Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  67, 76 Quotations from Stephen G. Miller’s Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

  73 Quotation from The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller, Copyright © 1941 by Henry Miller. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing.

  119, 129 Quotations from Theocritus. Reprinted by permission of Anthony Holden.

  128-129 Quotations from Orfeo ed Euridice. Translation by Andrew Huth. Reprinted by permission of Decca Classics.

  158 Excerpt from “Book 13” from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1961, 1963 by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright renewed 1989 by Benedict R.C. Fitzgerald, on behalf of the Fitzgerald children. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, LLC, and the Estate of Robert Fitzgerald.

  164 Quotation from Alice Glanville’s Schools of the Boundary: 1891-1991. Reprinted by permission of Sonotek Publishing.

  194 Quotation from Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “On Raglan Road.” Reprinted by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

  197 Quotation from Illustrated Flora of British Columbia, Vol. 5, Dicotyledons (Salicaceae through Zygophyllaceae) and Pteridophytes, G.W. Douglas, D. Meidinger, and J. Pojar, eds. B.C. Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks, and B.C. Ministry of Forests, Victoria, 2000, 389 pp. Reprinted by permission of the Ministries.

  200, 203 Quotations from Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia and Inland Northwest, Roberta Parish, Ray Coupé, and Dennis Lloyd. Reprinted by permission of Lone Pine Publishing.

  216 Quotation from The Practice of the Wild Copyright © 1990 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

  218 Quotation from “Closing Down Kah Shakes Creek” by Charles Lillard. Reprinted by permission of Rhonda Lillard.

  227 Quotation from The Collected Poems Copyright © 2000 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company.

  227 Quotation from Cicero. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustee of the Loeb Classical Library from Cicero: Volume III, De Oratore, Loeb Classical Library Volume 348, translated by E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham, p. 353, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1942 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  228 Quotation from Cicero. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from Cicero: Volume XVIII. Loeb Classical Library, Volume 141, translated by J.E. King, p. 65, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1927 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  229 Quotation from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, translated by Angelica Pass. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

  Endnotes

  Prelude

  i. Cicero’s ideas of mnemonic placement are distilled in Book ll of De Oratore, lines 350-360.

  ii. Evelyn, Sylva, p. 56.

  Quercus garryana: Fire

  1. Jon Keeley has researched the effects of fire on seed germination in California in particular; Gavin Flematti’s work has concentrated on fire and native plant ecology in Australia. I’ve included some of their articles in the bibliography.

  2. Nancy J. Turner, “Time to Burn: Traditional Use of Fire to Enhance Resource Production by Aboriginal Peoples in British Columbia,” in Indians, Fire and the Land, ed. Robert Boyd, p. 196. This essay led me, via its notes on cited materials, to the source of the quoted material: correspondence between James Douglas and James Hargrave, in The Hargrave Correspondence, 1821-43, ed. G.P. de T (George Parkin de Twenebroker) Glazebrook, recommended reading for the window the correspondence provides onto the workings of the HBC during this seminal period in its influence.

  3. Captain George Vancouver is quoted in Nancy Turner, “Time to Burn,” p. 195: “I could not possibly believe any uncultivated country had even been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture . . . extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art.”

  4. Anecdotal material cited in Nancy Turner, “Time to Burn,” p. 200.

  5. Ibid. p. 194.

  6. Information on the etymology of “oak” comes from several sources, notably my household’s hefty Compact Edition of the Oxford Dictionary, in two volumes (Oxford University Press, 1971); Bill Casselman’s Canadian Garden Words; Peter Wyse-Jackson’s Irish Trees and Shrubs; and Peter Harbison’s Ancient Irish Monuments.

  7. This is discussed by Andy Coghlan in “Sensitive Flower,” New Scientist, September 26, 1998, pp. 23-24.

  8. I’ve read a fair bit about the Ogham (or Ogam) alphabet and know that there are many theories about its origin. Perhaps the most compelling and least fanciful is presented by Damian McManus in the monograph included in the bibliography; the Archaeological Survey of Judith Cuppage is also based on solid research. The holed ogham stone at Kilmalkedar predates the seventh-century Christian monastery and is probably pre-Christian in origin. Many ogham stones can be found on the Dingle Peninsula.

  9. Poem by Aonghas MacNeacail. Used by kind permission of the author. (I first read this poem in the Times Educational Supplement online. Web address given in bibliography.)

  10. Rhapsodes or rhapsodists were professional reciters of poetry. They would perform at festivals and games, often in competition for prizes. The Homeric Hymns are generally believed to have been composed by a number of professional rhapsodes, almost certainly not by Homer himself but in the same tradition, though a little later — between the eighth to sixth centuries BCE. This excerpted passage is from Hesiod, Homeric Hymns and Homerica, 127.

  11. Ibid.

  12. The material on the British Columbia Protestant Orphans’ Home comes from various sources, among them http://web.uvic.ca/~cduncan/orphanshome/poh.html and Derek Pethick’s Summer of Promise, Victoria 1864-1914. The distasteful term “half-caste” comes from a letter quoted at the Web site cited here, and I use it to demonstrate the attitude that prevailed in the city at that time. The letters between Flora Sinclair and Mary Cridge, NCB77, are used courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.

  13. Information on historical distribution of Garry oaks on south Vancouver Island came in part from personal recollection as well as informal discussions with many people. I looked at many archival photographs of Saanich Peninsula. I also consulted the Web site of the Garry Oak Ecosystem Recovery Team — http://www.goert.ca — and am grateful to Ted Lea, a retired vegetation ecologist with the Ecosystems Branch of the BC Ministry of Environment, who sent me the map he helped to prepare. I hung the map near my desk and spent many hours musing about the lost landscapes of my childhood.

  14. Personal email correspondence from 2008. Used with permission.

  15. The story of the three broom seeds planted at Sooke by early settler and HBC surveyor Walter Colquhoun Grant sounds apocryphal but occurs in so many sources that it must contain at least a germ of truth.

  Quercus virginiana: Degrees of Separation

  1. Douglas’s report, Fort Vancouver, HBC, July 12, 1842, in Botanical Electronic News, #226, July 2, 1999.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Janis Ringuette, History of Beacon Hill Park, Appendix C: Dallas Road Waterfront, 2009, www.beaconhillparkhistory.org/.

  4. Archie H. Wills, “Booze and Bullets Flew in the Days of Cliff House,” in Daily Colonist, Feb. 28, 1971, p. 13. Noted in Ringuette at note 3.

  5. “The Provincial Museum had undergone two name changes, from the Provincial Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, to the British Columbia Provincial Museum to the Royal British Columbia Museum” (http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/Natural_History/Birds.aspx?id=723). In this chapter, I’ve tried to use the name appropriate to the period I’m writing about and, of course, there are considerable shifts in time from Newcombe’s collecting years to my childhood in the e
arly 1960s to the present.

  6. The Kwakwaka’wakw people are also known as Kwakiutl or Kwaguilth — though more properly “Kwakiutl” refers specifically to those people belonging to the Fort Rupert Band. Traditional Kwakwaka’wakw territory is bounded in the north by Smith Inlet, the south by Cape Mudge, the west by Quatsino Sound, and in the east by Knight Inlet. The Lekwungen people who occupied what is now Victoria are members of the Coast Salish linguistic group.

  7. Chaster, Ross, and Warren, Trees of Greater Victoria: A Heritage, p. 43.

  8. The British Colonist, June 15, 1872, at britishcolonist.ca/.

  9. Jan Hare and Jean Barman, Good Intentions Gone Awry, p. 85.

  10. Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage, pp. 22-23.

  11. Ibid. p. 191.

  12. Ibid. p. 85.

  13. Wilson Duff, Thunderbird Park, p. 20.

  14. Phil Nuytten, The Totem Carvers, p. 86.

  15. Ira Jacknis, “Authenticity and the Mungo Martin House, Victoria, BC: Visual and Verbal Sources,” in Arctic Anthropology, p. 7.

  16. This term comes up in both anthropology and cultural studies to denote the kind of collecting mentality that was so prominent in the early twentieth century when ethnographers felt compelled to “save” whatever aspects of material culture they could find, preferably the oldest and most authentic, in the belief that colonial influences would result in the disappearance of indigenous cultures. I’m grateful to Dr. Michelle Hamilton, Assistant Professor and Director of Public History at the University of Western Ontario, and the author of Collections and Objections: Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario (McGill-Queens’s University Press, 2010), for clarifying the term itself as well as its historical context. Dr. Hamilton said, “Some say Jacob Gruber coined the term salvage ethnography/anthropology but I’ve found the term used earlier than his article, at least in the 1950s. Nevertheless, I usually use his article to footnote the concept as it is one of the only articulations of the concept. The article is: Gruber, Jacob W. “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology.”American Anthropologist 72, 6 (1970): 1289-99. I could also suggest Marvin Harris’ The Rise of Anthropological Theory which is a standard survey. As for the word ‘paradigm,’ I tend to avoid use of what historians consider to be post-modern terminology while anthropologists and others are more comfortable with it.” From an email correspondence, March 2011, used with permission.

  17. Wilson Duff to Richard Conn, 4 December 1953. BCPM Correspondence, GR 111, box 8, file 39, courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.

  18. Robin Ward, Echoes of Empire, p. 58.

  19. The British Colonist, November 1, 1903, at britishcolonist.ca/.

  Olea europaea: Young Woman With Eros On Her Shoulder

  1. George Seferis, Collected Poems, p. 25, used with kind permission of the translator Edmund Keeley, Anvil Press Poetry, and Princeton University Press.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Julius Pollux was a second century AD Greek scholar and teacher. He’s best known for his Onomasticon, a kind of thesaurus in ten volumes, mostly lost, though an abridged Latin version is extant. This passage occurs in Stephen G. Miller’s Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources, p. 125, and is used with Dr. Miller’s and the University of California’s generous permission.

  4. Elytis, Eros, Eros, Eros, p. 72, used with kind permission of the translator Olga Broumas.

  5. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, p. 163.

  6. Elytis, Eros, Eros, Eros, p. 157.

  Thuja plicata: Nest Boxes

  1. John Dowland’s First Book of Songs and Ayres appeared in 1597 and contained arrangements for lute and voice.

  2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 48.

  3. Ibid. p. 100.

  4. Ibid.

  Platanus orientalis: Raven Libretto

  1. Although I own, and admire, the Landmark Herodotus (edited by Robert Strassler and beautifully translated by Andrea L. Purvis), I chose the nineteenth-century translation of George Rawlinson for this epigraph. To my ear and mind, it captures the capricious quality of Xerxes’s infatuation with the plane tree on the banks of the Maeander: Herodotus, The Histories, p. 272.

  2. “Ombra mai fu” is an aria from Serses (or Xerxes), a 1738 opera composed by Handel, libretto by Nicolò Minato.

  3. David Daniels, Operatic Arias, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Sir Roger Norrington conducting, Virgin Veritas CD.

  4. Theodora, Act 1, Scene 4. Composed by Handel, libretto by Thomas Morell. I’ve watched the extraordinary Glyndebourne Festival Opera production of this 1749 oratorio on DVD, directed by Peter Sellars, with a cast featuring Dawn Upshaw singing the role of Theodora, David Daniels singing Didymus, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Irene. Libretto available at http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/theodora.htm.

  5. My daughter Angelica bought this translation of Virgil’s Georgics — by Smith Palmer Bovie, published by University of Chicago Press, 1966 — at a book sale at the University of Victoria. I was enchanted to discover that its previous owner, as inscribed on its overleaf, was the late Peter Smith who’d been my Classics professor at UVic in the mid-1970s. He was one of the most generous and erudite individuals I encountered in my university life. The poem excerpt comes from Book IV, pp. 145-147.

  6. It’s hard to disentangle fact and fiction from stories about Hippocrates, the fifth-century BCE Greek physician about whom little is known but much is suggested. But there is a plane tree on Kos (or Cos, presumed to be the island of his birth) associated with him and his teachings; this association seems to have the endorsement of the British medical establishment! A.S. Playfair, “Hippocratic Plane,” in Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, June 21, 1971, pp. 367-368.

  7. Occurrence of fossil plane leaves and seeds discussed by Dr. Bruce Cornet at http://www.sunstar-solutions.com/sunstar/Sayreville/Kfacies.htm.

  8. Description of leaves from Maggie Campbell-Culver, A Passion for Trees, p. 169.

  9. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 494.

  10. Evelyn, Sylva, p. 216.

  11. This epigraph and all the passages in this section are from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, libretto by Nahum Tate, composed sometime before 1688. I love the 1967 recording, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, with the glorious Tatiana Troyanos as Dido. And I treasure the 1993 recording with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Dido, conducted by Nicholas McGegan. Readers interested in the libretto can find it at the very useful libretti site at Stanford University: http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/dido.html. (Recent scholarship has determined that the opera was composed earlier than the date given at the site — 1689; perhaps it was completed as early as 1684.)

  12. Theocritus, “Syrinx,” in Greek Pastoral Poetry, p. 197.

  13. From Charles Michener, “The Soul Singer,” in the New Yorker, January 5, 2004. Also available at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/01/05/040105fa_fact.

  14. These two passages are from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera, Orfeo ed Euridice (the 1762 Vienna version), libretto by Ranieri de’Calzabigi. “Che puro ciel” is from Act Two and “Che farò Euridice?” is from Act Three.

  15. Theocritus, “The Dioscuri,” from Greek Pastoral Poetry, p. 121.

  Pinus ponderosa: A Serious Waltz

  1. Noted in Yves Cambefort, “Beetles as Religious Symbols,” Cultural Entomology, CE Digest, Second issue (February 1994).

  2. Material on Khepri and scarabs in general from Robert A. Armour, Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt.

  3. El libro agregà de Serapiom, volgarizzamento di Frater Jacobus Philippus de Padua. Ed. Gustav Ineichen. Venice and Rome: Instituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1966.

  4. Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, p. 191.

  5. Creber, G.I., “Tree Rings: A Natural Data-storage System”, in Biological Review pp. 52, 354.

  6. http://www.basketmakersco.org/.

  Fagus sylvatica: Traces

  1. Homer, The Odyssey,
book 13, lines 404-06.

  2. Glanville, Schools of the Boundary, pp. 96-97.

  3. Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in Poems, p. 14.

  Arbutus menziesii: Makeup Secrets of the Byzantine Madonnas

  1. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, p. 45.

  2. Ibid. p. 46.

  3. Ibid. p. 84.

  4. The discovery that Venetian artists had access to a wider range of ground glass than had previously been known is discussed by Barbara H. Berrie and Louisa C. Matthew in “Material Innovation and Artistic Invention: New Materials and New Colours in Renaissance Venetian Paintings” in Scientific Examination of Art, pp. 12-28. A shorter account is given in by Alexandra Goho in “Venetian Grinds: The Secret Behind Italian Renaissance Painters’ Brilliant Palettes,” in Science News, March 12, 2005, pp. 168-169.

  5. Kavanagh, Collected Poems, p. 130.

  Populus tremuloides: Cariboo Wedding

  1. Douglas, Meidinger, Pojar, eds. Illustrated Flora of British Columbia, Vol. 5.

  2. Parish, Coupé, Lloyd, eds. Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia, p. 55.

  3. The Stl’átl’lmx are the First Nations people of the middle Fraser Canyon or Lillooet area in British Columbia, members of the Interior Salish language family.

  4. We had Lorraine at Emmanuel on the CD player. This is a wonderful recording celebrating Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the late conductor Craig Smith with the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music in Boston, Massachusetts, released in 2008 by Emmanuel Music. The lines are from the aria “There in myrtle shades reclined” from Act 1, Scene 2 of Handel’s Hercules.

  5. Patrick Hannay died in 1629 after publishing several books, including The Happy Husband and Two elegies on the late death of our Soveraigne Queene Anne, with Epitaphes. This particular poem about the quaking aspen is cited in Maggie Campbell-Culver’s A Passion for Trees: The Legacy of John Evelyn, p.135.

  Arboretum: A Coda