Mnemonic (35 page)

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 early 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.)