February 10, 2026 Carl Linnaeus, Rodney and Rachel Saunders, Charles Lamb, Sitting in the Shade by Hugh Johnson, and Winifred Mary Letts

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

February has a reputation for romance, but gardeners know another side of it. The February blues. The long pause. The stretch where effort feels heavier than reward.

And yet, this is often when love shows itself most clearly. Not as delight, but as endurance.

Today’s Garden History

1758 Carl Linnaeus wrote a letter unlike any other.

Earlier that year, Linnaeus fell into a deep depression. On February tenth, he poured his despair into a letter to his friend Abraham Bäck.

“I cannot write more today; my hand is too weary to hold a pen.

I am the child of misfortune.

Had I a rope and English courage, I would long since have hanged myself.

I fear that my wife is again pregnant.

I am old and grey and worn out, and my house is already full of children; who is to feed them?

It was in an unhappy hour that I accepted the professorship; if only I had remained in my lucrative practice, all would now be well.

Farewell, and may you be more fortunate.”

It’s hard to reconcile this exhausted, embittered voice with the figure history remembers.

Linnaeus was not yet fifty-one. And before that year was out, he made a decision — one that carried risk, debt, and responsibility, but also possibility.

He purchased two small country estates outside Uppsala: Hammarby and Sävja.

Nothing troubled Linnaeus more than owing money. But the purchase meant summers in the country. Land to pass on to his wife, Sara Lisa, and their children. And a garden that belonged to the family, not the university.

In the depths of winter despair, Linnaeus chose soil.

Sometimes, choosing soil is what keeps people going.

2018 Rodney and Rachel Saunders were murdered while botanizing in South Africa.

Rod and Rachel were British botanists and horticulturalists who founded Silverhill Seeds in Cape Town. They devoted their lives to South Africa’s extraordinary flora, especially the genus Gladiolus.

In their final years, they undertook an ambitious project: to find, photograph, and document every known species of Gladiolus in southern Africa.

Sometimes the plants were easy to find. Sometimes elusive. Often, they had to wait — for rain, for fire, for the right season, for the brief moment when a flower would finally reveal itself.

Rachel once wrote in an email, “The problem with these plants is not only do we have to find them, but then they need to be in flower.”

By 2018, they had found all but one known species.

Returning from a field trip in KwaZulu-Natal, they were abducted and murdered. Rod was seventy-four. Rachel was sixty-three.

Their notebooks were never recovered. But their photographs survived. Their correspondence. Fragments of field notes.

Friends, family, and fellow botanists came together to complete the work they had begun.

What endured was not just their research, but the way they worked — patiently, together, over time.

Some gardeners love by naming. Some by waiting. Some by giving everything.

Unearthed Words

In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from Charles Lamb, born on this day in 1775.

“Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!”

Gardeners understand the longing behind this line. We admire deep knowledge, long study, the fluency that comes from years of practice.

But gardening teaches slowly. And it humbles even the well-read.

There is always more to learn. And always another season to prove us wrong.

Book Recommendation

Sitting in the Shade by Hugh Johnson

This book isn’t trying to make anyone a better gardener. It’s simply the company of a mind that has lived alongside a garden for decades.

For more than forty-five years, Hugh Johnson kept Trad’s Diary, recording what he noticed: the structure of trees in winter, the smell of rain, the pleasure of shade.

The entries are brief and seasonal — perfect for the armchair or the bedside.

It’s a book written for seasons when the garden gives less, and still asks us to stay.

Botanic Spark

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

1882 Winifred Mary Letts was born.

She loved gardens — and garden books.

In her collection Knockmaroon, she once confessed, “My secret ambition has always been to write a garden book.”

During wartime, Letts wrote of a recurring nightmare — one she woke herself from by saying, “I should plant aubretia between the stones.”

Not to erase hardship, but to live beside it.

Here is her poem, “To a May Baby”:

To come at tulip time how wise!
Perhaps you will not now regret
The shining gardens, jewel set,
Of your first home in Paradise
Nor fret
Because you might not quite forget.

To come at swallow-time how wise!
When every bird has built a nest;
Now you may fold your wings and rest
And watch this new world with surprise;
A guest
For whom the earth has donned her best.

To come when life is gay how wise!
With lambs and every happy thing
That frisks on foot or sports on wing,
With daisies and with butterflies,
But Spring
Had nought so sweet as you to bring.

Final Thoughts

As we close today’s show, remember: February doesn’t ask for cheer. It asks for patience. For staying. For tending what isn’t rewarding yet.

Gardens are loved in many ways — through action, through waiting, through choosing to continue.

And sometimes, love looks like nothing more than that.

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