January 28, 2026 Leslie Young Correthers, Catherine Hauberg Sweeney, Dorothy Wordsworth, A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto's Gardens by Fergus Garrett, and Winter Garden Courage

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The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community

Today’s Show Notes

Late January can feel like a long-held breath. Not dramatic. Just persistent.

The garden is still. But it isn’t idle.

It’s watching the light. Measuring the cold. Noticing — quietly — the most minute shifts in temperature and day length.

And sometimes, winter leaves us a story that feels almost unbelievable.

On this day in 1887, at the Coleman ranch near Fort Keogh (KEY-oh), Montana, snowflakes were reported so large they were described as “bigger than milk pans.”

Some were said to measure nearly fifteen inches across and eight inches thick.

A mail carrier, caught in the storm, later confirmed what he saw.

Whether that was careful measurement or frontier astonishment, the image holds.

Winter, briefly, made something ordinary feel impossible.

And that sense of scale shifting, of attention sharpening — carries through today’s stories.

Today’s Garden History

1884 Leslie Young Correthers (kuh-RETH-ers) was born in Springfield, Illinois.

His friends called him Reggie.

And if his name isn’t familiar, that’s part of the story.

Some writers don’t disappear because they lack talent. They disappear because their work was small — and the world has a way of misplacing small things.

Reggie wrote tiny books of garden poems.

Pocket-sized volumes — the kind you could hold like a seed packet or slip into a coat pocket.

Their titles read like plant labels tied gently to stems:

These Shady Friends.
These Blooming Friends: A Little Book of Garden Scandal.
These Blooming Hedgerows: A Little Book of Wayside Gossip.
More Blooming Friends.
These Blooming Visitors.
These Garden Minstrels.
These Blooming Gypsies.
These Blooming Rascals: A Little Gossip about Troublesome Plants.
These Blooming Debutantes.
These Blooming Herbs: A Book of Aromatic Gossip.

Over his lifetime, Reggie cultivated a small bouquet of these books — each one a careful arrangement.

Reggie didn’t just describe plants. He noticed them.

And gardeners always know the difference.

In one poem, lemon verbena becomes an evening ritual — its scent arriving at the close of day, laid out like something precious on silver and glass.

In another, foxglove stands quietly, eyes lowered — and then the poem turns, and you glimpse her mischief.

Even monkshood — dark, hooded, poisonous — is allowed to be fully itself.

Beautiful. Dangerous. Not pretending otherwise.

There’s something bracing in that honesty.

In late January, we’re not asking the garden to entertain us.

We’re asking it to tell the truth.

And Reggie’s gift was writing the garden the way gardeners know it — full of charm, yes, but also full of secrets.

 

1995 Catherine Hauberg Sweeney (HOH-berg SWEE-nee) died at the age of eighty.

She has been called a botanical fairy godmother — and she is remembered as the woman who saved The Kampong (kam-PONG) — the historic tropical garden in Coconut Grove, Florida.

The Kampong had been created by plant explorer David Fairchild (FAIR-child) and his wife Marian Bell Fairchild — daughter of Alexander Graham Bell — as a living collection of tropical plants gathered from across the world.

After the Fairchild era ended, the garden’s future was uncertain.

It could have been subdivided. Developed. Lost.

Instead, Kay and her husband purchased the property in 1963 and quietly held it together.

Their generosity kept it safe. Kay’s vision helped it mature.

She understood what The Kampong needed.

Not reinvention. Not spectacle. Time.

To grow in place. To become an anchor for the study of tropical plants.

In 1984, she donated The Kampong to what is now the National Tropical Botanical Garden — ensuring it would remain a place for study, for visiting scientists, for students, for living plants to keep teaching.

Kay once called herself “just a lady gardener.”

But that kind of understatement often marks the people doing the most lasting work.

It’s easy to admire beauty. Harder to protect it.

Harder still to provide care year after year without applause.

Catherine’s legacy isn’t a monument.

It’s a place — The Kampong — still growing, still gathering people, still doing good work.

Unearthed Words

In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth (WORDZ-worth), who on this day, January 28, in 1802, opened her journal and recorded a single, quiet passage:

“William raked a few stones off the garden.
[It was] his first garden labor [of the] year.”

That’s all.

No declaration of spring. No certainty.

Just the first small act of readiness.

And if you garden, you recognize this moment.

The return to the garden after a long pause.

The day your hands do something — anything — that admits the season has started to turn.

Book Recommendation

A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto’s Gardens by Fergus Garrett

It’s time to grow the Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto’s Gardens by Fergus Garrett (FER-gus GARE-it), with photographs by Rachel Warne (WORN).

Beth Chatto (CHAT-oh) was a plantswoman, writer, and gardener who built her famous Essex garden on difficult, drought-prone land — and proved that close observation could replace force, fertilizer, and fantasy.

This is not a book of transformations.

It’s a book of continuities.

One garden. One piece of land. Observed honestly through an entire year.

Clear winter structure. Early bulbs. The long hum of summer. Seedheads. Decline. Return.

Beth’s philosophy — right plant, right place — is on full display.

Late January is often a planning season.

But this book doesn’t rush you toward lists.

It invites you to watch first.

And that’s often where good gardening begins.

Botanic Spark

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

It was on this day in 2000 that The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story urging gardeners to be bolder.

Not louder. Not trend-driven.

Bolder in what they notice.

To leave room for one unfamiliar plant. One unexpected texture. One choice that doesn’t come with instructions.

January is a perfect time for that kind of courage.

Seed catalogs are open. Plans are flexible. Old habits are loosening.

Changing one small thing — a plant choice, a bed shape, a corner you finally let go of — can breathe freshness into spaces that have been quiet for a long time.

Sometimes the boldest thing is simply making space for what you haven’t learned yet.

Final Thoughts

As we close the show today, take a moment to harken back to those enormous snowflakes that fell in Montana on this day over a century ago.

Whether measurement or myth, the story leaves us with something true:

Winter can make the ordinary feel enormous.

A flake. A flower. A new way to see your garden.

Tend something you love today.

Even if it’s small.

Even if no one sees it.

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