Stay ConnectedThe Daily Gardener is a weekday podcast celebrating garden history, literature, and the small botanical stories that shape how we garden today.
Each episode follows an “on this day” format, uncovering the people, plants, books, and moments that have quietly influenced gardens across time.
New episodes are released Monday through Friday, and each show features a thoughtfully chosen garden book.
Copyright: Copyright ©2019-2020, Jennifer Ebeling|The Daily Gardener All rights reserved
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Today's Show NotesHere's an exercise to try.
Take a minute today and write a letter that describes your garden.
What do you love about it?
What do you enjoy doing there?
What are your favorite flowers?
What areas give you trouble?
Be honest.
Be specific.
Write it the way you'd tell a friend who's never seen your garden.
Then clip a few flowers from the beds.
Tuck them into the envelope.
Seal it.
Date it.
And put it away.
Now imagine doing this every year.
A stack of letters.
A record of seasons.
A portrait of the gardener you were in May of 2026.
And how different that gardener will be in May of 2036.
What a gift for a future you.
What a gift for your grandchildren.
Today's Garden History1752 Albrecht Daniel Thaer was born in Celle, Germany.
Before Albrecht was a man of the soil, he was a man of the sickbed.
At the University of Göttingen, he trained as a physician.
And later served as a court doctor for royalty.
He was very good at his job.
But eighteenth-century medicine was still primitive.
He often watched patients die from things he couldn't fix.
And it wore on him.
But then came the garden.
Attached to his house, Albrecht had a small plot.
Nothing grand.
Just a place to grow flowers in his spare hours.
What started as an amusement quickly became an obsession.
He treated the garden like a science class.
Experimenting with carnations and auriculas.
After his marriage, he expanded.
Obtaining four hectares outside the city gates as a wedding gift for his wife.
The garden became both ornamental.
And productive.
From the start, Albrecht kept records.
Every input.
Every output.
Every change in the soil.
And he used what he learned to teach others.
In 1804, he moved to Brandenburg.
And purchased an estate.
Gut Möglin.
Two years later, he founded the Möglin Agricultural Institute.
The first agricultural college in Prussia.
Often called the cradle of scientific agriculture.
Before Albrecht's work, farming was guided by feel.
By folklore.
By instinct.
Albrecht made it a science.
With textbooks.
Lectures.
And data.
His masterwork, Principles of Rational Agriculture, became the standard across Europe.
Earning him the title:
Father of Modern Scientific Agriculture.
After years of observation, Albrecht championed crop rotation.
Never grow the same thing in the same place twice.
The soil, like the body, needed variety.
And rest.
At the center of his thinking was humus.
That dark, crumbly, living layer of soil.
He believed plants fed on it.
He was wrong.
A tree doesn't eat the earth.
It builds itself from the sky.
From carbon dioxide.
From light.
But here's the thing.
Albrecht's advice still worked.
Because compost feeds the microbes.
And microbes build healthy soil.
Healthy soil grows strong plants.
He was wrong about the chemistry.
But right about the care.
Today, regenerative gardeners are circling back to everything he taught.
Feed the soil.
Not the plant.
Build the humus.
Close the loop.
Albrecht died at seventy-six.
On his beloved estate.
His eyesight had failed him the year before.
The great observer left in the dark.
In his final years, he asked to be buried in his garden.
On the shore of a clear pond.
Surrounded by trees he had planted himself.
He called those trees his children.
Over his grave, they placed a pyramid of flowers.
Not marble.
Not bronze.
Just petals.
One tribute said it best:
"The ornaments of nature's rich temple mourn for their departed friend."
1905 Federico Delpino died in Naples.
He was seventy-one years old.
Federico was born in 1833.
A fragile child.
Thin.
Prone to illness.
His mother's remedy was the garden.
She kept him outside for hours every day.
Not because she knew the science.
But because she knew her son.
And to her, Federico needed the garden.
It worked both ways.
The garden needed watching.
And Federico watched.
Ants climbing stems.
Bees disappearing into flowers.
Emerging dusted in yellow.
Years later, Federico would say that as a child, he had already begun to think about studying plants.
Life had other plans.
When his father died, Federico left school.
Took a job at a customs house.
Counting crates.
Stamping documents.
Supporting his family.
For fourteen years, he worked there.
But never left the garden behind.
In his free time, he studied nature.
No university.
No lab.
No mentor.
Just his eyes.
And his patience.
In 1867, he published Thoughts on Plant Biology.
And changed botany forever.
Stop naming the parts.
Start watching what the plant does.
Federico saw plant life as negotiation.
A night-blooming flower?
That's for moths.
A deep tube of nectar?
That's for butterflies.
Nectar, he said, was a wage.
Plants hire help.
They advertise with petals.
They pay with sugar.
And when the bee arrives, it carries pollen forward.
Work complete.
He also saw plants hiring bodyguards.
Acacias with hollow thorns.
Housing ants.
Feeding them.
And in return, the ants protected the tree.
He called this relationship myrmecophily.
Mutual benefit between ants and plants.
Federico wrote to Charles Darwin.
Darwin was fascinated.
And frustrated.
Because he couldn't read Italian.
Federico later became director of the Naples Botanic Garden.
A long way from the customs desk.
He once wrote:
"The plant is not a simple machine. It is an individual that acts with a purpose."
He died on this day in 1905.
Buried in Naples.
Among the Illustrious.
All because his mother sent a fragile boy outside.
And told him to stay.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the American poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, who died on this day in 1966.
Georgia was a central voice of the Harlem Renaissance.
By day, she worked a government job in Washington, D.C.
By night, she wrote.
After the house was quiet.
After the dishes were done.
She called herself a "writer by night."
As her reputation grew, her home became a gathering place.
Young Black poets.
Langston Hughes.
Countee Cullen.
Finding their voices.
But when her own heart grew heavy, Georgia turned to nature.
Here is her poem Hope:
The oak tarries long in the depth of the seed, While the sharp blades of clover rise and fall, And the plants of the garden fulfill their need, But the oak is silent and makes no call.
It fuses the strength of the sun and the soil, In the secret dark of the silent years, It weaves a garment of patient toil, And drinks of the rain of the valley's tears.
Till a hundred years are gone and past, And the bough is great and the trunk is vast!
Clover rises quickly.
Falls quickly.
But the oak waits.
Some days we are the clover.
Quick.
Useful.
And gone.
And some days we are the oak.
Doing our work quietly.
In our own time.
Book RecommendationThe Regenerative Landscaper by Erik Ohlsen
It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Regenerative Landscaper by Erik Ohlsen.
This book is part of Mother's Day Week here on The Daily Gardener.
And that means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next.
Erik opens his book with a scene.
You step out your back door.
Birdsong everywhere.
A basket on your arm.
And within ten minutes, it's full.
Vegetables.
Herbs.
Eggs.
Fruit.
And a bundle of flowers resting on top.
This is what Erik calls "a landscape of real abundance."
Not a fantasy.
But something to build.
Erik is a permaculture designer.
And his book is a field guide to creating landscapes that produce.
Not through force.
But through relationship.
He writes about soil health.
Water stewardship.
Biodiversity.
And resilience.
But what holds the book together is the work.
Years of building soil.
Planting trees whose fruit you may never see.
Designing water systems that slow rain.
And let it soak.
He asks a simple question:
What are you leaving behind?
Because healthy soil is not built in a season.
It is layered.
Fed.
Protected.
Observed.
And passed on.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1865 Edward Augustus Bowles was born in Enfield, England.
His friends called him Gussie.
He was the youngest of four children.
And once planned to become a priest.
But tragedy changed everything.
His sister Cornelia died at nineteen.
Then his brother John died at twenty-seven.
The same year.
Half the children in the house gone.
Before New Year's.
Gussie returned home.
To his parents.
And to the garden.
He never went back to Cambridge.
Never became a priest.
At some point that year, he pressed his initials into the brick wall of the kitchen garden.
E.A.B. 1887.
Not perfect.
Not polished.
Just a mark.
A young man saying:
I am still here.
Gussie spent the next sixty-seven years in that garden.
And those initials remain.
In the brick.
Near the gateway to the pond.
Still legible today.
Final ThoughtsMid-May has a strange quality.
Everything is moving.
And yet nothing has quite arrived.
The whole season still ahead.
It asks a different kind of patience.
Not the endurance of winter.
But the patience of watching something begin.
To come to life.
In its own way.
Maybe not the way you expected.
And that's the work of May.
To watch.
And to wait.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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Today's Show NotesThis is the time of year to throw a spring garden party.
It doesn't have to be fancy.
A few chairs. A pitcher of something cold. And a neighbor you haven't seen since the leaves came down.
The garden does most of the work.
It sets the table.
It arranges the flowers.
And it gives everyone something to talk about.
Because nothing starts a conversation faster than a bloom someone hasn't seen before.
You can offer to walk your guests through the beds.
Encourage them to touch something new and green.
Or smell an herb.
Have a little one pull a radish.
If you've got one ready.
Sharing your garden is the best gift of all.
And you don't have to give anything away.
Just open the gate.
And let people in.
Today's Garden History1906 Enid Annenberg Haupt was born in Chicago.
She once said,
"Nature is my religion. There is no life in concrete and paint."
Enid spent ninety-nine years living that statement.
Growing up, she was the fourth child of eight in the Annenberg family.
A dynasty built on publishing.
And the hard politics of American media.
She found her way into the orbit of orchids.
It started when her second husband, Ira Haupt, courted her with a single spray of cymbidium orchids.
And Enid—raised surrounded by money and power—looked at the orchid and saw something that meant more to her than all of it.
Beauty.
She was so smitten with orchids that for her wedding, she requested thirteen orchid plants instead of jewelry.
Professionally, Enid ran Seventeen magazine for sixteen years.
And transformed it into a serious primer on careers and literature for young women.
Reflecting on her active lifestyle, she once said, "I haven't the time for boredom."
But it was gardens that became the great work of her life.
When the Victorian conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden was about to be demolished, Enid sold jewelry from her personal collection.
To make the first five-million-dollar gift that saved it.
As she aged, Enid came to see plants as something people needed.
But also something that made the world a better place.
And she believed beauty was not just a luxury.
But a human right.
Over the years, Enid gave more than thirty-four million dollars to the Botanical Garden alone.
And she funded a four-acre garden on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Behind the Smithsonian Castle.
Above all, she wanted it to feel like it had always been there.
Waiting for visitors on the day it opened.
So that the average person could walk in and feel peace immediately.
When she bought George Washington's former estate in Virginia.
River Farm.
She turned around and donated it to the American Horticultural Society.
Enid also cared about accessibility.
And she built one of the first wheelchair-accessible gardens.
At a hospital.
Where children could reach the flowers from their chairs.
And when the money ran short on many of the projects she helped sponsor, Enid sold Impressionist paintings from her own private collection.
Her inheritance.
Monet. Van Gogh. Gauguin. Cézanne. Renoir.
Fifteen masterpieces.
For twenty-five million dollars.
Unlike many who found gardens, Enid believed that if you helped create a garden, you must endow it.
Because a gift without a future is just a burden.
One that often ends up lost to time.
By the time Enid died in 2005, she had given away more than one hundred and forty million dollars.
Nearly all of it to gardens and green spaces open to the public.
Which makes Enid Annenberg Haupt the greatest patron American horticulture has ever known.
2018 Beth Chatto died peacefully at her home in Elmstead Market, in Essex, England.
She was ninety-four years old.
Beth was born in 1923.
Her mother gave her her first trowel.
And that was the beginning.
When Beth married the botanist Andrew Chatto, his research into the origins of plants helped shape her thinking.
Her work centered on a single, radical idea:
Right plant.
Right place.
It sounds obvious now.
But it wasn't at the time.
In the 1950s, the British gardening ideal was a manicured lawn.
And stiff beds of annuals.
Ripped out every autumn.
And replanted every spring.
If the soil was wrong, you changed the soil.
If the ground was too wet, you drained it.
Beth said no to all of it.
She encouraged gardeners to flip the paradigm.
To find plants that already want to grow where they are.
In her late thirties, Beth began work on a difficult piece of land.
Boggy hollows. Parched gravel beds. Brambles. Scrub.
Her neighbors told her to forget it.
But Beth saw five gardens.
She dug out ponds.
Shaped them like clouds.
On the dry gravel, she planted silver-leafed plants.
That color told her everything she needed to know.
Those plants would not need pampering.
So she chose euphorbias.
Lavender.
And giant feathery grasses.
That caught the wind and light.
Like something breathing.
Beth once said,
"I don't want a garden that looks like a florist shop. I want a garden that looks like a piece of the world."
Nearly twenty years later, she brought her ideas to the Chelsea Flower Show.
The traditionalists were horrified.
Beth displayed grasses.
And common plants like cow parsley.
Things most people called weeds.
And yet she won the gold medal.
And then again.
In all, Beth won ten consecutive gold medals.
Her boldest move came when she was nearly seventy.
She planted a gravel garden on a former parking lot.
And never watered it.
Not once.
Outside of rain, it remains unwatered.
And still blooms today.
Beth credited her artistic eye to her friend, the painter Cedric Morris.
He taught her to see the garden as a canvas.
And her dearest garden friend was Christopher Lloyd.
Christo.
Of Great Dixter.
In the garden, they were opposites.
Beth was silver and restrained.
Christo was orange and chaos.
She once wrote to him:
"I feel like a tired old horse, plodding along… then comes your letter, like a sharp spur."
Beth's gardens.
Seven and a half acres in the Essex countryside.
Are now a National Heritage landscape.
And her granddaughter Julia runs the nursery today.
Her insight remains one of the quietest laws in modern gardening:
Right plant.
Right place.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the English poet and memoirist Laurie Lee, who died on this day in 1997.
Laurie grew up in the Slad Valley in Gloucestershire.
A small Cotswold village.
With steep lanes.
And half-wild gardens.
His memoir Cider with Rosie is a love letter to a vanishing rural world.
Written especially to honor his mother.
Here is Laurie remembering her in the garden:
"So with the family gone, Mother lived as she wished…
Slowly, snugly, she grew into her background, warm on her grassy bank, poking and peering among the flowery bushes, dishevelled and bright as they.
Serenely unkempt were those final years, free from conflict, doubt or dismay, while she reverted gently to a rustic simplicity as a moss-rose reverts to a wild one."
Earlier, Laurie wrote of her gift with roses:
"She could grow them anywhere, at any time, and they seemed to live longer for her…
She grew them with rough, almost slap-dash love, but her hands possessed such an understanding of their needs they seemed to turn to her like another sun."
Laurie's mother was not a formal gardener.
Or a designer.
She worked without a plan.
Welcomed self-seeders.
And forgave the weeds.
Laurie described her this way:
"All day she trotted to and fro, flushed and garrulous, pouring flowers into every pot and jug she could find… until [the] dim interior [of the house] seemed entirely possessed by the world outside — a still green pool flooding with honeyed tides of summer."
That passage is more than a description.
It's a restoration.
Word by word.
Laurie brings her back.
Book RecommendationIn a Green Shade by Allen Lacy
It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: In a Green Shade by Allen Lacy.
This book is part of Mother's Day Week here on The Daily Gardener.
And that means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next.
In a Green Shade gathers Allen's essays on gardens and gardeners.
Most of these pieces were originally written for a newsletter called Homeground.
A father-and-son project that Allen almost didn't start.
In the introduction, Allen tells the story:
"Soon after I gave up my column in the Times, my younger son, Michael, a magazine art director, began mumbling that he and I should publish a gardening newsletter together.
I resisted, but he persisted, entreating me to consider the wonders of desktop publishing and the miracles of software programs with strange names not in any known language.
Finally, on Christmas Eve, he nudged me again.
This time I said yes.
On New Year's Eve Michael dropped by to show me the design dummy for Homeground.
The newsletter comes out quarterly and runs to sixteen pages an issue.
It's now approaching its eighth year. I had new things to worry about, such as the costs of paper, advertising, and postage.
We started off with no subscribers, and then we got a few, and a few more every month.
We have had a satisfying renewal rate, but Martha Stewart need not fear our competition."
On the page, Allen writes like a gardener who has been working the same land for a very long time.
He doesn't give advice.
He simply shares what he notices.
And for Mother's Day Week, this book speaks to that gentle continuity.
Honoring the gardeners who came before us.
Who taught by example.
Often without ever naming what they were doing.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1907 Daphne du Maurier was born in London.
Most people know Daphne from her novel Rebecca.
With that unforgettable opening line:
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."
But Manderley was not entirely imagined.
It was a real place.
Menabilly.
On the southern coast of Cornwall.
Overlooking the sea.
As a young woman, Daphne stumbled upon the property.
Pushed through brambles.
Followed an overgrown path.
And when the house appeared, it felt like a dream.
She fell in love with it immediately.
With the wildness of the land.
Rhododendrons gone feral.
Rare specimens planted long ago.
All tangled together in what she called an alien marriage.
In 1943, Daphne leased Menabilly.
Moved in.
And began to tend it back to life.
Not redesigning it.
Simply living with it.
Walking its paths every day.
Writing her books in a small hut.
With the garden just outside her window.
Her daughters remembered that wherever she lived, the house was always full of flowers.
In one of her books, a child slips away from a garden party and into the woods.
And Daphne wrote:
"The woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognize her as the garden did."
For Daphne, gardens were not decoration.
They were witness.
The one place that truly knew you.
She lived at Menabilly for more than two decades.
And when the lease ended, she was heartbroken.
She had given the garden her best years.
And it had shaped her life's work in return.
Daphne du Maurier died in 1989.
She was eighty-one.
Final ThoughtsThis is the time of year when the garden does most of the work.
Take some time to enjoy it.
Grab a couple of chairs.
Something cold to drink.
And sit beside a neighbor you haven't seen in a while.
Fill the kiddie pool.
Add a little Epsom salt.
Soak your feet.
And suddenly.
It's a party.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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Today's Show NotesFor the past week, I've been working on dividing plants.
Redesigning and refreshing my cottage garden.
Little by little.
Anyway, I potted up extras.
And set them on the curb with a "free" sign.
They were all gone by noon.
And I kept thinking about that afterward.
Not the plants.
Although I'm sure they've found good homes.
But how easy it was.
How little it cost me to share them.
And how the very thing that made me feel most like a gardener this week wasn't anything I planted.
It was something I gave away.
Today's Garden History1924 William James Beal died peacefully in his sleep.
He was ninety-one years old.
William studied at Michigan and Harvard under Asa Gray before landing a professorship at Michigan State.
He taught botany for nearly four decades.
William was wiry and energetic.
And he was most famous for his long white beard.
And the broad-brimmed hat he always wore.
Whether he was in the garden or not.
True to form, William was not a small-talk man.
But if you handed him a glass of punch at a party, he would have probably handed you back a magnifying glass.
And pointed to a weed.
Asking, "What do you see?"
And he wouldn't have let you leave until you actually looked.
And told him.
William called his hands-on approach the New Botany.
In his approach, he threw out the textbooks.
And handed students living plants.
Their job was to observe them.
Not to memorize the Latin name for them.
And that simple idea—learning by doing, learning by experience—is still how most of us learn to garden.
When William was forty, he founded the W.J. Beal Botanic Garden on the Michigan State campus.
On the north bank of the Red Cedar River.
It is the oldest continuously operating university botanical garden in the country.
And visitors can still enter through the ornate metal gates.
But William did something else in 1879.
Something that is still going on today.
He filled twenty narrow-necked glass bottles.
Like pint jars.
With moist sand.
And fifty seeds each from twenty-one species.
Mostly common weeds from any Michigan field.
Then he buried them in a secret spot on campus.
About twenty inches deep.
Upside down.
And slanting.
So water wouldn't pool.
Every twenty years, a small group of Michigan State plant biologists are given a map.
To find a single bottle.
And dig it up.
In the middle of the night.
For secrecy.
And to keep the seeds from being exposed to sunlight.
Then, back at the lab, they empty out the seeds.
Plant them.
And see if they still grow.
Remarkably, many do.
With Verbascum, or mullein, proving the most resilient.
The next bottle is scheduled to be unearthed in 2040.
With the final one uncovered in the year 2100.
William was forty-six when he buried those bottles.
And he knew he would not live to see them all opened.
But that was the point.
It was a message written in seeds.
To young scientists he would never meet.
1935 William Robinson died peacefully at his home in Sussex, England.
He was ninety-six years old.
As a young man, he arrived in London totally penniless.
But what William did have was opinions.
And when it came to Victorian gardens, he disliked them.
Very much.
The rigid rows.
The geometric beds.
And the thousands of identical greenhouse flowers.
All ripped out at the end of every season.
William called it a mutilation.
Instead, he believed plants should be allowed to grow according to their nature.
If a flower thrives in a woodland, it should be planted under a tree.
If it loves wet feet, it should be planted by a pond.
Right plant.
Right place.
In 1870, William published his thoughts in a book called The Wild Garden.
And it shook English horticulture.
In it, William pushed back against the rage for exotic plants that needed hothouses.
And the constant cycle of bedding out.
Where flowers were replaced three to four times each season just to keep the look fresh.
To William, the entire approach was wasteful.
And soulless.
To name what he preferred, William coined the term wild garden.
His notion of growing hardy perennials.
Plants that come back year after year.
Three years later, William wrote another book.
The English Flower Garden.
And it was so popular and timeless that it has never gone out of print.
In midlife, William used the money from his writing to buy a crumbling Elizabethan home.
Gravetye Manor.
Nestled on a sandstone ridge about thirty miles south of London.
Once he got to work, he treated it as a giant canvas.
Planting thousands of wildflowers and spring-flowering bulbs.
Daffodils.
Scilla.
Anemones.
And giving the meadows around Gravetye the wild, unstyled beauty he had chased his whole life.
When William was seventy, he was paralyzed from the waist down after a serious fall on his way to church.
After the accident, he made Gravetye accessible for his wheelchair.
Including a little path system from inside his house.
And out to his beloved elliptical kitchen garden.
Undaunted, he gardened almost every day with the help of his staff.
For another twenty-six years.
Despite his spinal injury.
And he somehow managed to scatter bluebell seed until his final days.
In the end, William left Gravetye.
And all of its thousand acres.
To the people of England.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the American poet Amy Lowell, who died on this day in 1925.
Amy lived her entire life at Sevenels.
Her family's estate in Brookline, Massachusetts.
The home sat on ten acres of land.
With formal garden beds.
Long borders.
And plenty of lilacs planted deep into the New England soil.
Amy was a leader of the Imagist movement.
A school of poetry that was clear, precise, and rooted in the imagination.
Here's an excerpt from Amy Lowell's poem Lilacs:
"Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England.
Among your heart-shaped leaves Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing their little weak soft songs;In the crooks of your branches
You are everywhere. You were everywhere.
You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,
And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.
Maine knows you, Has for years and years; New Hampshire knows you, And Massachusetts and Vermont. Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island;
Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea.
You are brighter than apples, Sweeter than tulips, You are the smell of all Summers, Lilac in me because I am New England,
Because my roots are in it, Because my leaves are of it, Because my flowers are for it,
Because it is my country And I speak to it of itself
And sing of it with my own voice
Since certainly it is mine."
Amy never wanted to stray far from Brookline.
The estate and its lilac-bordered gardens weren't just scenery for her.
They were who she was.
Amy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the year she died.
For a collection she humorously called What's O'Clock, which includes her poem Lilacs.
Yet she never knew she'd won.
She died before anyone could tell her.
But I think she would have shrugged.
The lilacs were already enough.
Book RecommendationThe Glory of Roses by Allen Lacy
It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Glory of Roses by Allen Lacy.
It's Mother's Day Week here on The Daily Gardener.
And that means all of this week's Book Recommendations are devoted to garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next.
Allen Lacy was a garden writer who thought slowly.
And wrote carefully.
The kind of writer who could spend a whole chapter on one rose and make you feel like you'd spent an afternoon beside him.
In The Glory of Roses, Allen turns his gaze to a flower often burdened with symbolism.
But he doesn't reduce roses to romance.
Instead, he writes about the discipline roses require from gardeners.
The pruning.
The feeding.
And the patience.
In the book, Allen quotes Candace Wheeler, who wrote in 1902:
"[The rose has] a mysterious something in its nature — an inner fascination, a subtle witchery, a hidden charm which it has and other flowers have not — ensnares and holds the love of the world."
That's the rose, isn't it?
All of it together.
The fragrance.
The thorn.
And the beauty.
A kind of magic that other flowers just don't carry.
If someone in your life grows roses in their garden, or simply loves them as their favorite flower, this is the book to hand to them.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1812 Edward Lear was born in London.
The English artist and nonsense poet was the twentieth of twenty-one children.
And when his family ran out of money and couldn't care for him, his eldest sister Ann raised him.
Ann taught Edward to draw.
And drawing became his way forward.
By his early twenties, he was producing scientific illustrations for the Zoological Society in London.
Alongside that work came taxonomy.
The Latin names.
The rigid classifications.
The serious business of labeling everything properly.
Edward could take the drawing seriously.
But the naming struck him as a little absurd.
So he invented his own botanical Latin.
And illustrated his creations.
He drew people dangling upside down from a plant stem like bleeding hearts.
And called it Manypeeplia Upsidownia.
He drew a lily where tigers became the petals.
And called it Tigerlillia Terribilis.
And he drew a flower with a large, grumpy face.
And called it Phattfacia Stupenda.
Edward's creations were an immediate success.
The popularity of his nonsense books exceeded his serious art.
But he never complained about his work.
Or his chronic poor health.
Edward suffered from epilepsy.
Which he called "the Demons."
And from depression.
Which he called "the Morbids."
He moved repeatedly.
Searching for warmer climates.
From London to Rome.
To San Remo on the Italian coast.
Where he eventually settled.
And named his home Villa Emily.
At Villa Emily, Edward finally had a garden of his own.
With a fat tabby cat named Foss.
Who inspired his beloved poem The Owl and the Pussy-cat, which begins:
"The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note."
When the end came, his friends could not be with him.
Dear old Foss had died the summer before.
Edward Lear died alone in San Remo in 1888.
He was seventy-five years old.
And was buried beneath a fig tree.
Final ThoughtsThe garden gives you more than you can hold.
And you don't have to keep it all to yourself.
Nobody's keeping score.
Nobody's checking to see if you gave away your best division.
Or your scrappiest one.
The giving is the thing.
Most of us don't keep it all.
Most of us end up at the fence.
Or in a neighbor's yard.
Saying, "Here — take some."
It's part of gardening.
And it's what the best gardeners are known for.
Generosity.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Support The Daily Gardener Patreon Buy Me A Coffee Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community Today's Show Notes If you got plants from your kids this Mother's Day, here's a thought. Don't plant them all at once with everyone together. Plant them with one kid at a time. I called it YAMA time. You And Me Alone time. And it gave each of my four kids their own quiet garden moment with me. Because something happens when you're working side by side with just one child. It's quiet. Your hands are busy. And their little thoughts and curiosities start to bubble up to the surface. And little comments come out. Little questions. Little moments. And those were more precious to me than the plants themselves. I'm not saying I made four gardeners. I highly doubt I did. But I do know that each one of them has their own memory of gardening with me. And that, I think, they will remember. Today's Garden History 1808 Moses Ashley Curtis was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Moses came from a long tradition of clergymen-botanists. Men whose parish rounds made plants as familiar as congregants. On missionary journeys through the pine barrens and the damp coastal lowlands of North Carolina, Moses brought back a full portfolio of plants from every trip. Ferns pressed between the pages. Fungi sketched by lamplight. And orchids dried and labeled and sent north to Harvard. When his academic peers started acknowledging his expertise, Moses remarked: "Nothing surprised me more than to be called a botanist at first. Although I had accomplished the survey of the [flowering] plants of the State, I still felt that I was comparatively not a botanist." Yet Moses enjoyed many botanical firsts. Including the thrill of being the first person to describe a Venus flytrap catching its prey. It was a little bit of being in the right place at the right time. Because it just so happens that most of the world's wild Venus flytraps grow within seventy-five miles of Wilmington, North Carolina. In an 1834 paper about these carnivorous plants, Moses noted the function of the hairs, the digestive properties of the leaf, and the mucilaginous fluid that seemed to dissolve insects. He wrote: "It is very aptly compared to two upper eyelids joined at their bases. Each side of the leaf is a little concave on the inner side, where are placed three delicate, hair-like organs in such an order that an insect can hardly traverse it without interfering with one of them, when the two sides suddenly collapse and enclose the prey with a force surpassing an insect's efforts to escape. The fringe or hairs of the opposite sides of the leaf interlace, like the fingers of the two hands clasped together." "The little prisoner is not crushed and suddenly destroyed, as is sometimes supposed, for I have often liberated captive flies and spiders which sped away as fast as fear or joy could hasten them. At other times I have found them enveloped in a fluid of a mucilaginous consistence, which seems to act as a solvent, the insects being more or less consumed in it. It is not to be supposed, however, that such food is necessary to the existence of the plant, but like compost may increase its growth and vigor." During his lifetime, Moses also became the foremost authority on North American fungi. A field most botanists wouldn't touch. Fungi were unglamorous. And widely feared. Yet Moses walked straight into that fear. And made it his life's work. Once, when someone asked about his ambitions, he wrote back: "All I expect, and I may say, all I desire, is to settle down with the mediocrity." But Moses was not mediocre. He was sturdy in a field that killed its collectors young. And it wasn't because he played it safe. Moses hiked mountain ridges until his clothes were in tatters. And once met a local tailor named Silas McDowell. Silas mended his coat. And then joined him in the field. Because Silas happened to be an amateur botanist. Back home in North Carolina, Moses's wife Mary and their children processed his specimens. Pressing. Drying. Labeling. And they did it so well that no one ever guessed it was a family operation. But through it all, his greatest joy was walking in the woods. In contrast, the greatest heartbreak of his life happened during the Civil War. As the Union blockade tightened and North Carolina began to starve, Moses looked at the woods he loved around Hillsborough. And saw what no one else could see. A pantry. As he foraged the land within two miles of his own house, he had collected and eaten over forty different species of mushrooms. Moses immediately realized that if it was possible for him, foraging could work for anyone. So he wrote a book. To teach ordinary people how to identify and cook edible mushrooms. And his son Charles painted the color illustrations. So that someone with no training could look at the page and know what was safe to eat. But when the South ran out of paper and ink, the book was never printed. And though people would listen to Moses on Sundays, they would not follow him into the woods on Mondays. That is why his message about the edibles hiding in the forest never reached the people who needed it most. It was his biggest regret. That he couldn't help people who literally starved to death while food was growing all around them. For most of history, the world has wanted to pit science against God. And yet there were people like Moses who held both in the same mind. And the same life. And found no contradiction. Moses died in 1872. Twenty-five years after his death, his book on edible fungi was finally published in 1897. Today, his gravestone in the churchyard at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Hillsborough, North Carolina, reads simply: Moses Ashley Curtis, D.D. Priest and Scientist. 1794 Frances Stackhouse Acton was born. The British botanist and illustrator grew up at the elbow of one of England's most celebrated botanists. Her father, Thomas Andrew Knight. President of the Royal Horticultural Society. Fanny, as her family called her, later said those years working beside her father were the happiest of her life. While other girls were taught needlework, Fanny was taught to graft a pear tree. And cross-pollinate a strawberry. When she came of age, no woman could attend a university. But her father's orchard was on par with any degree. And the botanical illustrations she painted for his published works were the equivalent of a thesis. At eighteen, Fanny married Thomas Stackhouse. A man twenty-five years her senior. But they were both serious. And curious. And shared a passion for botany. For nearly twenty years, everything was going along just fine. Fanny had her husband. Her father. And a life full of the work she loved. But when Fanny was in her late thirties, she gradually lost her entire family. First, she lost a baby girl. The only child she would ever have. Then her mother-in-law and her husband died within about twelve months of each other. And the final blow was losing her father. The man who gave her a love for nature that would last her entire life. By the time Fanny was forty-one, she was alone in the world. But she had also inherited her husband's family estate. Acton Scott Hall in Shropshire. Along with all the wealth and responsibility that came with it. Fanny would spend the next forty-six years as a widow. But also as a woman fully prepared to live a life of service, science, and stewardship. Everything she learned at her father's elbow. The patience. The precision. The love of the land. Made her ready for her final four decades. Fanny seized her independence with both hands. And never let go. In an era when a man could say "I am self-made," but a woman could not, Fanny built a legacy that rested squarely on her own shoulders. She cared for her local village the way a mother cares for her family. Repairing what was broken. Building what was missing. And making sure no one around her went without. And when Fanny died in 1881 at eighty-six, a local newspaper wrote that her name had become "a household word for all that is good, kind, and benevolent." Fanny was buried at St. Margaret's Churchyard on the family estate. Right beside her husband. And the baby daughter they lost. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the Irish novelist William Trevor, born on this day in 1928. William wrote about quiet lives. And missed chances. In his work, gardens appear again and again. Not as decoration. But as memory. And inheritance. In his 1988 novel The Silence in the Garden, an old Irish estate is set inside a landscape he knew by heart. He wrote: "The high white gates stood open at the head of a sunless avenue… Moss and cropped grass softened the surface beneath the horse's hooves, making our journey eerily soundless. Beech trees curved their branches overhead. The shiny leaves of rhododendrons were part of a pervading greenness." Although William spent most of his life in Devon, his imagination never left rural Ireland. And William kept returning to it. Again and again. Just to be there once more. Book Recommendation My Gardening Life by Mary Berry It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: My Gardening Life by Mary Berry. It's Mother's Day Week here on The Daily Gardener. And that means all of this week's Book Recommendations are devoted to garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next. Most people know Mary Berry for cakes. And careful measurements. But in My Gardening Life, she steps outside the kitchen. And into the garden. Which she freely admits has always been her first love. This is not a technical manual. It is a memoir of seasons. About childhood gardens. About the solace of tending plants while raising a family. And the steady comfort of returning to the soil after life's disruptions. In the opening pages, Mary wrote: "As a child, gathering things in the wild is my first real recollection of enjoying plants and flowers. We used to go primrosing in spring, and often my grandparents would be there. My father's father, Grandpa Berry, was a canon of York and was very proper and correct. He used to come on these outings wearing an overcoat and a sort of trilby-style hat. Mum would make up a picnic. After we'd enjoyed a rock cake, we'd pick primroses and would tie them into bunches with lengths of wool. We'd put them in small vases around the house, and, most likely, I would take some to school the next day for my teacher to sweeten them up, because most of the time I was quite naughty. To this day, I still clearly remember the delicate smell of those primroses, and they remain one of my favourite flowers. They herald spring." Mary is an absolute delight. And this book shows how tending a garden can mirror tending a family. Both imperfect. And both enduring. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1939 Henri Correvon died. The Swiss alpine gardener spent his life devoted to the small, stubborn plants of the mountains. As a young boy, Henri lost his mother. And was raised by his grandfather. A nurseryman. It was in that nursery that Henri first fell in love with alpine plants. And he never let them go. As a garden designer, Henri built gardens on north-facing slopes. Where the air was thin. And the soil was mostly rock. Because he believed hardship made flowers more beautiful. Henri had an intimate understanding of plants. He could walk through a garden and toss out the secrets of a lifetime without breaking stride. Once, passing a group of acacias, he simply said: "Acacias hate lime." And kept walking. Just a small piece of hard-won wisdom. Shared in passing. Once, when a British diplomat visited his nursery in Geneva, Henri was unimpressed. But later, when that same diplomat identified a rare tulip by its leaves alone, before it had even bloomed, Henri lit up. He later said: "There is a Minister of Foreign Affairs in every country, but there is only one who can identify Tulipa clusiana by its leaves." That was Henri. He didn't care who you were. He cared what you knew. His nursery, Floraire. The place of flowers. Passed to his son. And then to his grandson. Three generations rooted in the same soil. In his final years, Henri began to go blind. He had spent eighty-five years seeing what no one else could see. Losing his sight was a loss he could not bear. So Henri went in for what should have been a straightforward operation. To help him see again. It did not work out that way. A former student later wrote: "He went to sleep happy in the thought that he should again see his beloved flowers, and he did not awake." Final Thoughts If you're standing in your garden this week with a flat of plants and your kids running about, try something simple. Have them help you. One at a time. Just you and them. Hand them the trowel. Show them where to dig. And then be quiet. You'll be amazed at what comes up. And I don't just mean the plants. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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Today's Show NotesMother's Day is this Sunday.
And if you're a gardener, you've probably had the experience of someone you love showing up with a plant you don't love.
It happens every year.
The intention is beautiful.
The plant is not what you'd choose.
So years ago, I started doing something different with my kids.
Before Mother's Day, I'd send them to the garden center with an assignment.
I'd say, bring me back two things that are green.
One that's a vine or a creeper.
And one that's spiky.
Or I'd tell them, just buy herbs.
You can never go wrong with herbs.
And when it came to flowers—because kids are always drawn to whatever's blooming—I'd give them a color palette.
This year I'm looking for purple, white, and pink.
Or this year, I only want blue flowers.
And when Mother's Day arrived, I got exactly what I wanted in the garden.
No gaudy surprises.
Just plants I actually loved.
And here's the thing.
It taught my kids to see plants through my lens.
It made the whole experience something we shared.
Instead of something I had to pretend about.
So if someone in your life wants to give you a plant this weekend, tell them what you like.
Be specific.
Say, get me something green.
Something that doesn't flower.
Like lady's mantle.
Or something aromatic.
Like lavender or thyme.
Givers want to get it right.
They just need us to say what right looks like.
Today's Garden History1698 Henry Baker was born.
The English naturalist never planned to become a scientist.
As a young man, he was apprenticed to a bookseller in London.
But at twenty-two, Henry went to visit relatives for a few weeks.
And stayed for nine years.
What kept him was a child.
The family's eight-year-old daughter, Jane Forster, had been born deaf.
Henry became fascinated.
Not with her limitation.
But with the possibility of reaching her.
Incredibly, Henry figured out how to teach Jane to speak.
To read lips.
And to move through the hearing world.
Then he taught her two younger siblings.
It worked so well that word spread.
And the work became his career.
Henry spent years teaching the deaf children of the British aristocracy.
Charging high fees.
And guarding his methods behind legal bonds.
Every family sworn to secrecy.
It made him wealthy.
And it made Henry one of the most unusual scientists of his century.
Once the teaching made him secure, Henry turned to the microscope.
For a new challenge.
And everything changed again.
In 1742, Henry wrote The Microscope Made Easy.
The first practical guide to help ordinary people use a microscope at home.
But he didn't write it for professors.
Henry wrote it for the curious.
And he believed the microscope gave humans a "new sense" to add to the other five.
A way of seeing into another world.
One day, Henry studied pond water and discovered that the sparkling light in the sea at night was caused by tiny living creatures.
Another time, he watched a hydra get cut in half.
And grow back whole.
Suddenly, everything seemed new under the lens.
And so everything was up for grabs.
That is why Henry also examined pollen.
Crystals.
And the invisible architecture of seeds.
And through his connections at the Royal Society, he helped introduce the Alpine strawberry and rhubarb to England.
Plants that crossed borders because Henry built relationships around them.
For his work, Henry won the Copley Medal.
He also helped found the Society of Arts.
And when Henry died, he left money to the Royal Society to fund an annual lecture.
The Bakerian Lecture.
Still delivered every year.
Henry once wrote:
"The works of nature are the only source of true knowledge."
And in his poem The Universe, he asked us to remember how small we really are:
"And what is Man? A crawling worm! An insect of a day!"
I reflect on Henry whenever life gets too big.
I imagine him at his microscope.
Using his sixth sense to really look at things.
A grain of pollen.
A drop of water.
Tiny things that held the whole universe.
And against the whole universe, our troubles seem small.
Henry Baker knew that.
1842 Emil Christian Hansen was born.
The Danish botanist grew up very poor.
His father was a French Foreign Legion soldier turned alcoholic drifter.
And his mother was a laundress.
By thirteen, even though Emil was the brightest student in his class, he had to leave school to help feed his family.
Later, in his twenties, Emil finished high school.
And found a mentor in a local botanist named Peter Nielsen.
Who showed him the world under a microscope.
And through that lens, Emil fell in love with fungi.
By thirty-four, he won a university gold medal for an essay on Danish mushrooms.
And in 1879, he was appointed to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen.
A position Emil would hold for the rest of his life.
In the 1800s, brewing beer was a gamble.
Entire batches would go bitter or oily without warning.
They called it "beer sickness."
And nobody could explain it.
Emil looked at the yeast under a microscope.
And saw the problem immediately.
It wasn't one organism.
It was a crowd.
Like a garden bed full of weeds and wheat all tangled together.
Wild yeasts.
Uninvited.
Invisible.
Contaminating every batch.
Emil found a single cell.
Just one perfect cell.
And he isolated it.
Then he put it in its own clean jar of sugar water.
And let it multiply.
One became two.
Two became millions.
And because they all descended from that one pure original cell, they were identical.
No weeds.
No contamination.
Just pure.
Emil called it Saccharomyces carlsbergensis.
Named for the brewery that gave him a chance.
It was 1883.
And Emil and Carlsberg did not patent it.
They gave it away.
Free.
To every brewer in the world.
The man who grew up with nothing made the most generous discovery of his career.
And simply handed it out over the fence.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who died on this day in 1880.
Gustave spent most of his life at his family estate in Croisset.
Along the Seine in Normandy.
He was known as the Hermit of Croisset.
Gustave was a large, booming man.
With a walrus mustache.
And a temperament that swung between thunder and silence.
When he paced the lime-tree walk in his garden—his allée de tilleuls—Gustave shouted his sentences aloud to test their rhythm.
As a gardener and a writer, he believed that if a flower was going to be written into a story, it had better be seasonally correct.
In Madame Bovary, Gustave used gardens to mirror the inner life of his characters.
Like when Emma's early hopes begin to wither in the overgrown garden at Tostes.
He wrote:
"The garden, longer than it was wide, ran between two mud walls … the espaliers were dying, the boxwood was growing wild, and a few lilacs, choked by the nettles, were losing their leaves."
Gustave once wrote that anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Which explains why he walked that same lime-tree path every day of his adult life.
The same trees.
The same worn stones.
And every morning he went back.
Because it was interesting.
And because he kept showing up.
And somewhere in the dailiness, he fell in love with it.
Book RecommendationThe Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng.
It's Mother's Day Week here on The Daily Gardener.
And that means all of this week's Book Recommendations are devoted to garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next.
Set in post-war Malaya, the story centers around a Japanese garden built in the Cameron Highlands.
It follows a woman who returns to the mountains years after the war.
To study under a former gardener to the Emperor of Japan.
The garden Tan builds in this novel is shaped by the principles of Zen design.
Moss.
Stone.
Water.
And deliberate emptiness.
Every rock placement carries intention.
And every clipped branch is restraint made visible.
The garden becomes a vessel for silence.
And for memory.
Tan's novel reminds us that gardens are not always decorative.
Sometimes they are containers for sorrow.
And sometimes they are the place where healing begins.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
2012 Maurice Sendak died.
The American author and illustrator spent his later decades in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
In a quiet house with old maples outside his studio window.
He walked his dogs.
And gardened.
Near the end of his life, he called the world "beautiful, beautiful".
And said it was "a blessing to grow old."
He was in love with life.
All of it.
And that love had started early.
Maurice grew up in Brooklyn.
The son of Polish Jewish immigrants.
Shadowed by stories of relatives lost in the Holocaust.
Mortality arrived early in his imagination.
So did trees.
In Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice gave us a bedroom that becomes a forest.
A small boy is sent to bed without supper.
And the walls of his room "became the world all around."
Vines hung from the ceiling.
The floor softened into earth.
And a private loneliness grew leaves.
The transformation was not loud.
It happened slowly.
A room thickening with green.
A child's anger given teeth and claws.
And a kingdom to rule.
Maurice understood that children do not need protection from their feelings.
They need somewhere to let those feelings loose.
In the studio, he drew trees with quiet devotion.
Cross-hatched trunks.
Heavy canopies.
Branches that feel older than the page.
When Maurice died on this day in 2012, spring was well underway in Connecticut.
Leaves were widening.
And the light filtered green through the glass windows of his room.
Final ThoughtsIf someone wants to give you a garden gift this Mother's Day, let them.
But feel free to tell them what you see when you imagine your garden at its best.
Give them a color.
And a direction.
Something green and aromatic.
Or something that climbs.
It's not about control.
It's about invitation.
When you share what you love, you teach the people around you to see your garden the way you see it.
And that gift—telling someone what you love and watching them bring it home—is one of the best things a gardener can do.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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Today's Show NotesAnd here's something a little different to carry into the garden today.
A riddle from the nineteenth century:
"My first we all possess; my second we all should gain; my whole you'll surely guess: 'tis one of Flora's train."
The answer?
Heart's-ease.
Heart's-ease is an old name for the wild pansy.
A flower that was said to ease an aching heart.
And if you think about it, that's not so far from the truth.
Most of us don't go to the garden because everything is fine.
We go because something needs settling.
And somehow, kneeling in the dirt, hands in the soil, the ache gets a little quieter.
The old herbalists may not have had the science.
But they had the instinct exactly right.
Today's Garden History1700 Gerard van Swieten was born.
The Dutch physician and botanist was orphaned at twelve.
As a young man in Leiden, Gerard found Herman Boerhaave, the most famous medical teacher in Europe.
He quickly became his finest student.
And for thirty years, Gerard wrote down everything his teacher said.
Five volumes.
Every word preserved.
As if losing even one was something he couldn't bear.
When a professorship opened at Leiden, Gerard was passed over.
Not for lack of brilliance.
But because he was Catholic in a Protestant country.
By then, he had a wife and children of his own.
The day Empress Maria Theresa invited him to Vienna, Gerard almost refused.
Because he feared trading his freedom for what he called a "slavish existence" at court.
And that is why Gerard would not go until the Empress promised, in writing, that his wife and children would be provided for if anything happened to him.
The path forward was clear once he knew his children would never face the hard-scrabble life he had faced as an orphan at twelve.
In Vienna, Gerard got to work almost immediately.
He tore out the old medical faculty and replaced it with bedside teaching and clinical observation.
In a move of sweeping generosity, Gerard opened the Imperial Library to the public.
And in 1754, Gerard founded a botanical garden at the university.
Not for beauty.
But for medicine.
Every plant was named.
Every specimen was classified.
And every medical student was required to learn botany before they could practice.
Because Gerard knew that healing starts with plants that were alive and growing.
The following year, the Empress sent him east to investigate reports of vampire attacks in the provinces.
Gerard arrived with a notebook and cold logic.
After he examined the so-called evidence, he explained it all away as simply natural decomposition, fermentation, and the chemistry of buried bodies.
After his visit, Gerard called the panic a "barbarism of ignorance," and in response, Maria Theresa banned vampire rituals across the empire.
Gerard died in Vienna in 1772.
He was seventy-two.
He left behind a functional medicinal garden along with systems that did not disappear overnight.
Today, the mahogany genus is named in Gerard van Swieten's honor.
Swietenia.
So every time you see mahogany, that is the botanical world's way of remembering the man who started out as a twelve-year-old orphan from Leiden and then spent his life making sure nothing was lost.
1870 Howard Evarts Weed was born.
The American landscape architect started out as a young entomologist in Mississippi, specializing in the insects that decimated plants.
Grain weevils.
Borers.
The small relentless things that farmers could not see until the damage was done.
But somewhere in those years of cataloging destruction, Howard got tired of focusing on damage.
Instead, he wanted to create and build something new and uplifting and alive.
And that is when Howard decided to pursue landscape architecture.
He specialized in creating beautiful cemeteries.
In 1912, Howard published Modern Park Cemeteries.
A book that was part design manual.
And part moral argument.
In it, he called rows of monuments and markers a "museum of bad taste."
Instead, he wanted the headstones gone and the lawns opened up.
He envisioned a place where trees, shrubs, and perennials were planted in vast sweeps of green so beautiful that, in Howard's own words, "the purpose of the place is forgotten."
In his futuristic view, Howard wanted the living to walk into a cemetery and feel a sense of peace.
Not dread.
Or morbidity.
That same year, Howard began raising irises.
They became the greatest joy of his life.
As his collection grew, he founded Weed's National Iris Gardens in Beaverton, Oregon.
And yes, that is his real last name.
The garden featured six acres of blooms that visitors described as a rainbow on a hilltop.
Instead of planting in careful little clusters, Howard planted thousands of iris just to find one new creation worthy of naming.
Popular irises like Azure Glow, Blue Skyscraper, and Beaverton.
These irises all offered huge, dramatic drifts of color that flooded the senses.
Howard died in Beaverton in 1946.
He was seventy-six.
His son Thurlow carried the garden on after he was gone.
Howard Weed spent the first half of his life trying to save plants from destruction.
And the second half proving that beauty could outlast it.
Six acres at a time.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from the English novelist and children's author Alison Uttley, born on this day in 1884.
Alison grew up on a farm in Derbyshire, where fields rose steeply and the seasons ruled the day.
As a young woman, Alison studied physics.
She trained to measure light and matter before she ever knew she would become a future writer of fairy tales, including the Little Grey Rabbit series.
After her husband's death, and through long seasons of sorrow, Alison returned again and again to the memory of her childhood farm and its gates, gardens, and windows.
The following passage comes from her semi-autobiographical novel The Country Child, published in 1931, where a young Susan Garland looks out upon her family garden:
"The parlour window looked out on the roses that nodded close by, and the garden with its wicket gate.
Sometimes the gate opened, and her mother went in for a bunch of carrots, a stick of celery, a spray of parsley, unaware of the still ghostlike face and the brown eyes gazing down at her.
Every window at the farm had its own peculiar magic for Susan.
Each was a peep-hole into some enchanted scene — none was homely or commonplace or dull."
Alison died in 1976 at the age of ninety-one.
And although her farm in Derbyshire was long gone, she never stopped writing her way back to it.
Book RecommendationFlower House Mexico by Pili Fuentes
This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener.
And that means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature a journey through gardens beyond our borders, exploring how culture, climate, and history shape landscapes around the world.
Every January, floral designers from around the world gather in Mexico for Flower House Mexico.
A public art event and floral showhouse founded by Pili herself.
Each designer is given a room.
And they fill it with flowers.
Pili's book chronicles the work of more than twenty of these designers and their flower-room creations.
It is part floral-arranging guide.
Part look-book.
With detailed instruction on choosing flowers, extending bloom life, and using non-floral materials like ceramics, textiles, and candles to create atmosphere.
And woven throughout is the symbolism and importance of flowers in Mexican cultural and spiritual life.
The photography by Corbin Gurkin pulses with magenta, orange, indigo, and lime.
With bougainvillea against cobalt walls, courtyard fountains, and clay pots warming in the sun.
In one passage, Pili features the work of New York floral designer Ariella Chezar, who transformed a sterile apartment using thirteen thousand marigolds:
"Using a chicken wire armature and 13,000 marigolds, Ariella and her team constructed a massive serpent-like form that wove throughout the apartment.
The flowers started as a concentrated burst within the room and cascaded outward, spilling onto the floor and overtaking the once-bland hallway in an immersive tide of orange.
Many florists approach bold hues with caution and add only a single pop of color before retreating into neutrals.
Ariella, however, typically takes the opposite approach.
Ariella revels in saturation and allows tones to intensify and resonate."
Pili's book expands what a garden can look like and challenges the assumption that beauty means restraint.
In Mexico, flowers bring joy and grow loudly.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1954 Edward Augustus Bowles died.
The English plantsman was called Gussie by his friends and family.
He lived all eighty-nine years at Myddelton House in Enfield, England.
He did not roam the Himalayas.
He did not chase orchids through jungle mist.
He mostly stayed home.
As a young man, Gussie had intended to enter the Church.
But failing eyesight closed that door.
And he knelt in borders instead and found his devotion there.
His friend, the plant hunter Reginald Farrer, called him "Little Father Augustus," and the name fit.
By 1901, Gussie was growing more than a hundred species and varieties of Crocus in carefully tended beds.
In 1924, he published A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum for Gardeners.
Complete with his own watercolor illustrations.
Patient.
And exact.
Gussie treated a rare alpine species and a common daisy with the same courtly regard.
People called him the Crocus King.
Not because he collected them.
But because he knew them.
The way you know old friends.
At a garden party, you would not find Gussie at the center of the lawn.
He would be crouched at the margin.
Tweed rumpled.
Pockets bulging with a magnifying glass and a stray bulb he meant to plant.
Gussie kept a garden bed he referred to as the "Lunatic Asylum."
This was where he planted the twisted, the variegated, the imperfect.
Hazels that contorted.
Leaves that misbehaved.
He gave the outcasts a home.
Gussie never married and had no children.
But he opened his garden to local boys who needed steady hands and quiet work.
They became known as the Bowles' Boys.
Gussie taught them to sketch.
And to read the veins of a leaf as if it were scripture.
And in his later years, when his sight dimmed almost entirely, he could still identify his crocuses by scent and by taste.
When Gussie died in early May of 1954, the spring bulbs were already thinning.
Snowdrops—Galanthus—had long since bowed away.
And crocus petals were giving themselves back to green.
At Myddelton House, the beds Gussie shaped kept going without him.
The way a garden does when someone has loved it long enough.
Final ThoughtsHeart's-ease.
The little wild pansy that the old herbalists believed could settle what ached.
And maybe they were right.
Not because the flower has any special power.
But because the garden does.
You go out.
You kneel down.
You put your hands in the soil.
And something that was loud inside you gets a little quieter.
A little less worrisome.
And a little less painful.
That's heart's-ease.
And it has been growing in gardens for a very long time.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Support The Daily Gardener Patreon Buy Me A Coffee Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community Today's Show Notes All things are difficult before they're easy. And I think about that every May. Because right now, the garden is all effort. You're hauling bags of soil. You're staking things. You're tidying up. You're buying the plants and dreaming the dreams. There is so much to do. And nothing feels easy right now. It's a lot of work. And that's the right feeling for this part of the season. The easy comes later. Or I should say, easier. It actually does get easier. But you don't get there without this part—the watching, the waiting, the second-guessing, and the exhaustion. So if your garden looks like a construction zone this morning, that's May. And yes, it's not easy. Today's Garden History 1742 Jean Senebier was born in Geneva, a city built on calm water and careful theology. As a young man, Jean trained as a pastor, and by his early thirties, he became the chief librarian of the Republic of Geneva, where he settled into a quiet life of books and public duty. Across the city, a wealthy naturalist named Charles Bonnet had spent years studying leaves submerged in water. He noticed that they produced bubbles—tiny, silver, mysterious. But he couldn't identify the gas. When Charles's vision started to go, he needed someone with patience, with method, and with a librarian's obsession for detail. So he created a competition on what he called "the art of observing." When Jean entered and won the grand prize, Charles found his protégé and began mentoring him by giving Jean the question that would define his life: What were those bubbles? That quest for the answer meant Jean's days split in two. In the mornings, he worked in the library—cataloging manuscripts and helping students find volumes in the stacks. By midday, he was chasing light, moving glass jars filled with water and submerged leaves to windows and terraces, wherever the sun was strongest. Then he watched and waited for bubbles to appear. In his work, Jean became a botanical detective. And the bubbles were clues that revealed everything he needed to know. When Jean took away the carbon dioxide, the bubbles stopped. When he doubled it, the bubbles doubled, too. After three long decades of searching, Jean eventually found his answer. And after all that time, it's fitting that one of Jean's most famous quotes is: "Observation and experiment are two sisters who help each other." But he also knew the work was not easy. It demanded both stamina and courage. Jean once wrote to Bonnet with admiration for his mentorship, saying: "It was in studying you that I learned how to read from nature, and to paint her, but in studying you I despaired forever of resembling you; [you have mastered] the art of seeing well." The scientific truths Jean discovered are canon today. Plants are not made of soil. They're made of air and light. Sunshine turned to life. And while we exhale carbon dioxide, plants inhale it as food. In turn, plants breathe out oxygen, and we inhale it to stay alive. Plants and people. We need each other to live. In 1791, Jean wrote poetically about man's perfect symbiotic relationship with the natural world: "I see my blood form in a spike of wheat... and wood in winter gives back the heat, fire and light it has stolen from the sun." As for Jean, all that time staring into bright, sunlit water and squinting to count those tiny silver bubbles came with a price. It cost him his vision. Jean worried about the loss of sight for other naturalists and even warned them to take breaks when they worked to avoid eyestrain. Speaking from his own experience, he advised: "When the senses are fatigued, they become unfaithful." In his old age, Jean didn't leave his desk. But he needed help getting to it. And from that post, he dictated his work to the assistants in the library. That's how, essentially in the dark, Jean finished his five-volume masterpiece on plant life. Jean died on the last day of October in 1809. He was sixty-seven. It is especially poignant now to go back to a time when Jean was in the middle of it all—counting tiny bubbles, trying to figure out what it all meant. He wrote about the experience in a book called The Art of Observing. In it, Jean wrote: "[The observer] regards Nature as a book, in which it is necessary to attempt to read the characters with rigor without presuming to imagine what signification they ought ultimately to have." I think about those words every time I am confused or unsure about what to do in the garden. If nature is a book, then when I'm stuck, I just need to spend a little more time reading her. 1889 Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach died in Hamburg, Germany. Heinrich was sixty-six years old. From the time he was a little boy, Heinrich grew up in the Dresden Botanical Garden because his father, Heinrich Sr., was the garden's director. As a boy, Heinrich learned to draw plants by hand. He discovered how to see the architecture inside a petal and learned how to spy the story inside a dried specimen. By his late thirties, Heinrich had followed in his father's footsteps and worked at the Botanical Gardens in Hamburg, where he was the expert plant hunters trusted to name orchids. When crates of orchids arrived from all over the world, Heinrich felt like a boy again. And when he wrote about orchids, his descriptions were vivid and relatable. On the Mooreana, an extraordinary variety of L. Locusta Orchid, Heinrich described it this way: "Green sepals, green petals, green lip, green callus, green ovary, green bract, green sheath, green peduncle, green bulbs, green leaves—just as green as a green grasshopper or the dress of some Viennese ladies." Over twenty-five years, Heinrich named more orchids than almost anyone of his time and helped create the frenzy known as the Orchid Craze. He named each orchid like he would his own child, often naming them to honor his friends who collected the plants and nearly died finding them. He also named the plants after wealthy orchid lovers who built glass cathedrals to house them. Still, sometimes he simply named them after one of their many stunning features. Heinrich's closest ally was the great orchid collector Frederick Sander. Frederick sent his best finds to Heinrich first. And in return, Heinrich wrote such beautiful descriptions that he helped Frederick prosper by fueling the very craze that made them both famous. When Heinrich learned that the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew had appointed a new orchid expert, he took it as a serious blow. Robert Allen Rolfe was a self-taught former garden boy who had risen through the ranks. While Heinrich had spent his entire life drawing, promoting, and naming orchids, it felt like a complete and utter dismissal. When Heinrich died in 1889, he left his entire collection—over seventy thousand specimens—to the Natural History Museum in Vienna with one single condition. The entire collection had to remain sealed from the world for twenty-five years. In his will, he wrote: "My herbarium and my botanical library, my instruments, collection of seeds, etc. accrue to the Imperial Hof Museum in Vienna, under the condition that the preserved orchids and drawings of orchids shall not be exhibited before twenty-five years from the date of my death have elapsed. Until this time my collection shall be preserved in sealed cases. In the event of the Vienna Institution declining to observe these conditions, the collection falls under the same conditions to the Botanical Garden at Upsala. Should the last-mentioned institution decline the legacy, then to the Grayean Herbarium in Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. If declined by that institution, then to the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, but always under the same conditions, viz., of being sealed up for twenty-five years, in order that the inevitable destruction of the costly collection, resulting from the present craze for orchids, may be avoided." This was the choice of a man who loved something too much to simply hand it over to people he felt weren't worthy. But when the seals were finally broken at the Imperial Hof Museum in May of 1914, the orchid craze was over and the world was on the brink of war. A botanist named Friedrich Kränzlin from the Natural History Museum was sent to catalog the collection and spent years trying to decode Heinrich's private shorthand. Friedrich's biggest job was comparing Heinrich's records against twenty-five years of independent work, since botany had moved on after Heinrich died. And that's how Friedrich's audit made orchid classification even better. Heinrich's collection somehow survived both world wars. And because the specimens were locked away for a quarter of a century, they are unusually well preserved compared to many other collections from the late 1800s. Ultimately, when Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach locked that door, he ended up opening it wider than he ever intended. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the Belgian playwright and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck, who died on this day in 1949. Maurice grew up in Ghent, a city of dark water and cold stone in northern Belgium. As a young man, Maurice became one of the most celebrated playwrights in Europe and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. Maurice once wrote: "Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?" For Maurice, that question wasn't rhetorical. It lived in everything he did. And his deep appreciation for beauty and the natural world explains the joy and mystery Maurice found in a greenhouse. For years, Maurice kept bees and studied flowers with the same devotion he once gave to plays. In 1907, Maurice published a book called The Intelligence of Flowers. He wrote: "We shall see that the flower sets man a prodigious example of insubmission, courage, perseverance and ingenuity." When Maurice looked at flowers, he didn't see something delicate. He saw something that grew where it shouldn't be able to—pushed through soil, stone, drought, and shade, adapting constantly, bending, turning, reaching for light. A flower never complains or gives up. Maurice went on to say that if we applied just half of the same effort to the things that "crush us, such as pain, old age and death" the world would be a different place. For much of his adult life, Maurice lived in a restored Norman abbey at Saint-Wandrille, where he wrote in silence every morning in a cold stone room and then spent his afternoons with his bees. Of them, he wrote: "Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue Work except in secrecy." And: "If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live." Later in life, Maurice wrote a play called The Blue Bird. In it, two children search for an ethereal blue bird and the source of all happiness. Their travels take them far away. But then, eventually, they find the bluebird in the most unexpected place—back at home. Similarly, Maurice spent a lifetime searching for answers. Yet he spent his final years at a villa above the Mediterranean, surrounded by lavender and salt-crusted cypress trees. In the end, I think Maurice knew where the answers lived all along. I sometimes find myself thinking about the bluebird and Maurice with his flowers and bees when I wonder if there's something else I should be doing with my life instead of spending so much time in the garden. But I think, like Maurice, I already know the answer in my heart. Book Recommendation The Gardens of William Morris by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart, and John Simmons It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Gardens of William Morris by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart, and John Simmons. This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener. That means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature a journey through gardens beyond our borders—exploring how culture, climate, and history shape landscapes around the world. William Morris was a British designer, poet, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement. He believed that beauty and usefulness were inseparable. William once wrote: "I know a little garden-close, set thick with lily and red rose, where I would wander if I might from dewy dawn to dewy night." The authors open a window into the private gardens connected to William's life. Red House. Kelmscott Manor. And the places where climbing roses, dense borders, and fruit trees were not merely decoration. They were a green philosophy William could walk through and gather from. The book includes over fifty examples of William's designs shown alongside the real plants that inspired them. For William Morris, daily life always began in the garden. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1970 Ellen Schulz Quillin died in San Antonio, Texas. The American botanist, author, and museum director was eighty-two years old. Ellen grew up on a farm in Saginaw, Michigan, the daughter of German immigrants. She lost her mother young and left Michigan at twenty-nine for a teaching job in Texas. She never went back. In San Antonio, Ellen became a high school science teacher who loved wildflowers so much that she wrote a field guide listing five hundred different species. In the preface, Ellen described the Texas landscape this way: "Texas is a land of flowers. From the time the first warm breath of spring awakens sleeping buds in the south until the last purple aster is nipped by the frost in the north, the state is a vast garden of color and beauty." As a young teacher, Ellen wanted her students to see that garden. So Ellen helped organize a fundraiser, selling bluebonnets, until the class had raised five thousand dollars—enough to buy a natural history collection that became the foundation of the Witte Museum, which opened in 1926 with Ellen as its director. Ellen ran that museum for thirty-four years. In 1927, Ellen married Roy Quillin, an ornithologist who loved birds the way she loved wildflowers. On weekends, they disappeared into the Texas brush together—Roy looking up, and Ellen looking down. When the Depression hit, Ellen worked at the Witte for a dollar a year. Her operating budget was almost nothing. To keep the museum alive, Ellen cleverly built a Reptile Garden. She paid ranchers a dime a pound for live rattlesnakes and charged visitors ten cents to see them. And the garden paid for itself in one week. Ellen wasn't just moved by nature. She felt it was a divine connection. Ellen once wrote: "How often, in the early morning light, we pause in the out of doors, in the natural surroundings of our garden, and feel close to life, and to our Creator." When she retired in 1960, the city of San Antonio honored Ellen with her own day. She had proven herself a daughter of Texas. Today, the Witte Museum is still standing. And Ellen's original collection is still inside. And yes, there are still live snakes to draw the crowds. Final Thoughts Things are always difficult before they're easy. It's just part of the deal with May. So here are some ideas on how to deal with it. Work in the morning when it's cooler. And maybe only work in one- or two-hour shifts. Whatever's right for you. Bring a fan outside and have it blow on you, because mosquitoes aren't good flyers. Use sunscreen. And drink plenty of water. Putting together a str…
Full show notes at the publisherSubscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Support The Daily Gardener Patreon Buy Me A Coffee Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community Today's Show Notes I ran across a little poem the other day by Thomas Edward Brown, who was born on the Isle of Man on this day in 1830. This poem is what Thomas is remembered for. It's called My Garden, and it opens with the line: "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!" "God wot" is an old English way of saying "God knows." So a garden is a lovesome thing. God knows. And what a claim. Not that a garden is a useful thing, or a productive thing, or even a beautiful thing—although it is all of those. But a lovesome thing. A thing that draws love out of you and makes you more loving for having tended it. And that feels right for May. Because May is when the garden starts to love you back. The seeds you trusted to the cold are up. The perennials you weren't sure had survived are actually doing fine. May is the month when the garden says to us, loud and clear: I have received everything you gave me. Look around. So if you're stepping outside today, enjoy your lovesome garden and let it be the thing that softens you. Today's Garden History 1854 Charles Wesley Powell was born. Except, Charles was originally born Charles Leslie Pullen, in Richmond, Virginia. His second act came later. As a young man, Charles lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was well-regarded and connected. His father was a Deputy Sheriff there, and his connections helped Charles become the city's secretary to the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners. In that role, Charles collected money for the city and delivered it to the trustee. But in 1890, a grand jury found Charles responsible for a shortage in the accounts. Thousands of dollars. Unaccounted for over several years. Although Charles maintained his innocence, he could not explain where the money went. That's how Charles ended up convicted of fraud. And although at least nine more indictments waited for him, Charles didn't stay to face them. Instead, Charles packed up his family and went south to New Orleans, where he lived with his wife Addie and their four girls for nearly a decade. Along the way, Charles once told a reporter he had a little greenhouse there, and that he always was interested in flowers. With the turn of the new century in 1900, Charles's life started to fall apart. His father died in July in Houma, Louisiana, deep in the bayou, sixty miles southwest of New Orleans. And then, just seven months later, his beloved wife Addie died from kidney failure at forty-two years old. Six years later, in January 1907, he arrived in Panama as Charles Wesley Powell, during the earliest construction days of the Canal. It was the perfect place to start again. And I suspect he found the inspiration for his new name from John Wesley Powell—the man who ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, who went into unmapped territory and came back transformed and celebrated. His fame peaked in the 1890s, the same decade when Charles left Memphis in shame. When Charles first arrived in Panama, he worked first as a quinine dispenser for the Isthmian Canal Commission—getting established and learning the place. By 1910, the canal was nearly finished. Charles settled on the lower slopes of Cerro Ancón, the hill that overlooked Panama City, and built a garden at his house there. Orchids growing in baskets suspended from a great mango tree on the patio. Panama's habitat is perfect for orchids. Not the showy corsage orchids. The tiny ones. The botanicals. Flowers no bigger than a pinhead, clinging to bark with nothing but air and rain to keep them alive. In the wild, most of these orchids bloom a hundred feet up in the canopy—visible to almost no one on the ground. Charles brought them to eye level and became obsessed with them. Charles once said he believed his orchids knew him. "When I used to return from a trip into the jungle, I'd go into my garden and all the flowers would look tired and dejected. Then I used to wander about, speaking to this plant and that one, removing a twig, feeling the stem. And before I had been in the garden ten minutes I would notice a marked change in the plants, which seemed to spruce up and stiffen their wilted petals." By 1915, Charles was sending orchid specimens to the top collectors and institutions in the world. He taught himself taxonomy, and his personal collection grew to seven thousand plants. By his sixties, Charles was crawling through jungle mud on his hands and knees, hacking through brush with a machete to reach specimens deep in the forest. Charles loved to tell how, at sixty-six, he once shimmied out over a five-hundred-foot ravine on a half-dead branch to reach a single orchid. And even when the branch cracked beneath him, he didn't let go of the plant. Though six years later, he told a reporter in St. Louis he had scrambled back to earth like a scared chipmunk. After Charles opened his garden to the public, visitors to Panama soon learned there was a garden they should seek out. As soon as they passed through the vine-covered wire fence, they found themselves surrounded by thousands of flowering orchids—most species they would otherwise need to climb a tree or venture into the jungle to see. The collection was so impressive that the German botanist Rudolf Schlechter based an entire ninety-five-page publication on the orchids Charles collected in Panama. Soon, dozens of species were named for Charles Wesley Powell, all carrying the name powellii, the latinized version of his adopted last name. Had he never made the change, the orchids would have been named Pullenii, for his original family name of Pullen. But Charles had turned that page. Near the end of his life, Charles's daughter Adelaide moved to Panama, where she too worked for the Canal Company. But then, suddenly, she died. She was just thirty-six years old. When Adelaide was born, she was named for her mother, the wife Charles lost in New Orleans twenty-four years earlier. That was the moment he decided to start again. And he had. But with the loss of his daughter, Charles felt his own time was slipping away. And he needed to make sure his orchids would be cared for long after he was gone. So he made arrangements to gift them all to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. The following year, in 1926, Charles Wesley Powell returned to the States to see his orchids arrive at their new home. Charles told the reporters: "I am proud to be a part of Shaw's Garden." "That slat covering on the orchid houses is remarkable. They have had slat coverings in England for a long time, but none to compare with this. The sun percolates through quarter-inch openings between the slats." For two whole days, Charles walked the greenhouses at Shaw's Garden, absorbed in talking orchids with the horticulturist George Pring—barely stopping and barely sleeping. Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tennessee, as people read about the man responsible for the finest orchid collection in the world, they had absolutely no clue they were reading about the man they knew as Charles Leslie Pullen, who had served fifteen days in the Shelby County workhouse thirty-five years earlier. After the careful transfer of his orchids, Charles returned home to Panama. To an empty garden. He died the following year. Charles was seventy-three years old and was buried at the Corozal American Cemetery in Panama, just like his daughter, Adelaide. Today, most seasoned gardeners love orchids for their beauty and their long-lasting, symmetrical blooms. But after learning about Charles and his life before Panama, I find myself thinking more and more about their role in his redemption—and how one hundred years after his life ended, we only remember the good part. Charles Wesley Powell. Orchid hunter. 1861 Thomas Hayton Mawson was born. The British landscape architect grew up in Lancashire. He was the second of four children. At twelve, he left school to begin working. When his father died four years later, a sixteen-year-old Thomas moved to London alone to better support his mother and younger brothers. When he found work in nurseries and with landscape gardeners, he learned about soil and stone experientially and how to work alongside the people he worked with. By his mid-twenties, Thomas had settled in the Lake District with his wife Anna Prentice, a trained nurse and the daughter of a surgeon. There, Thomas opened a nursery and then a design practice. Commission by commission, he began to reshape how England thought about the relationship between house and land. For Thomas, a garden should wrap itself around the house. The stone terrace should flow into the path. The path should meet the hedge. And the hedge should frame a view—a mountain, a gate, a statue—so that even a small garden feels like a journey. Thomas was also a writer. In 1900, he published The Art and Craft of Garden Making, a book that quickly became the guiding text for Edwardian landscape design. It went through five editions. As Thomas matured in his career, his work expanded beyond private estates. He designed public parks, insisting that working people deserved the same green space the wealthy could afford. He even won an international competition to design the gardens for the Peace Palace at The Hague. Then came Parkinson's. Thomas was diagnosed in 1923. Slowly, he handed over the reins of his business to his eldest son Edward. Anna, the nurse Thomas had married nearly forty years earlier, cared for him through the long, narrowing decade that followed. But Thomas did not stop. When he could no longer hold a pen, Thomas dictated his autobiography to Edward, summing up his fifty-year career as "most congenial." In 1929, Thomas became the first president of the Landscape Institute, the professional body that still governs landscape architecture in Britain. Four years later, Thomas died on a November day, with one final garden season behind him. It was fitting that Thomas was buried in Bowness Cemetery, overlooking the Lake District landscapes that had launched his career. And the parks Thomas designed still do exactly what he intended. They give ordinary people something green. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear journal reflections from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, born on this day in 1813. Søren loved to walk, and he believed it not only kept him healthy but also cured him of ailments and illnesses as they came along. As Søren walked the streets of Copenhagen every day of his adult life, he connected to nature—to lilies, to birds, and to silence. The therapeutic value of his daily habit was not lost on him. Early in his journals, Søren wrote: "Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it." Søren also loved walking in fall the best. He wrote: "Here is why I so much prefer autumn to spring. In the autumn one looks at heaven. In the spring at the earth." In his 1849 meditation The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Søren focused on his favorite flower, the lily. Søren wrote: "So it is also with the lily; it is silent and waits. It does not impatiently ask, 'When will spring come?' because it knows that spring will come in due season, knows that it would be least useful to itself if it were allowed to determine the seasons of the year. It does not ask, 'When will we get rain?' or 'When will we get sunshine?' or say, 'Now we have had too much rain,' or 'Now it is too hot.' It does not ask in advance what kind of a summer it will be this year, how long or how short. No, it is silent and waits—that is how simple it is." Søren walked every day until his body would not let him anymore. He died at forty-two. And my thoughts immediately drift to Søren every time I almost talk myself out of a walk. Book Recommendation Napoleon's Garden Island by Donal P. McCracken It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Napoleon's Garden Island by Donal P. McCracken. This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener, and that means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature gardens from around the world. In the book, we're taken to St. Helena, the remote Atlantic island where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled after Waterloo in 1815. When Napoleon arrived on the night of October seventeenth, his first bed ashore was in the boarding house of the island's Company gardener, Henry Porteous. The little house was crowded—cramped rooms meant to hold as many officers as possible. Needless to say, the conqueror of Europe did not stay a second night. Over the five years and ten months that followed, Napoleon settled at Longwood House. There, he turned to gardening. He planted trees. Designed paths. And reshaped the grounds into something of his own. The book traces how confinement became cultivation. A man stripped of empire and power, left with nothing but the soil beneath him. In a rare moment of candor, Napoleon admitted to General Gaspard Gourgaud: "The life that I live here on St. Helena, if I were not a captive, would suit me very well. I should like to live in the country. I should like to see the soil improved by others, for I do not know enough about gardening to improve it myself. That kind of thing is the noblest existence." Through this book, we're given a gift. A Napoleon most histories ignore. A man with nowhere left to go, who turned to the garden and called gardening itself the noblest existence. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1998 Nicole Maxwell died. The American ethnobotanist grew up in a strict Christian Science family in San Francisco. Even as a young girl, she understood what it meant to follow the rules. When Nicole broke her arm, her family refused medical treatment and took her to church to pray. The pain was unbearable. Nicole eventually found a doctor herself. As a young adult, Nicole left the church and married, moving to France. In Paris, she trained as a dancer and moved through drawing rooms where orchids stood in crystal vases and conversation rarely ventured beyond the weather. Soon Nicole realized she had traded one rigid life for another. Then, at forty, after a quiet reckoning with herself, Nicole packed her bags and traveled to the Amazon rainforest. There she found her calling. Nicole was not collecting plants for display. She was studying how people healed with them. During her time in the rainforest, Nicole spent long hours sitting with healers among the Witoto and the Jívaro. Listening. She learned that the forest was not wilderness in the romantic sense. It was a dispensary. Leaves cooled fever. Bark stopped bleeding. And sap closed wounds. Once, while clearing brush, Nicole gashed her arm badly with a machete. Her guide stepped into the forest and returned with dark red sap. The guide gave some for her to drink and poured the rest into the wound. The bleeding slowed. And then stopped. Within days, the cut healed without a scar. That's why, as forests were cleared for cattle and timber, Nicole saw more than trees disappearing. The Green Pharmacy, as Nicole called it, lived not only in plants but in the memory and daily life of the indigenous people. In their language. And in the apprenticeships between elders and children. Burn an acre of forest, and what was lost was not just trees, but a lineage of knowing. Nicole tried to preserve as much knowledge as she could…
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Today's Show NotesEarly May is a strange time in the garden.
Nothing announces itself.
A branch that was bare three days ago now has leaves the size of a squirrel's ear.
The groundcover that seemed nonexistent last week is suddenly there—not because anything dramatic happened, but because it kept going while you weren't with it.
That's how gardens work.
They don't wait for you. They don't perform.
They just keep going and growing.
And the ones who feel it most are the gardeners who keep showing up.
Morning after morning. Same path. Same bed. Same gate.
For no other reason than because they're there.
And it's always good to check.
Today's Garden History1556 Luca Ghini died.
The Italian botanist spent most of his life doing something no one had done before.
He collected plants, pressed them flat, dried them between sheets of paper, and glued them down.
What Luca created is what we now call a herbarium—a collection of preserved plants mounted, labeled, and stored so they can be studied long after the season ends.
Before Luca, if a scientist wanted to study a plant away from the field, the best option was a drawing.
Luca's pressed specimens changed that.
For the first time, a botanist could hold the plant itself—dried and flattened, but real.
For centuries after Luca, botanists followed his lead, fanning out to collect specimens before the plants were gone.
Luca taught first in Bologna and later at Pisa.
He loved to teach by showing.
He brought his dried specimens into the lecture hall and passed them around so students could compare one leaf to another.
While Luca was at Pisa, he also founded one of the first university botanic gardens in the world.
The garden served his teaching—a living collection that could be studied alongside the herbarium Luca was always expanding.
Today, remarkably, none of Luca's original herbarium sheets survive.
But we know about them because his students carried the practice forward.
They pressed plants, labeled them, and stored them.
And the method spread—from botanist to botanist, generation after generation.
1893 Mary Sutherland was born.
The English botanist was born in London and studied at the University College of North Wales in Bangor.
When she graduated in 1916, Mary became the first woman in the world to earn a degree in forestry.
She was twenty-three.
But there was a war going on.
So Mary joined the Women's National Land Army, taking on the work of a forester—the work the men who had gone to war could no longer do.
After the war, Mary stayed in forestry.
But budget cuts kept finding her, and her gender did not help matters.
In 1923, after she lost her position in Britain, she moved to New Zealand.
There, the State Forest Service hired Mary as the first professional woman on their staff.
Still, the rules were different for Mary.
When male rangers went into the field, they always camped together.
But Mary was not allowed to follow suit.
The Service required her to stay in hotels.
And when the cost of that became inconvenient, they simply stopped sending Mary out.
That is how Mary became a grounded forester.
Not because she could not do the work—but because no one had planned on a woman doing the job.
Still, she continued.
And when another round of cuts came, Mary moved to the Dominion Museum in Wellington.
Her title there was clerk.
But the work she did was all botany-based.
Mary collected more than nine hundred plant specimens for the museum herbarium—pressing plants the same way Luca Ghini had done centuries earlier.
Mary attended the founding meeting of the New Zealand Institute of Foresters and later designed their official seal—a sprig of native rimu bearing ripe fruit.
Not the timber. Not the trunk.
But the fruit.
The part that carries the future forward.
In 1954, at sixty-one years old, Mary was still working in the field when she fell ill and died the following March.
Today, the Mary Sutherland Scholarship supports a young forestry student—someone just beginning the path Mary helped cut through the trees.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the English novelist and poet Charlotte Turner Smith, born on this day in 1749.
Charlotte's life was not gentle.
She married at fifteen to help resolve her father's debts.
By 1783, her husband was in debtor's prison, and Charlotte chose to go with him.
While she lived there in confinement, she began writing in earnest.
There, Charlotte produced the first of ten novels and the sonnets that would later influence Wordsworth and Coleridge.
And incredibly, she wrote her books while raising twelve children and enduring lawsuits, financial strain, and a grief that never quite lifted.
But Charlotte also knew plants—the hedgerows, moss, lichens, and the small, bright wildflowers of the English downs.
In her writing, she did not speak vaguely of blossoms.
She named them.
In her poem Reflections on Some Drawings of Plants, Charlotte turned to painting flowers because describing grief was harder.
She wrote:
"I can in groups these mimic flowers compose, These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew;
Catch the soft blush that warms the early Rose, Or the pale Iris cloud with veins of blue;
Copy the scallop'd leaves, and downy stems, And bid the pencil's varied shades arrest
Spring's humid buds, and Summer's musky gems: But, save the portrait on my bleeding breast, I have no semblance of that form adored..."
Charlotte could render every petal—but not the child she had just lost.
When Charlotte was fifty-seven, her husband died in debtor's prison.
The inheritance that might have saved her family remained trapped in the courts.
A few months later, Charlotte herself died.
Rheumatoid arthritis had taken nearly everything.
Near the end, the physical act of writing was nearly impossible.
Even so, her final poem, Beachy Head, was left unfinished.
Yet it includes sixty-four endnotes filled with the Latin names of wildflowers Charlotte loved all her life.
They are not loose ends.
They are the record of a woman who loved the natural world until the moment she could no longer hold a pen.
Book RecommendationIt's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Ninfa by Charles Quest-Ritson.
This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener, a week devoted to gardens beyond our borders.
Places where culture, climate, and history shape the landscape.
In Ninfa, Charles tells the story of what is often called the most romantic garden in the world.
He spent twenty years studying the garden before writing his book.
Ninfa began as a ghost town—marshy ground, malaria, and crumbling towers.
Then the Caetani family began planting into the ruins.
Roses climbed broken walls. Wisteria spilled over arches. Streams ran where streets once stood.
Charles does not rush the story.
Instead, he explains the drainage, the politics, the planting choices, and the slow restoration that turned a ruined town into one of the world's most extraordinary gardens.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1929 Gertrude Clarke Nuttall died.
The British botanist and writer passed away at Ivy House on Holywell Hill in St. Albans, England.
She was sixty-one years old.
Gertrude was born in Leicester in 1867.
Because her father was a surgeon, she grew up in a household where the human body was something to be studied carefully.
And when she began her professional work, she brought that same devotion to the natural world.
In 1891, Gertrude became one of the first women in Britain to earn a bachelor's degree in botany from Bangor University.
Two years later, she married Dr. Charles Nuttall and turned her attention to nature writing.
In 1911, Gertrude published Wild Flowers as They Grow—seven complete volumes, all illustrated with some of the earliest color photographs of British plants.
Two years later, she published Trees and How They Grow.
This time, she focused on just twenty-four species—not as specimens to measure, but as lives to follow.
Of the elder, Gertrude wrote that its spirit was that of an old woman, and that "no forester in olden days would dare to cut it down or even lop off a branch without first asking her permission three times over."
And of the willow, Salix, she wrote:
"To the botanist, as well as to the poet, the Willow is a sad subject."
Gertrude knew trees.
She understood how their roots held the soil, how their branches moved in the wind, and how they appeared in spring after the first warmth of the year.
When Gertrude died on this day in 1929, the willows and the elder would have been in leaf.
Though no species bear her name, the name Nuttall appears across hundreds of botanical entries—but those honor the American naturalist Thomas Nuttall.
Gertrude's books are rare collectibles now.
And if you happen to find one, you just might discover a leaf or two still marking the pages.
Final ThoughtsMay is a strange time in the garden.
Nothing is happening—and then suddenly everything is happening.
The days can give you a bit of whiplash.
But that is how gardens work in spring.
They do not wait for perfect weather.
They simply keep going and growing.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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Today's Show NotesIt's the last day of April.
And if you've been waiting for the right moment to tuck pansies into a pot or a border, this is it.
Pansies love a cool spring.
They want these exact mornings—bright but not hot, damp but not heavy.
Give them a little shade by afternoon, and they will bloom their hearts out for weeks.
The word pansy comes from the French pensée, meaning thought.
Bruce Springsteen once left pansies at the grave of Robert Ingersoll.
With this note:
"I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma."
A pansy.
As a thought.
An idea.
And the start of action.
Today's Garden History1873 William Starling Sullivant died.
The American botanist passed away in Columbus, Ohio—the same city where he was born, the same place his father once surveyed when it was still frontier land.
William became the father of American bryology, the study of mosses.
While others chased orchids and towering conifers, William crouched, peered through lenses, and studied plants most people stepped over.
And what he found was an entire world.
He described nearly three hundred species of mosses and liverworts and wrote the bryophyte sections for Asa Gray's Manual of Botany, a foundational guide for plant identification.
Then came his masterpiece, Icones Muscorum, published in 1864—one hundred twenty-nine copper plates of North American mosses, drawn with scrupulous accuracy.
Every frond.
Every spore capsule.
His work still matters today.
But his life was not quiet.
His first wife, Jane, died just months after their wedding.
At twenty, he left his studies when his father died suddenly and stepped in to run the family business.
Years later, he met Eliza Griscom Wheeler.
She ignited his botanical work.
Collected alongside him.
Discovered species on her own.
The genus Sullivantia bears his name.
But it was Eliza who found those delicate, cliff-dwelling plants.
When Eliza died of cholera in 1850, William had a wreath of Sullivantia carved into her headstone.
And then he returned to his mosses.
To the tiny worlds of green that brought him solace.
If you have ever planted Sullivant's Milkweed—that smooth, rose-pink Asclepias that monarchs adore—that is for William.
And if you have grown Black-Eyed Susan called Goldsturm, tracing back to Rudbeckia fulgida variety sullivantii, that is him, too.
1827 David Douglas reached the summit of Athabasca Pass.
The Scottish botanist stood waist-deep in snow in the Canadian Rockies.
Carrying seeds, dried plants, and soaking journals.
His moccasins were rotting.
His eyesight already failing.
He was just twenty-eight.
On that same date, twenty-four years earlier, the Louisiana Purchase was signed.
A line drawn on paper.
And here was David.
Walking it.
Freezing.
Starving.
Collecting plants.
The Indigenous people he traveled among—the Chinook and the Kalapuya—called him the Grass Man.
They watched him wander, fixated on what others ignored.
In his journal that day, he wrote:
"The snow being very soft, and the weather warm, we were often waist-deep. The view from the top is most terrific. I was so much struck with the beauty of the scenery. I ascended a mountain on the North side. This I named Mount Brown, in honour of R. Brown, Esquire, the illustrious botanist."
David introduced hundreds of species to Western gardens.
Douglas fir.
Sitka spruce.
Flowering currant.
California poppies.
Lupines.
Penstemons.
Oregon grape.
Plants we pass every day.
Carried home in a saddlebag.
He died seven years later in Hawaii.
Falling into a cattle pit trap.
Killed by a bull.
Thirty-five years old.
Every seed he sent back was paid for in labor, in danger, and in devotion to finding what nature held.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the American writer Annie Dillard, born on this day in 1945.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
A year spent watching, crawling through grasses, tracking insects, and seeing what others missed.
She wrote:
"All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water.
If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring.
At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium.
Now: if you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin.
The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood."
Green.
Red.
One atom apart.
She reminds us that every leaf is a miracle.
And that what feeds a plant and what feeds us are cousins.
Book RecommendationIt's time to Grow That Garden Library with today's book: Fresh Cuts by Edwina von Gal.
This book is part of Modern Masters Week here on The Daily Gardener, a week devoted to contemporary voices who are reshaping how we garden and how we care for the land.
Edwina is known for championing naturalistic landscapes—gardens that feel loose and alive, yet are thoughtfully designed.
Fresh Cuts celebrates meadow-style planting, ecological awareness, and a gentler touch on the landscape.
In Edwina's gardens, grasses bend, perennials weave, and nothing stands rigidly at attention.
Edwina asks gardeners to rethink what "finished" looks like.
Not perfection, but movement.
Not control, but balance.
She also writes beautifully about the small details hidden in trees and buds.
For example, she wrote:
"Buds are a big part of a tree's identity. They contain next year's leaves, flowers, and twigs.
When I was but a bud myself in my life with plants, I once confused Acer platanoides—the Norway maple—with Acer saccharum, the sugar maple.
This is no way to impress a nurseryman. But the buds tell the story.
Those of the Norway maple are larger and greener.
You just have to know where to look."
Edwina reminds us that somehow the smallest details often reveal the most.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1966 Roland McMillan Harper died.
The American botanist passed away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
He was eighty-seven years old.
He was born in Maine but moved south as a boy, his family hoping the warmer air would save him from tuberculosis.
He spent the next sixty years traveling through the longleaf pine region.
A hundred thousand miles.
On foot.
By train.
What he understood was something no one else believed.
That forests need fire.
The longleaf pine begins as a grass stage—a low clump of needles.
Fire passes over it harmlessly, clearing space and making room.
Without fire, the forest chokes.
He wrote:
"Fire is as much a part of the environment of the longleaf pine as is the soil or the rain."
They called him a crank.
He kept going.
For decades.
Late in life, he married Mary Susan Wigley.
When he died, she organized everything.
Seven thousand photographs.
Hundreds of boxes of notes.
So nothing he saw would be lost.
Today, a wildflower bears his name: Harperocallis flava.
Harper's Beauty.
Final ThoughtsThe pansy was named for a thought.
And the garden is where thoughts have room to rise.
Like a long drive or a hot shower, it is a place where something settles into clarity.
You plant.
You weed.
You harvest.
And somewhere in that motion, you let go of what you were carrying.
The garden holds it for you.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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