“When I discovered a plant, I sat down to make its acquaintance.”
John Muir (1838-1914)
The recent exhibition of enlarged botanical images of selected John Muir botanical specimens at Bedford Gallery, Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, presented a “close up” view of some gorgeous plants collected by Muir in his many years of travel and study as a naturalist. Besides the oversized digitally enhanced images of botanical specimens, the exhibition also includes selected actual specimens collected by Muir, and samples of Muir’s notebooks and journals, showing “first hand” his powers of description and ability to sketch the flora and fauna that intrigued him throughout his life. Included among these is a very appealing description and sketch of a “long eared California hare” and also an impressive drawing of the Davidson Glacier, Alaska, which Muir made in 1900.
This traveling exhibition, which will be shown internationally at various venues, follows Muir’s travels throughout Canada, Indiana, the American southeast, California, and Alaska. Several hundred of the plant specimens collected by Muir were scanned at locations throughout North America and digitally enhanced by Pleasant Hill photographer Stephen Joseph. Bonnie Gisel, Muir scholar and the exhibition’s curator, has commented on these specimens and their images in a beautiful catalog.
We here in the San Francisco Bay Area are very fortunate to be able to call John Muir one of our own, as of course he lived and worked in his very attractive house and farm in Martinez, a designated National Historic Site that is readily available to any Bay Area resident or visitor who takes an hour’s time to go to the site. In fact, on my recent visit to Muir’s residence and farm, some of the enhanced and enlarged images of specimens like those in the Bedford Gallery exhibition were also on display on the second floor of Muir’s mansion. Some of the specimens are from Muir’s herbarium at the site. To visit this mansion and grounds is a real treat, for it brings vividly to life Muir’s significant contribution as naturalist, explorer, conservationist, botanist, farmer and rancher, inventor, and lover of nature.
The 17-room Victorian house was not actually built by John Muir, but by his father-in-law, Dr. John Strentzel, in 1882. Muir and his wife Louie lived about a mile away in a small Dutch colonial-style house, from 1880 until Dr. Strentzel’s death in 1890. On a visit to this mansion, you can walk the rooms where Muir and his family lived and where he worked. You can see his books in their bookcases in the library, in the hallways, and in his famous study where he led the heroic effort to save Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. You can walk around the very interesting kitchen, where Muir’s Chinese cook, Ah Fong, had total command, and you can look into the pantry full of vintage kitchen items, tools, and implements. You can climb up through the attic to the bell tower, with its pleasant panoramic view, and where you can happily ring the bell.
A visit to this historic site is particularly appropriate at this time because, in celebration of Earth Day 2011 and John Muir’s birthday (April 21, 1838), on Saturday, April 16 from 10:00 AM to 4;00 PM, the site will offer free admission and host more than 50 exhibitors, with “earth friendly information and hands-on activities for all ages,” including “John Muir” on site who will tell tales and share his birthday cake.
Muir’s powers of observation and description are extraordinary. His books are full of salient and poignant examples, but a simple example will suffice here. After I had written the following poem about a water ouzel I saw on a family outing to Frazier Falls in Plumas County, published in my recent book of poems, The Fifth World (AuthorHouse: 2011), I discovered John Muir’s description “The Water Ouzel,” from his The Mountains of California (1894).
Bird
Among the bushes by the waterfall, the ouzel darts,
Dives and struggles under water, walking upstream,
Purchasing bug and foothold simultaneously.
This is a water world marvel of adaptation and
Selectivity, a dream creature of fancy and
Imagination. Mossy stone, emerald vision, bright
Flits and myriad reflection, a dark movement
Under rock and a scurry taken. Quick exit
And hop to penetrate slip of light again.
No known solution for this problem: The water
Of all possibility I have opened, which closes
Instantly behind me like the liquid invisible
Zipper of another world.
The Water Ouzel
“When feeding in such places he wades up-stream, and often while his head is under water the swift current is deflected upward along the glossy curves of his neck and shoulders, in the form of a clear, crystalline shell, which fairly incloses him like a bell-glass, the shell being broken and reformed as he lifts and dips his head; while ever and anon he sidles out to where the too powerful current carries him off his feet; then he dexterously rises on the wing and goes gleaning again in shallower places.”
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