"Wildflowers of the West" by Molly Hashimoto

What a joy! A beautiful new Molly Hashimoto book in time for holiday giving! This book is much more ambitious than the recent books we have reviewed which maintained a focus on Mt. Rainer.

This book covers the wildflowers of the entire West through all the climate zones from Alpine to Desert, including the shoreline regions. I selfishly zoomed to the places where I had been, sometimes only once, but I had experienced something extraordinary that I would never forget. One was the hanging gardens at Zion National Park. It seemed impossible that a dry rock could hold such a luxurious display and there it was. I had the feeling that someone was going to pinch me and whisper that you’re not in Michigan anymore. Molly explains that rain and snow water were trapped between a porous sandstone and a hard rock layer spreading out on ledges where it nourished the hanging gardens. So improbable. So magical. An experience not to be forgotten.

Another destination was Death Valley. And how did I get there? I was in my first year at college and read about an Easter vacation opportunity: a week-long trip to Death Valley with the West Coast Nature School. Five days of lecture with hands on experience with professors from our school and college credit. I didn’t expect too much in the way of flowers knowing the cactus flowers were often elusive but the peak bloom time for wildflowers is February to early May, so Easter week was prime for spotting desert marigolds, evening primroses and mariposa lilies. I have many memories of this trip but the improbability of beautiful flowers in such an arid setting is nothing short of miraculous!

On my first visit to Mt. Rainer there were still patches of snow around the Inn at Paradise but poking through the snow were small white flowers which I think were Avalanche lilies. Imagine the determination to bloom and survive that leads a delicate flower to burst through a patch of snow to announce that spring will come after all. It is this message that makes spring my favorite season!

This book is full of Hashimoto’s usual tips on drawing and even pressing flowers. Again, she quotes poets and other memorable people who love flowers. She mentions Thoreau and it brought to mind Margaret Fuller’s description of him always with garden dirt on his hands. He would often go directly from garden to kitchen to produce a nutritious lunch without the usual detour of washing one’s hands! No one in the illustrious group including Waldo (Emerson) suffered any ill effects (Finding Margaret Fuller by Allison Pataki).

One of my favorite quotes is from someone who tried to put more beauty in our lives: Lady Bird Johnson. “Wherever I have traveled I have tried to observe and learn from landscapes no matter how unfamiliar they might be…Discovering the Sonoran Deserts, the misty coastlands of the Pacific Northwest…has been a series of adventures. I have thought and always hoped that if more of us could experience this adventure we would be more aware of our own biological origin, sense our relationship to the natural processes, and perhaps better appreciate the landscape around us. We live in…a constantly changing artificial world; we need wildflowers to keep us from becoming artificial, too.” (Wildflowers Across America by Lady Bird Johnson).

~Diane Snell