January 22, 2026 Francis Bacon, Francis Guthrie, Winter Garden Design at Anglesey Abbey, People With Dirty Hands by Robin Chotzinoff, and Bill and Ben

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Today’s Show Notes

Before we step fully into today’s garden history, a brief note from the weather ledger:

1985 A deep cold wave swept through Florida, destroying nearly ninety percent of the state’s citrus crop.

Years of growth, lost in a single night.

It is a reminder gardeners understand well: abundance is always provisional.

Today’s Garden History

1561 Francis Bacon was born.

He gave us one of the most enduring garden essays ever written: Of Gardens.

Bacon did not treat gardening as a pleasant aside. He called it “the purest of human pleasures” and “the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man.”

He imagined the truly learned life as one that required more than books: a garden, a library, a laboratory, and a cabinet of curiosities — a place for wonder, objects, and close observation.

Bacon had the kind of sensibility gardeners recognize instantly: learning is not just what you read. It is what you notice, what you tend, what you return to day after day.

Bacon also understood something gardeners know instinctively: tending living things disciplines the mind.

He wrote,

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

So today, if winter has you feeling a little cramped indoors, Bacon is essentially giving you permission to treat green things like medicine.

1831 Francis Guthrie was born.

He is remembered for asking a deceptively simple question in 1852 while coloring a map: what is the minimum number of colors needed so that no neighboring regions touch?

That curious question became known as the Four Colour Problem, and it puzzled mathematicians for more than a century, until computers finally confirmed Guthrie’s solution in 1976.

But Guthrie himself never saw the resolution.

He published little. He moved to South Africa. He taught. He collected plants. He lectured on botany.

He lived a life of attention rather than acclaim.

Plants were later named in his honor — living things carrying forward the memory of a man who noticed patterns, boundaries, and relationships.

Guthrie’s story begins the way so many garden insights do: with someone looking closely, noticing edges, adjacency, and pattern.

The same habits gardeners practice every day.

So today’s history gives us two companions: Bacon, who argued that green space restores the spirit, and Guthrie, who shows how careful looking can quietly reshape how we understand the world.

Unearthed Words

2015 The Guardian shared winter garden design wisdom from David Jordan, the assistant head gardener at Anglesey Abbey.

Jordan’s advice was simple and bracing: the winter garden succeeds not by excess, but by clarity.

Start with a tree whose bark holds the light. Add a shrub that offers scent or color when little else does. Let the ground rest.

At Anglesey, one of the most powerful sights is a stand of West Himalayan birches — pale trunks against dark earth, nothing competing, nothing hurried.

Winter, like good design, rewards restraint.

Book Recommendation

People With Dirty Hands by Robin Chotzinoff

Published in 1996, this book by Robin Chotzinoff is built from portraits of gardeners, gardens, and moments rather than instructions.

Chotzinoff is a journalist by training, and the book quietly reveals why people keep gardening long after logic says they should stop.

Chotzinoff writes:

“Gardening is all there is, while you’re doing it.”

And:

“There are no child prodigy gardeners.”

The book reinforces garden wisdom through a series of intimate profiles. One of the most memorable is Zelma, who spends her days at a picnic table beneath a grape arbor — shelling peas, writing letters, and refusing to move indoors as she ages.

As Chotzinoff puts it:

“The older she got, she said, the less she wanted to be inside.”

People With Dirty Hands reminds us of something gardeners already know: you cannot rush a garden. You cannot dominate it. You must grow alongside it, season after season.

Botanic Spark

And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.

1953 British television aired the very first episode of Bill and Ben — The Flower Pot Men.

The premise was simple, almost impossibly so. There was a little house, and around the little house, a beautiful garden. While the gardener stepped away for his dinner, two terracotta flower pots at the bottom of the garden came quietly to life.

Bill. And Ben.

Between them grew their small companion, Little Weed — a smiling, nodding presence who never moved far, rooted firmly in place, watching everything.

Bill and Ben did not roam. They whispered. They muddled through small mishaps. They blamed one another gently. And when footsteps returned, they slipped back into stillness just in time.

What made Bill and Ben endure was not the story. It was the faith it placed in the garden.

The idea that a garden has its own inner life. That when we turn our backs, something tender carries on. That flower pots might talk, weeds might listen, and nothing truly important needs to hurry.

For many children, this was an early lesson: gardens are not decorations. They are inhabited.

They are places where patience matters, where small lives are worthy of attention, where even a weed has a voice and a place.

And perhaps that is why the closing line always lingered:

“And I think the little house knew something about it — don’t you?”

Gardens still know things we do not. They keep watch. They wait. They remember us when we forget ourselves.

That quiet assurance — that something gentle is continuing, just out of sight — may be the sweetest gift a garden gives.

Final Thoughts

As we move through January — spare, cold, and honest — it helps to remember this:

Not everyone changes the world loudly. Some do it by paying attention. By getting their hands dirty. By noticing what belongs, and what does not.

Gardens understand this instinctively. They make room. They allow small things to grow where they will, even weeds. Especially weeds.

Like Little Weed, quietly watching from between the pots, the winter garden keeps its counsel.

The garden notices us, even when we forget to notice it.

Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.