Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012 - (Page 218)

Kim Blaxland and the Violets of North America Chris Blaxland Kim's goal was a book on the "Violets of North America" which would bring the genus up to date, the last such work being Doretta Klaber's Violets of the United States, published in 1976. Other reference points are the books by Viola Brainerd Baird (1942) and her father, Ezra Brainerd (1921). The taxonomy and the technologies have advanced since those publications. Kim had concerns about their completeness and that much of the information was gathered indirectly and with a regional bias – she wanted to see these plants fresh, and in their natural habitats, rather than rely on herbarium specimens. She wanted to provide a life-size drawing of a representative plant, with other drawings of important morphological features such as the style. For Viola pedata she had drawings of leaves at several stages, details of leaflets, seed pods, and flowers. Kim took many photographs of a species from which she could select those that captured the essential character of each. For example, there are 28 photographs of Viola pedata. Many are of single flowers, showing the considerable variation in colors. The opening paragraph of Kim's proposed text for Viola pedata, which is published here directly following this introduction, suggests that she liked this one: "Viola pedata, endemic to North America, is one of the loveliest violets, distinctly different from all other species. Deeply divided leaves give this species its name, the divisions radiating from the center of the leaf with additional divisions at the ends of each narrow lobe. Large showy bicolored or single-colored flowers, in shades of mauve to lilac and dark purple, are produced in profusion in spring often in massed colonies that form spectacular sheets of color along roadsides." I recall it on several trips and in our Radnor garden in Pennsylvania. Kim's collection of non-Viola slides is intended as a gift to NARGS Slide Library. Kim offered her 2,500 non-North American Viola pictures to Japanese colleagues to use as a basis for a book on violets of the world. Kim photographing Viola umbraticola on Mount Lemmon, Arizona 218 Rock Garden Quarterly Vol. 70 (3)

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012

Digital Quarterly
Expanding Panayoti's Axioms
Photo Contest 2012
Photographing Alpine Plants: A Landscape Point of View
NARGS 2013 Election Timetable
Rock Gardening from Scratch - Seeds
Kim Blaxland and the Violets of North America
Viola pedata
Violas, Kim, and Us - A Celebration
Cooking Native Japanese Plants
Carl Gehenio Memorial Trough Show
Fire in the Hole: Phlox across Colorado
Rebuilding a Rock Garden in Pittsburgh
A Remarkable Garden: David Douglas and the Shrub-steppe of the Columbia Plateau
Bookshelf - Reviews
Swedish Dreams
Treasurer's Report
Bulletin Board
2012 - Eastern Study Weekend: October, Pittsburgh

Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012