St. Lynn’s Press – Books Can Save A Life

The Monarch: Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly

April 28, 2017April 28, 2017 Valorie Grace Hallinan11 Comments

“The tag on that little butterfly sent me off on a journey of my own – one that would over and over again astound me at the miracle of it, the wonder of nature, the tenacity of living things. Over the next ten years I would continue to add to my knowledge and experience about something that had been going on for centuries, with a part of it still taking place right in my own backyard.” The Monarch: Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly, by Kylee Baumle

I had no idea monarch butterflies were so fascinating. I didn’t know there are such things as Certified Monarch Waystations and that I could easily create one myself, or that I could monitor monarch butterflies as a citizen scientist. I didn’t know there was a Beautiful Monarch Facebook group with 11,000 members. (As of this writing, I’m one of their newest.)

My favorite nature and gardening publisher, St. Lynn’s Press, kindly sent me a review copy of their new book, The Monarch: Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly, by Kylee Baumle. I thought this would be the perfect time to feature it on Books Can Save a Life in honor of the People’s Climate March this weekend in cities around the world.

Kylee Baumle – a citizen scientist, lifelong gardener, blogger (Our Little Acre), and columnist for Ohio Gardener magazine – has written a beautiful book about the monarch butterfly, its perils, and what we can do to help make sure this magnificent creature is still here generations from now.

The author begins by telling a personal story about a monarch encounter that involves miraculous detective work and speaks volumes about her passion for this threatened creature. She follows up with fascinating chapters about monarch biology that focus on the miracles of its five-stages of development and nearly unbelievable cross-country migration.

“The monarch’s migration is extraordinary; there is none like it in the butterfly world. Think of it: A butterfly born in Canada or the U.S. begins an epic journey of up to 2900 miles south to a place they’ve never been before – a very specific place, where their great-great-grandparents went the year before, but never the other generations between them.”

(Baumle tells us that the winter location of the migrating monarchs was unknown until 1975. Now we know they overwinter in the oyamel fir forests of the Transvolcanic Belt mountains in central Mexico. This location was first shared with the world in the August 1976 issue of National Geographic. Read more about the discovery here.)

“The final generation of monarchs in late summer and early fall are called the Methuselah generation. Why Methuselah? The name is borrowed from the Bible, in which Methuselah was said to have lived for 969 years, much longer than his contemporaries. Migrating monarchs live five to eight times as long as their parents and grandparents.”

You don’t have to be an expert gardener – or a gardener at all – to enjoy The Monarch and find inspiration to become involved in its preservation. Baumle has carefully and thoroughly presented the most up-to-date research about the monarch, and she’s included a range of easy, fun activities that will appeal to all ages. This is an excellent book for the lay person as well as for teachers and students, young and not-so-young.

Here are some things you can do to honor and help save the monarch butterfly: 1. Become a Citizen Scientist (8 programs are listed in this book.) 2. Create a Monarch Waystation with milkweed and other plants to attract and nourish monarchs. 3. Make a butterfly watering station. 4. Raise a monarch in your home. 5. Tag a migrating monarch. 6. Get a grant to plant a school garden. Several grant sponsors are listed in this book.

I admire St. Lynn’s Press for publishing books that encourage us to savor and preserve the natural world. They have an impressive backlist of gardening and nature titles, and they’ve done it again with The Monarch: Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly. Kylee Baumle’s love for the monarch and enthusiasm for spreading the word is contagious.

” A group of butterflies goes by several names. ‘Kaleidoscope’ is my favorite, but others have used the terms ‘swarm’ and ‘rabble.’ Take your pick.”

“Where have all the butterflies gone? It’s a question I hear being asked quite a bit these days.”

For more about Danaus Plexippus (the monarch butterfly) and how you can get involved, here are excellent websites listed in The Monarch:

Make Way for Monarchs

Journey North: A Global Study of Wildlife Migration and Seasonal Change

Monarch Joint Venture

Monarch Watch

Monarch Butterfly Garden

Monarch Lab

Xerces Society

“There aren’t many such widespread issues whose directions can be changed by ordinary people like you and me, or in which people truly believe that anything they do will have any measurable effect. But reversing the decline in the number of monarchs is one where we really can make a difference.”

If you would like to read a great work of eco-fiction about the migration of butterflies, follow up your reading of The Monarch with Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. I wrote about it on my blog a few years ago.

“No one is an environmentalist by birth. It is only your path, your life, your travels that awaken you.” Yann Arthur Bertrand, photographer and creator of the book Earth from Above and the film Home.

If you plan to participate in one of the climate marches this weekend, happy marching!

Happy Spring! Duck Eggs Daily

March 28, 2016March 28, 2016 Valorie Grace Hallinan10 Comments

duck eggs daily

“As the sun peeks up over the tops of the trees, I finish the last of my coffee and get dressed in my ‘barn attire.’ My schedule (and the ducks’) isn’t dictated by the time on the clock on the kitchen wall, but entirely on the sun. They want to be let out at sunup, whether that comes at 5:30 a.m. or 8:00 a.m….It’s cold outside, so I’ve heated up some water in the teakettle and have a special treat for the ducks to go with their breakfast. They’re getting a pan of oats, cracked corn, dried cranberries and mealworms, moistened with warm water.” Duck Eggs Daily by Lisa Steele

I know it’s spring when, every April, a pair of wood ducks appear in our backyard. They like to swim in our two small ponds and they nest somewhere in the miniature forest of beech, maple, and hemlock behind our house that gets a bit swampy in the spring.

Our ducks haven’t shown up yet, but I’m expecting them any day now.

A pair of ducks We never see any ducklings, though, and we worry because this is also the territory of a neighborhood fox, as well as hawks and owls. By midsummer our visiting ducks have disappeared – maybe they’re busy tending their nest – and I always miss them once they’ve gone.

So I was delighted when my favorite gardening and sustainable living publisher, St. Lynn’s Press, sent me a review copy of Duck Eggs Daily: Raising Happy, Healthy Ducks…Naturally by Lisa Steele. (Lisa is also the author of Fresh Eggs Daily.)

My husband and I have been learning (very) small-scale vegetable gardening, and I’ve been thinking about branching out into eggs. I’d read in one of my gardening books that ducks are great for pest control and fertilizer, and they’re easier to raise than chickens.

Ducks In Duck Eggs Daily, Maine hobby farmer Lisa Steele proves this is so, and I found her enthusiasm and love for ducks (and flocks of all kinds) to be contagious and inspiring.

An expert in small-flock poultry keeping, Lisa has been a long-time owner of chickens, too. She says that ducks are more cold hardy, heat tolerant, and disease resistant than chickens – so I’m thinking ducks might be the way for a beginner like me to get started. They have a longer and more productive laying life too, and duck eggs are especially rich in protein.

Duck Eggs Daily is a beautifully designed little how-to reference book that also reads like a daybook or nature journal, particularly the day-in-a-life-with-ducks chapter. Lisa’s eleven ducks clearly bring her a great deal of joy, and these duck tending activities are lovingly rendered:

hatching ducklings in an incubator
collecting eggs at sunrise
making ducks happy with special treats (such as watermelon, dandelion greens, fresh peas, leftover squash and pumpkins from the garden, and delicious mealworms)
giving ducks swim time in the kiddie pool
watching typical duck antics like walking in a row, mud dabbling, tail wagging, and happy quacks.

Each duck topic covered is packed with useful details:

the characteristics and advantages of various duck breeds
hatching, brooding and raising ducks
one complete day in a life with ducks, from sunrise to sunset
duck behavior and duck treats
duck houses and duck pools
duck health
cooking with duck eggs, with tempting recipes like crème brûlée, lemony egg rice soup, herbed deviled eggs, and homemade pasta.

Ducks 2 Lisa says that now is the perfect time to invest in a pair or trio of ducks, because many ducks adopted as pets are abandoned after Easter. She encourages interested readers to adopt two or three from one of the duck rescue organizations listed in the book’s appendix.

After reading Duck Eggs Daily, I concluded that currently we don’t have a lifestyle conducive to raising ducks and doing it well. However, we’re looking forward to ducks in our future when the time is right. It’s a daily commitment, and we’d need to find someone to take over when we travel. I have a hard time picturing myself filling water tubs twice a day, especially during freezing, snowy western New York winters. And, in theory, I like the romance of getting up with the sun to let the ducks out and give them breakfast, but rising early isn’t my favorite thing to do. I’d have to make a commitment to make that happen on cold, dark winter mornings. Still, I like the discipline this entails. I think it would be a great way to start to my day and get me at my writing desk earlier.

But those ducks, they sure are cute, so maybe it will happen sooner rather than later. I’ve never tasted a duck egg, and wouldn’t it be fun to make homemade mint chip ice cream with fresh duck eggs?

My St. Lynn’s Press Library

I’ve had a small herb garden as long as I can remember, and I’ve always loved flowers, having grown up in a floral shop. Over the past year or two, since we began our vegetable garden and I discovered St. Lynn’s Press, I’ve assembled a great little library that’s still growing.

Slow Flowers, by Debra Prinzing

The 50 Mile Bouquet, by Debra Prinzing

Windowsill Art, by Nancy Ross Hugo

The Herb Lover’s Spa Book, by Sue Goetz

The Cancer Survivor’s Garden Companion, by Jenny Peterson

Yards, by Billy Goodnick

Ducks 1

The Cancer Survivor’s Garden Companion

February 21, 2016February 22, 2016 Valorie Grace Hallinan11 Comments

“‘Don’t let cancer define you, Jenny.’ So how did I not let cancer define me? Not knowing anything better, I simply kept doing what I knew to do. And one of those things was gardening….I’m not going to lie – I had many days when I did not feel like gardening. But I decided to change my approach and focus on small, doable tasks….little by little, my relationship with plants and my garden became the thing that turned me around – body, mind and spirit. No, it wasn’t easy. Nothing about cancer and cancer treatment is easy. But it was my reality, and I was determined to find some place where I could thrive and experience joy again.”

From time to time, I like to take a break from literary fiction and literary nonfiction at Books Can Save a Life to feature a slow living book that gets me out of my head and inspires me to enjoy the moment. I especially love the unique gardening books published by St. Lynn’s Press, so I was thrilled when they sent me a review copy of The Cancer Survivor’s Garden Companion.

This book is especially meaningful to me because over a year ago my brother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Sadly, my brother passed away in the fall. As I thumbed through the pages of The Cancer Survivor’s Garden Companion, I wished Jenny Peterson‘s book had been available earlier. It would have been a wonderful gift for my brother and his family. From now on, The Cancer Survivor’s Garden Companion will be part of any care package I might give to friends and loved ones with health challenges.

Jenny’s book is filled with simple and enjoyable gardening activities to restore body, mind, and spirit, especially during treatment. I thought about my brother’s small backyard garden, which was a bit neglected after his diagnosis, and how this book might have inspired him to continue enjoying manageable tasks on his tiny plot of tomatoes and eggplants.

One of my fondest memories of that difficult time was the afternoon we decided to make jam from the two old crab apple trees and the grapevines in my brother’s backyard. Joe and my sister-in-law had never picked or eaten the tiny crab apples, and we had no idea how the jam would turn out. We had fun all afternoon picking, cooking, and then tasting the deep purple and ruby colored jams, which turned out delicious.

Four jars of homemade jam — Jam made from the crab apple trees in my brother’s backyard.

Jenny Peterson is so right about the restorative powers of gardens and nature, because that afternoon my brother really enjoyed sorting and de-stemming the crab apples, the aroma of fruit cooking over the stove, and tasting the still-warm jam. I think he appreciated the little miracle of new and unexpected late-summer bounty from his backyard.

Wellness + Mindfulness + Gardening

Jenny Peterson, a writer and landscape designer with degrees in psychology and theology, is also a survivor of breast cancer and skin cancer. She wrote The Cancer Survivor’s Garden Companion not as a how-to gardening book, but “to encourage people who are diagnosed with cancer, going through cancer treatment, healing from cancer or living with cancer to view their gardens, plants and outdoor spaces as resources in creating the healthiest and most balanced life possible. Life can be difficult, but it can also be profoundly beautiful, and our gardens are the best teachers of this.”

So, you don’t have to be an experienced gardener, or even a gardener at all, to enjoy and benefit immensely from The Cancer Survivor’s Garden Companion. The activities, each centered around body, mind, or spirit, can be scaled up or scaled down, depending on needs and energy levels.

“Survivor Spotlights” feature gardening tips from individuals who have had a cancer diagnosis.

Jenny Peterson talks about her own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual challenges during radiation, chemotherapy, and other treatments, and how she turned to her garden as both a haven and good medicine. She genuinely understands the rigors of cancer treatment and is deeply empathetic, warm, and encouraging.

CancerContents

The Garden That Heals: Body + Mind + Spirit

Her suggestions for restorative and healing garden activities include:

Gardening for cardio exercise, strength and flexibility, strong bones, circulation & boosting the immune system
Ideas for building a yoga deck garden
Beneficial fruits, vegetables and herbs for nourishment and strength during treatment, including aromatherapy and herbal remedies
Garden design, problem solving, and nature photography to relax the mind and keep it sharp
Sharing the garden with friends and family by hosting seed and plant sharing parties, social hours, and other events
Garden-themed music to enjoy
Prayer, meditation, and mindful movement, including labyrinths, suggested mantras, garden altars, and tea ceremonies

There is an appendix with suggested books (fiction and nonfiction), excellent health information sites, and sources for garden tools and clothing.

CancerWabiSabi — I love the Japanese words *wabi sabi* and have read other books on this fascinating topic, including ***Wabi Sabi for Writers*** by Richard R. Powell.

I love these other books published by St. Lynn’s Press, too:

Slow Flowers, by Debra Prinzing

Windowsill Art, by Nancy Ross Hugo

The Herb Lover’s Spa Book, by Sue Goetz

If you have a personal story of gardening, illness and health, please share. I’d love to hear about your own gardening book favorites, too.

The Herb Lover’s Spa Book

March 9, 2015 Valorie Grace Hallinan5 Comments

“Dear Reader – I write this because I love a garden that gives back. Flowers, fragrance, flavor…all of it. A true giving-garden is filled with herbs. Discover them. Grab a leaf, rub it, hold it to your nose and breathe in. Voila! That plain, leafy plant becomes so much more when you learn ways to use it. This is what I share with you.” Sue Goetz, The Herb Lover’s Spa Book

In the middle of a hard winter I couldn’t ask for a better pick-me-up than The Herb Lover’s Spa Book by Sue Goetz, just published by St. Lynn’s Press. This is a little gem of a book. Looking at the photos and skimming through the recipes for facial steams and oatmeal soaks and lavender heat pillows while the snow fell outside my window was a spa experience in and of itself.

I grow the standard kitchen garden herbs and I love cooking with them. Now Sue Goetz has inspired me to try out recipes for herbal preparations that heal, sooth, relax, and refresh. I’d been making a list of seeds to order for this year’s garden, and I’ll have to expand it to include new-to-me herbs like lemon balm and lemon verbena, scented geranium and camomile. I want to try the recipes and the end products myself, of course, and if all goes well, when holiday time rolls around I’ll have homegrown, handmade gifts to give family and friends.

A well-known garden designer, writer, and speaker from Washington State, Sue Goetz packs a lot of information into this little book, and her passion for using herbs in the home for pleasurable and nurturing spa experiences shines on every page.

The Herb Lover’s Spa Book has three parts: Surround, Grow, and Create.

Surround

You can enjoy the herbal preparations you’ll learn to make in this book in your very own private spa. Sue shows how you can create a retreat in your own home, indoors or outdoors, where you can read, relax, soak, sleep, or meditate. She suggests designs, colors, and textures conducive to rest and relaxation, whether in a garden or in a favorite indoor space.

Grow

You’ll find information about nineteen of the most common and popular herbs used for skin treatments and teas and infusions, including lavender, hops, dandelion, eucalyptus, sage, parsley, witch hazel, and thyme. Sue includes growing tips, healing properties, and suitable varieties for each herb, a list of seasonal herb garden tasks, and tips for harvesting and preserving.

Create

In addition to over 50 herbal recipes, Sue provides information about sourcing and working with common ingredients and materials such as beeswax, baking soda, essential oils, epsom salt, ginger root and jojoba oil.

I loved leafing through the recipes. I didn’t know there are so many varieties of bath brews, each with its own effects. For a relaxing bath you can use chamomile, hops, and lavender. For a stimulating bath, try eucalyptus, lemon balm, mint, rosemary, sage, or thyme. For a healing bath, use calendula, lavender, lemon verbena, parsley, or spearmint.

First on my list of recipes I’d like to try is the Inspiration Bath. When you want to get your creativity flowing, put some calendula petals in a muslin sachet or directly into a warm bath, and add 6 drops each of lavender essential oil and rose essential oil.

Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see the complete recipe for Sue’s Basic Bath Brew. Other tempting concoctions: Peppermint Foot Soak, Midsummer’s Eve Floral Garden Water, Dusty Rose Body Powder, Winter Warming Steam, Chamomile Eye Soothers, Rosewater Cream, and Floral Water Skin Brightener.

Sue includes fascinating tidbits about historical aspects of the spa experience and herbal pharmacopoeia. I’d never heard of a stillroom, for example – a special room in homes of the early American colonies set aside to prepare household products from the garden. Sue says the lost art of the stillroom is coming back, and she encourages us to find a special space in our modern homes where we can store ingredients and experiment with herbal remedies.

I like that a glossary of commonly used terms is included at the end of the book, as well as a list of resources, including places to purchase herbs, oils, packaging materials, plants, and seeds.

I’m so impressed with St. Lynn’s collection of how-to gardening books. I’ve written about a couple of other St. Lynn’s titles here at Books Can Save a Life: Debra Prinzing’s Slow Flowers and Nancy Ross Hugo’s Windowsill Art.

I have a soft spot in my heart for small, inspired publishers with a strong sense of values and a well defined mission – I was an editor for such a publisher eons ago at the beginning of my career. I like St. Lynn’s because they make gardening so inviting and accessible to those of us who are beginners, and because they are strongly committed to ecology and our planet.

Make yourself a cup of tea and browse some of their other titles. (And if you want to know who St. Lynn is, click here.)

Bath Brew recipe — One of many tempting recipes in Sue Goetz’s The Herb Lover’s Spa Book

Do you make herbal preparations from your garden? If so, I’d love to hear about them, as well as books you recommend for those of us who want to learn more.

Windowsill Art

October 13, 2014December 14, 2014 Valorie Grace Hallinan4 Comments

“For me, windowsill arranging is almost a spiritual practice. When I am looking for materials to display and placing them on the windowsill, I feel more like a poet placing words in a haiku than a floral designer placing stems in a vase. I love the limited space, the double connection to the outdoors (through the window and my materials), and the structure that repeating the same activity over and over provides.” Nancy Ross Hugo, Windowsill Art

Vase of borage blossoms on windowsill — I was inspired by Nancy Ross Hugo’s delightful new book, Windowsill Art, to create this for “In a Vase on Monday,” the blog series by Rambling in the Garden. I used borage and pachysandra. The borage blossoms had flopped over from heavy rain the night before, so I decided to snip them off and enjoy them indoors.

I wrote about flowers and flower-themed books this past summer to commemorate the Ohio floral shop I grew up in (we just sold the building where my parents had the business for some fifty years) and to chronicle a renewed desire to have more flowers in my life. When St. Lynn’s Press asked me to review their new book, Windowsill Art, by Nancy Ross Hugo, I was thrilled. There is much, much more to this small, hand-sized book than meets the eye.

Windowsill Art is, first of all, about discovery: using seasonal blossoms and other easily accessible gifts of nature all around us – seedpods, cones, leaves, twigs, foliage, fruits, and vegetables – to make simple, striking designs we can display in the modest spaces of our windowsills.

Secondly, it is windowsill art as artist’s practice. Hugo writes, “Windowsill arranging can be to floral design what pen and ink drawing is to oil painting: a way to strip the art form to its basics and distill the essence of it.”

Nancy compares her windowsill practice to the work of a vegan cookbook author she once heard speak. The cookbook author focused exclusively on vegan cooking even though she was not a vegan. “She limited her universe in order to investigate a small part of it more deeply.” The simple art of windowsill arranging, Hugo writes, can be “a path back to….innocence and [the] beginner’s eye….And it can help focus a lifetime of practice and observation.”

The author is a naturalist and floral designer who, for three years, created floral windowsill art every day and posted photographs of it on her blog, Windowsill Arranging: Creating Nature on the Windowsill. She learned that her work greatly increased her readers’ sense of artistic freedom: techniques and ideas they hadn’t thought of before opened up new creative paths and possibilities.

Hugo offers instruction in how to find plant material and choose containers; ways to explore the process, including combining and shuffling materials and letting arrangements evolve; and experimenting with styles and techniques. She is suggestive and encouraging; there are no hard and fast rules. Nancy wants you to feel artistically uninhibited, free to try new things. Windowsill Art is generously photographed, featuring a gallery of Nancy’s arrangements through all four seasons.

You’ll want to keep Windowsill Art close to your work area for inspiration.

windowsillart1 — April’s Lenten rose blossoms on the left, set against Japanese kerria blooming outdoors; daffodils and violas on the right. Windowsill Art features nature on the window ledge for every month and season. By Nancy Ross Hugo.

Windowsill Art has inspired me to try some arrangements myself. I’ve noticed bits and pieces from nature in our yard I would have overlooked for use in an arrangement. We have a great deal of moss because of shade from our huge hemlock and beech trees, so I hope to use moss in my next arrangement.

I’m expanding my collection of vases and containers, too. At a local dairy, I bought large and small glass bottles of milk and cream; the empty bottles are terrific vases. I recently put aside a small jug that was filled with maple syrup, as well as an empty balsamic vinegar decanter.

Leaves and foliage in vases on windowsill — By Nancy Ross Hugo

If you happen to participate in Rambling in the Garden’s “In a Vase on Monday” meme, consider trying windowsill art for your next creation.

Blue bottles, white flowers — Winter: paperwhite narcissus bulbs, mustard and moneyplant leaves, by Nancy Ross Hugo

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