January 23, 2026 Peter Joseph Lenné, Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, Elizabeth Lawrence, The Unsung Season by Sydney Eddison, and Ken Nakazawa

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Today’s Show Notes

January is a month that strips things back. The garden shows us structure instead of spectacle. Paths without flowers. Trees without leaves. Design without distraction.

That makes today’s stories especially fitting, because they are about people who believed gardens should hold meaning, even when nothing is in bloom.

Today’s Garden History

1866 Peter Joseph Lenné died at the age of seventy-six.

Lenné was one of the most important landscape architects of the nineteenth century, though you will not find him quoted on mugs or calendars.

He left behind something far more lasting than aphorisms. He left parks.

Born into a family of working gardeners, Lenné learned early that gardens are not decorations. They are systems.

He trained in Paris and Vienna, studied botany and architecture, and eventually became Director General of the Royal Prussian Parks in Potsdam and Berlin.

What Lenné believed, and showed, was this: a garden should feel inevitable, as though it had always been there.

He embraced the English landscape style — long sightlines, borrowed views, gentle transitions — and rejected rigid formality. Baroque gardens impressed. Lenné’s gardens rested the eye.

As his career matured, so did his sense of responsibility. He believed green space mattered not only to kings but also to ordinary people. That parks were not luxuries. They were relieved. Places where the city could soften, where people could breathe.

Today, many of the landscapes Lenné shaped — Sanssouci, Glienicke, and Babelsberg — are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

But perhaps his truest legacy is quieter: the idea that a garden can be a conversation between nature, design, and the human spirit.

1866 Gertrude Penfield Seiberling was born.

She was blessed in many ways, but she never took her gifts for granted. One of the ways she kept herself grounded was by gardening.

Gertrude grew up in Ohio and later married F. A. Seiberling, the founder of Goodyear. In Akron, Ohio, they created a home together known as Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens, a place shaped not only by architecture, but by intention.

Gertrude was never simply the lady of a great house. She helped shape the gardens herself, walking them, imagining them, living into them season by season.

In 1924, she founded the Akron Garden Club, helping to build a community around the shared pleasure of growing things.

She was also a musician, a singer who once performed at the White House, and later in life, a painter who returned again and again to landscapes: streets edged by trees, buildings softened by green.

Above the entrance to Stan Hywet is a motto carved in stone: Non Nobis Solum — Not for Us Alone.

It feels like something a gardener would choose, because Gertrude understood that gardens are never only personal.

They are gifts. They outlast grief. They hold joy and memory at the same time.

Her family once described the Seiberlings as a clan — loud at holidays, together often, constantly bustling — a world of people who made their own warmth.

Gertrude understood that gardens are not possessions. They are gifts. They gather people. They outlast us.

She died in 1946 at Stan Hywet, surrounded by the beauty she helped bring into being.

Unearthed Words

1945 Elizabeth Lawrence wrote a letter that opened in the heart of winter.

Her salutation sets the scene simply: she was enjoying thin toast, wild strawberry jam, and tea by the fire in her studio.

She wrote about food shared with friends, conversations that wander, and people quietly doing their work in the world. The letter moved gently, the way winter days do — nothing rushed, nothing forced.

Then, just before she signed off, she added this wonderfully human line:

“I must put the puppy to bed before he chews up all the files of Gardening Illustrated.”

It is such a small moment, but it tells us everything. Even the most thoughtful garden writers lived among interruptions.

That is winter gardening in a sentence: not grand plans, just warmth, memory, and something alive nearby doing exactly as it pleases.

Book Recommendation

The Unsung Season: Gardens and Gardeners in Winter by Sydney Eddison

This is a book written for gardeners who live where winter is real.

Sydney Eddison writes about what happens when the garden goes quiet, and how gardeners adapt. Some strap on snowshoes to check beds. Others turn to winter crafts, seed sorting, or garden planning. Some bring the garden indoors. Others design landscapes meant to shine in the coldest months — bark, berries, structure, and light.

What makes The Unsung Season special is its tone. It does not rush winter away. It does not treat it as a problem to solve.

Instead, it honors winter as part of the gardening life — a season of observation, patience, and faith.

It is a book that understands January.

Botanic Spark

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

1940 News of a garden lecture appeared in The San Bernardino County Sun.

The speaker was Ken Nakazawa, a professor at the University of Southern California and a writer deeply attuned to cultural meaning.

Nakazawa invited his audience into the philosophy of Japanese gardens, explaining that the perfect garden is composed of three elements: heaven, earth, and man.

Nothing, he said, is accidental. Some stones are meant to be seen. Some are meant to be hidden. Some are meant to be used.

He reminded listeners that gardens are not only meant to be seen, but to be heard: water moving, wind in trees, birds arriving like punctuation.

What makes this moment especially tender is what came later in Nakazawa’s life. Within a year, he would be arrested and imprisoned following Pearl Harbor, swept up not because of anything he had done, but because of who he was.

And yet, even in confinement, Nakazawa spoke of gardens and human psychology, of watching how people live together under strain.

It is hard not to hear his garden philosophy differently, knowing that. That he believed meaning could exist in restraint. That some things must remain hidden. That harmony depends on how carefully we place ourselves in relation to others.

In January, when gardens are mostly shape and silence, that feels like a lesson worth keeping.

Final Thoughts

January teaches us to notice structure — what remains when ornament falls away.

Paths. Edges. The quiet work beneath the surface.

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