has decided that God doesn't exist." I think that's me.

Light reading

Like our resident Librarian gnome, Mitchell, I like to read. Too much probably (just like Mitch - every time I look at him he always has his head buried in a book). And to make things worse, I also like to read online as well. But worst of all, definitely the worstest of the worstest, I also like bookshops. They're a major danger zone for me. It's rare that I don't leave a bookshop without some kind of book under my arm. Bookaholism, I think it's called. (Fellow Sydney garden blogger Chookie sometimes struggles with it, too). I'm a sufferer but I don't want to be helped (see, I haven't hit rock bottom yet). As a consequence, my 'to read' pile continues to grow. I might have to retire, just to catch up on reading. Let me explain in a few photos, plus a couple more words and links (which might seem like an ad for Amazon, except they're not).

This is Mitchell, doing all day what I would like to do all day – reading (well, that's when I'm not gardening, cooking, going to movies, eating, socialising, riding motorcycles, blogging and reading online, that is).

And this, approximately, is my 'to read' pile. You see the problem? Exactly. It's not too many books, it's not enough time. Work will just have to step aside for a year or two and make room for the finer things in life.

It's an eclectic collection of fiction and non-fiction.

In the fiction section there's always some kind of detective uncovering the unpleasant details of life. Over the last few years Italian skulduggery has roped me in. Next on the list it's Andrea Camilleri, someone I haven't read yet but who has been recommended to me. As I have read all of Donna Leon's books about Venice-based Commissario Guido Brunetti and most of Michael Dibdin's books about Aurelio Zen, who uncovers evil all over Italy, I am looking forward to making the acquaintance of Inspector Montalbano, who no doubt has his hands full in Sicily.

But not all the fiction there is disreputably criminal: Margaret Attwood, Carol Shields and Tim Winton are waiting patiently for me to get back to them once more. And one of these days I am going to enjoy "The Bridge on the Drina" by Ivo Andric, a novel loaned to me by my workmate and good friend Zora. Andric is a Nobel Prize winner, and this novel is a voyage into the heart and soul of the Balkans.

In the non-fiction section it gets weird. Right now I'm two-thirds the way through a wonderful book by Fred Kaplan called "1959" and you guessed it, it's all about 1959. So much happened back then, including the invention of the microchip which makes blogging and everything else computery happen. And the founding of Motown (the record label), the launch of the contraceptive pill, Sputnik, the first US soldiers killed in Vietnam, and lots more (eg, the treatment of African-Americans back then was just appalling - and they didn't call them African-Americans, either).

There are no less than three books there by the wonderful Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf ('Origins', a Maalouf family history that spends a lot of time in Cuba, 'The Crusades Through Arab Eyes', and 'Leo the African', about a 16th-century traveller). I first came across Amin Maalouf via his poetic, imagined life of Omar Kayyam, called 'Samarkand'. I can't recommend that book highly enough (of course I don't have a copy, having repeatedly given it to friends to read). It is a beautiful piece of writing.

But there are also books to read on Aborigines living on riverbanks while Sydney grew around them, Russian home life during Stalin's rule (no fun, apparently), the Arab contribution to the Western intellectual tradition (much bigger than you might think), what happened during and after Cyclone Katrina (yikes), Christopher Hitchens trying to explain himself (oh, yes?), and a couple more.

And then, not in the pile, there are motorcycle magazines, daily newspapers and, of course, gardening magazines (not to mention websites as well). My poor eyes. I really need to win Lotto straight away, so I can retire and just devote myself to hanging out with Mitchell in the backyard, gardening and reading.

Still selling well

This is almost as exciting as seeing seeds come up. Sales charts! Working in publishing, in the end you live or die (or at least get paid or don't) according to whether your stuff sells or not. And last Sunday I opened the newspaper and in the book reviews section they had a sales chart for Australia's Top 10 gardening books, and our book is number one! That's such a thrill.

In fact, to be more accurate, we're still number one. A similar gardening books sales chart came out last November, just a few months after our book, 'Organic', was released, and while we were absolutely delighted to be the top seller then, we knew it was a great book and our high hopes for it were confirmed by that first result. Now, a few more months down the track and we're still number one. That's an even bigger thrill somehow.

Now, working in publishing for many years, this isn't the first book I've worked on, but this is the most important one for me, personally. For one thing there's a chapter on our little inner-city garden in it, and for another thing I worked very hard on every single page – I must have read it at least a dozen times now, and there are a few of my photos in it too, plus a few words here and there, and my name's in it, too, so is Pam's (she did the planting plan illustrations, and they're lovely).

Mind you, it's Don's book from cover to cover, and especially it was his vision for how it would look, how it would be based on real people's vegie gardens, with an emphasis on kids and parents growing healthy food together. But everyone who works on a book or magazine feels like they own a part of it, and I'm sure everyone on the team who helped to put this book together feels that way, and that's a good, natural outcome of so much work.

So, please forgive me for blabbing on about a simple sales chart and a book. But in publishing a sales chart can be cause for either celebration or drowned sorrows (either way we hit the bottle, but that's just a journalist thing).

Catalogue time!

Oh, how I love a good seed catalogue, and my favourite, a work of vegie catalogue art, landed in my letterbox yesterday. And while I haven't yet made up my mind what to order, as I have so little spare space left in my garden, I just had to do a blog on the catalogue itself. It's put out by Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Missouri, USA. I'm sure almost every North American grower already knows all about these people, but way down here on the sunniest side of the planet, in Oz, they're a discovery I made only last year.

Here's the cover of the 2010 catalogue. I thought it might be of interest to show you some pages, so here we go (click on all photos to make them bigger, for easier viewing).

Who would've thunk that radishes could look so nice?

Cute kids are exploited shamelessly throughout to make things cuter and more wholesome, but I am sure that a whole spread of squash and pumpkins on their own would have looked just fine.

Striped tomatoes? Sure. Now, striped Romas, I might order them.

Just thought I'd toss in a page of weirdos, such as African Wild Melons and knobbly Bitter Melons, to give you an idea of the amazing range they have here.

Tomatoes of all shapes, colours and sizes, of course, including a spread of orange toms.

Asian vegies are very well represented. It's a catalogue of world vegies at times.

Following on from the fun I'm having with my golf ball sized, purple and white Asian eggplants, this page caught my eye. Wow, orange eggplants, I like that idea!

More cute kids! Oh, yes, there's also a good range of flower seeds to choose from, as well as herb seeds, too, plus books and other goodies. If you have both a shopping problem and a gardening problem, you probably shouldn't look at this catalogue. It will only cause more problems for you.

OK, that's the guided tour. If you missed the link at the top of the page they're at www.rareseeds.com and yes, you can order their catalogue from Australia. It's five bucks. Last year I believe they eventually ran out of catalogues, and I suspect half the people ordering the catalogue just wanted the catalogue and not any seeds.

Of course I do get a few other catalogues in the mail, including good old Diggers here in Australia, and they're a good mob, well worth a mention if we happen to be talking about cattle dogs.

The good thing about all these catalogues is that they're one of the best places to find heirloom vegies now. You can't find many heirlooms at your garden centre. These specialist seed suppliers are the keepers of the flame for the rich biological diversity within our food plants. That's why I like to support them and, yes, I know there are plenty of others doing the same thing, and good on all of them, too.

However, I'd better finish up now and spend the evening browsing, dreaming, getting real, then placing a small order... striped romas, orange eggplants, what else?

Going Organic

November is definitely going to be my month of shameless self-promotion. Yesterday, my radio spot, today, my book. Well, it's not really my book. But my garden is in it, and I worked on it, and it has some of my photos and words in it, plus my wife Pam's illustrations, too. So it feels like 'my book', even though it's Don Burke's book. It's called 'Organic', it's all about growing food the organic way, and it has just gone on sale in bookshops everywhere in Australia. And, quite frankly, I'm thrilled!

This is the cover. It's a hardcover book, 304 pages, and priced at just $29.95, so it's brilliant value, although I guess I'm biased, aren't I? We've been working on the book for more than a year. My garden is just one chapter in the book (we're the 'gardening in small spaces' inner-city gardening bit, and there's another chapter on a great country vegie garden and the young family making all that happen).

As well as providing stacks of info and tips on growing all the different vegies, herbs and fruits, plus some recipes, the book follows a whole year of vegie garden in the backyard of a family of beginner vegie gardeners. We helped Teresa and her kids set up their vegie beds, prepare the soil and plant it out. Then they took over looking after it all, but of course our gardening experts, Don Burke and Geoffrey Burnie, offered lots of tips along the way and helped out with some of the work, too. We grew a full set of summer and winter crops, and those chapters are filled with step-by-step how-tos and advice, plus planting plans, pest control tips and everything else an organic vegie grower would like to know. And at the back of the book you'll find a full A-Z of vegies and how to grow them, plus chapters on fruits, herbs and organic pest control.

Here's the opening page of our chapter. There was no way anyone else was going to write about our garden, and so I wrote this bit. It just tells the story of how things have grown and changed over the years, plus there are tips on herbs, composting, feeding soils and other food growing tips, as well as Pam's illustration of our garden layout.

In fact, Pam's illustrations are used in several places throughout the book, including the planting plans for each of the beds for summer and winter crops at Teresa's place. This is just one of them, and they're all really lovely, but then again, I might be just a bit biased!

And if any of my relatives are reading my blog, guess what you're getting for Christmas - our book, with us in it!

Working on a 300-page gardening book is a long, hard, slog. It's a lot of work, especially when it's in addition to my day job on the magazine. But once you get the real deal in your hands, the published book, all the thoughts of those long nights poring over text and photos disappears and all you feel is excitement and a sense that you've accomplished something worthwhile that will actually help a lot of people do what they love - growing their own food.

Book review: 'Flower Hunters'

Flower Hunters

By Mary Gribbin and John Gribbin

Oxford University Press, 2008, 332 pages, ISBN 9780192807182.

This is one of those Christmas purchases which I gleefully swooped on in early December, then gave to my wife, telling her in our matter of fact way: “You’re giving me this book for Christmas”. (This cuts both ways – she often brings home handbags or, most recently, some lovely earrings in ‘her’ colours, hands them over and tells me that I’ve just bought them for her.)
And so, having finally opened up my perfect gift on Boxing Day, I devoured it over the next 48 hours. I love books in the format of a cluster of potted biographies on a theme, and this is one of them. *

‘Flower Hunters’ tells the story of the lives of 11 famous botanist-explorers, while along the way giving the supporting cast of other notable botanists of the era sufficient limelight to illuminate the whole exciting world of hunting for new plants in the 18th and 19th centuries. The ‘First XI’ selected for full chapters are Carl Linnaeus (as it turns out a dud of a flower hunter, but the chapter on this eccentric father of botany nevertheless gets the book off to a great start), Sir Joseph Banks, Francis Masson & Carl Peter Thurnberg, David Douglas, William & Thomas Lobb, Robert Fortune, Marianne North, Richard Spruce, and Joseph Hooker. The ‘12th man’ in the team is John Ray (1627-1705), a pioneer explorer-botanist who forms the prologue to the book.

Packed with anecdotes and biographical detail, each chapter is well written and very easy to read. It never bogs down, and as a nice touch, at the end of each chapter the authors summarise which garden plants we owe to these intrepid explorers.

‘Intrepid’ is undoubtedly the best word to describe some of these adventurers, who suffered mightily in conditions ranging from frost-bitten blizzards to mosquito-plagued swamps in their search for specimens. Along the way some of them brought back plants not merely pretty to behold in a garden or glasshouse somewhere – they made significant discoveries that benefit our lives today.

Richard Spruce made possible the mass production of quinine, to treat malaria, made from the bark of the Chinchona trees he brought back from the jungles of South America. Robert Fortune smuggled both Camellia sinensis and the expertise to cultivate it out of China to create the great tea-growing plantations in India.

I was particularly fascinated to read about how plants were kept alive and transported over such vast, difficult distances back then. No, they didn’t just rely on seeds, although of course they were very important in many cases. By the middle of the 19th century they had developed what we now call ‘terrariums’, perfected by Nathaniel Ward in the 1830s, to such an extent that our plant hunters were able to take numerous ‘flat-pack’ terrariums (á la Ikea) with them into the field, and then assemble them only when needed.

Some of our heroes lived long, distinguished and celebrated lives, such as Banks and Hooker, but others died young, their health broken by their efforts. The worst demise undoubtedly belongs to poor David Douglas (of ‘Douglas-fir’ fame) who, while botanising in Hawaii, managed to fall into a big pit dug to trap the wild bulls which were a problem then. Unfortunately Douglas fell into a pit already occupied by a wild and angry bull, and that was that.

I could only find fault with this book in a few usual but minor quibbles with proof reading and the spelling of a few names which I know here in Australia. It’s a bit under-illustrated for one thing, but as these are often the most expensive part of the production the authors probably have no control over that matter. However, the reproduction of adventurous botanical artist Marianne North’s amazing works has opened up a new avenue of exploration for me.

I had always been in the market for a book such as this, and it has provided me with a launching pad for reading more about several of the people profiled. Robert Fortune, for one, really stands out as being worth a fine biography, so too Joseph Hooker, but should I stumble into a bookstore, do my usual trick and pick up a biography of any of these amazing people and find a few minutes later that I’ve already read several pages without noticing the passage of time, I’m a customer.

* My favourite other book of potted biographies is ‘Short Lives’ by Katinka Matson (Pan Books, 1980) which was, according to the cover, “portraits of writers, painters, poets, actors, musicians and performers in pursuit of death”. Many of them died young (Janis Joplin, Thomas Chatterton, Jack Kerouac), but quite a few choices, such as Judy Garland, Edgar Allen Poe and Dylan Thomas merely departed the stage earlier than they should have, after a life where they often skated close to death before the scythe finally got them.