February 12, 2026 William Mason, Emily Lawless, Frank Lloyd Wright and Jens Jensen, The Beauty of the Flower by Stephen A. Harris, and Revising the Garden

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Today’s Show Notes

February can feel like a month made of drafts. Nothing finished. Nothing resolved.

And that’s not a flaw. It can be a good thing.

Because gardeners are always iterating — one growing season after the next. It’s a cycle that often looks like this: an attempt, an unexpected result, followed by the quiet correction.

Gardens are revised in public — and so are we. Today’s stories are about that kind of forward progress.

Today’s Garden History

1724 William Mason was born.

William was the poet, the clergyman, and the garden designer who helped the English garden feel like a place with a point of view.

He had a gift for giving gardeners a new metaphor. To him, gardens were a canvas, and the gardener was the artist.

In his long garden poem The English Garden, he urged gardeners to design a landscape the way an artist would:

Take thy plastic spade — it is thy pencil. Take thy seeds, thy plants — they are thy colors.

It’s a memorable way to think about design.

He truly turned a corner as an artist in 1775. At Nuneham Courtenay, near Oxford, William designed a flower garden for George Harcourt.

His ideas spread across the gardens of England. Straight lines began to loosen. Beds stopped behaving like borders on paper.

Instead of keeping everything obediently close to the house, planting began to flow outward — toward a walk, a seat, a temple, an orangery, a pause.

Mason’s gardens required people to move through them. His landscapes cried out for a little wandering.

But they weren’t wild as in careless. They were wild as in natural.

When Mason said, “Compose your gardens,” he didn’t mean do less. He meant choose deliberately.

He wanted the garden to be arranged, but arranged in a way that felt organic rather than imposed.

Maybe that’s why his advice still holds. Gardeners still shape experience. They choreograph a view. They imitate nature. And they decide what is revealed — and what is withheld until the next few steps.

1900 Emily Lawless wrote a diary entry that feels a little familiar.

She was on a train near Guildford, England, when she ran into a fellow gardener — the sort of person she usually enjoyed sparring with.

But this time, when they started talking, he made a disparaging comment about the British soldiers — the Tommies — after defeats in the Boer War.

Emily bristled. Not because she was naïve. She admitted the home front was rattled. But to refer to their own fighting men like that felt insulting and unpatriotic.

And then, in the middle of that tension, the man brightened and changed the subject, asking:

“Is Anemone blanda in flower in your garden now?”

The emotional whiplash hits hard. War. Defeat. National pride. And then — anemones?

And yet it’s also painfully true to life. People cope in their own ways. Some reach for the garden because it’s the only place they can still control an outcome. They can’t alter headlines, but they can measure bloom.

Emily captured the moment perfectly in her journal.

“Anemone Blanda?” I repeated, feeling slightly confused by the rapidity of the transition.

[The man answers:] “[I have] sixteen tufts in full flower—beauties! Yours were the pale blue ones, weren’t they? Mine are as blue as, oh, as blue as—blue paint.”

“We have numbers of bulbs at present in flower,” I said severely. “Scillas and chinodoxas, and daffodils, and tulips, and Iris Alata, and many others.”

“Ah, potted bulbs. They’re poor sort of things generally, don’t you think? Some people, I believe, like them though.”

“We have Cyclamen Coum in flower out of doors,” I added; garden vanity, or… ill-humour, arousing in me a sudden spirit of violent horticultural rivalry.

“Oh, you have, have you?”—this in a tone of somewhat enhanced respect. “Don’t you shelter it at all?”

“Not in the least!” I replied contemptuously. “We grow it out in the copse; on the stones; in all directions. It is a perfect weed with us. No weather seems to make the slightest difference.”

…Luckily for my veracity our roads just then diverged; my horticultural acquaintance getting out at the next station, and I continuing on my way to Guildford.

I don’t think I have ever in my life felt more ruffled, more thoroughly exasperated than I was by that most uncalled-for remark about the Tommies.

I adore my garden, and yield to no one in my estimation of its supreme importance as a topic; still there are moments when even horticulture must learn to bow its head;

“Anemone Blanda!” I repeated several times to myself in the course of the afternoon, and each time with a stronger feeling of exasperation. “Anemone Blanda, indeed!”

Unearthed Words

In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from a letter written by architect Frank Lloyd Wright to landscape architect Jens Jensen.

In 1943, on this day, Jens wrote Frank to say the two men would never agree.

Frank’s reply was stunning.

Dear Jens,

You dear old Prima Donna-

I don't know whether you exaggerate your own sense of yourself or exaggerate my sense of myself.
It doesn't much matter either way.

You are a realistic landscapist.
I am an abstractionist seeking the pattern behind the realism - the interior structure instead of the comparatively superficial exterior effects you delight in.

In other words I am a builder.
You are an effectivist using nature's objects to make your effects.

I find that I can be interested in that with which I supremely disagree, and I continually learn from my opposites.

Jens couldn’t resist replying later in March:

Dear Frank

I did not think I could ever get you to write me a letter. But here it is!

Thanks for the compliments.

You are still the same Frank, although I fear a little less poetic.

Book Recommendation

The Beauty of the Flower: The Art and Science of Botanical Illustration by Stephen A. Harris

Published in 2023, this book traces how humans learned to see plants well — not just admire them.

It treats botanical illustration not as decoration, but as a working language shared by artists, printers, and scientists.

Because botanical art wasn’t created to decorate a wall. It was created to carry information: what mattered enough to show, what could be simplified, what had to be exact, what had to be repeated until another mind could recognize the plant, too.

It’s the kind of book that makes a gardener pause over a single page and think: oh. That’s why illustration still matters.

Not because photographs don’t exist, but because drawing forces examination.

Botanic Spark

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

2024 BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine promoted their #GrowSomethingDifferent campaign.

It was a simple nudge: break a habit, try something new, keep learning.

What’s something new for the garden this season? A plant you’ve never grown. A method you’ve never tried. A small experiment that keeps the mind awake.

Gardens stay alive that way.

Final Thoughts

As we close today’s show, here’s one thought to carry forward.

A garden isn’t built by certainty. It’s built by revision — the way drafts are built: by noticing what didn’t quite work, and trying again.

Change-ups.

Redos.

A spade as pencil. A flower bed as a sentence.

A season as a quiet mantra that keeps teaching us to keep going — and keep growing.

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