May 5, 2026 Charles Wesley Powell, Thomas Hayton Mawson, Søren Kierkegaard, Napoleon's Garden Island by Donal P. McCracken, and Nicole Maxwell

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Today’s Show Notes

I ran across a little poem the other day by Thomas Edward Brown, who was born on the Isle of Man on this day in 1830.

This poem is what Thomas is remembered for.

It’s called My Garden, and it opens with the line:

“A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!”

“God wot” is an old English way of saying “God knows.”

So a garden is a lovesome thing.

God knows.

And what a claim.

Not that a garden is a useful thing, or a productive thing, or even a beautiful thing—although it is all of those.

But a lovesome thing.

A thing that draws love out of you and makes you more loving for having tended it.

And that feels right for May.

Because May is when the garden starts to love you back.

The seeds you trusted to the cold are up.

The perennials you weren’t sure had survived are actually doing fine.

May is the month when the garden says to us, loud and clear:

I have received everything you gave me.

Look around.

So if you’re stepping outside today, enjoy your lovesome garden and let it be the thing that softens you.

Today’s Garden History

1854 Charles Wesley Powell was born.

Except, Charles was originally born Charles Leslie Pullen, in Richmond, Virginia.

His second act came later.

As a young man, Charles lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was well-regarded and connected.

His father was a Deputy Sheriff there, and his connections helped Charles become the city’s secretary to the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners.

In that role, Charles collected money for the city and delivered it to the trustee.

But in 1890, a grand jury found Charles responsible for a shortage in the accounts.

Thousands of dollars.

Unaccounted for over several years.

Although Charles maintained his innocence, he could not explain where the money went.

That’s how Charles ended up convicted of fraud.

And although at least nine more indictments waited for him, Charles didn’t stay to face them.

Instead, Charles packed up his family and went south to New Orleans, where he lived with his wife Addie and their four girls for nearly a decade.

Along the way, Charles once told a reporter he had a little greenhouse there, and that he always was interested in flowers.

With the turn of the new century in 1900, Charles’s life started to fall apart.

His father died in July in Houma, Louisiana, deep in the bayou, sixty miles southwest of New Orleans.

And then, just seven months later, his beloved wife Addie died from kidney failure at forty-two years old.

Six years later, in January 1907, he arrived in Panama as Charles Wesley Powell, during the earliest construction days of the Canal.

It was the perfect place to start again.

And I suspect he found the inspiration for his new name from John Wesley Powell—the man who ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, who went into unmapped territory and came back transformed and celebrated.

His fame peaked in the 1890s, the same decade when Charles left Memphis in shame.

When Charles first arrived in Panama, he worked first as a quinine dispenser for the Isthmian Canal Commission—getting established and learning the place.

By 1910, the canal was nearly finished.

Charles settled on the lower slopes of Cerro Ancón, the hill that overlooked Panama City, and built a garden at his house there.

Orchids growing in baskets suspended from a great mango tree on the patio.

Panama’s habitat is perfect for orchids.

Not the showy corsage orchids.

The tiny ones.

The botanicals.

Flowers no bigger than a pinhead, clinging to bark with nothing but air and rain to keep them alive.

In the wild, most of these orchids bloom a hundred feet up in the canopy—visible to almost no one on the ground.

Charles brought them to eye level and became obsessed with them.

Charles once said he believed his orchids knew him.

“When I used to return from a trip into the jungle, I’d go into my garden and all the flowers would look tired and dejected.

Then I used to wander about, speaking to this plant and that one, removing a twig, feeling the stem.

And before I had been in the garden ten minutes I would notice a marked change in the plants, which seemed to spruce up and stiffen their wilted petals.”

By 1915, Charles was sending orchid specimens to the top collectors and institutions in the world.

He taught himself taxonomy, and his personal collection grew to seven thousand plants.

By his sixties, Charles was crawling through jungle mud on his hands and knees, hacking through brush with a machete to reach specimens deep in the forest.

Charles loved to tell how, at sixty-six, he once shimmied out over a five-hundred-foot ravine on a half-dead branch to reach a single orchid.

And even when the branch cracked beneath him, he didn’t let go of the plant.

Though six years later, he told a reporter in St. Louis he had scrambled back to earth like a scared chipmunk.

After Charles opened his garden to the public, visitors to Panama soon learned there was a garden they should seek out.

As soon as they passed through the vine-covered wire fence, they found themselves surrounded by thousands of flowering orchids—most species they would otherwise need to climb a tree or venture into the jungle to see.

The collection was so impressive that the German botanist Rudolf Schlechter based an entire ninety-five-page publication on the orchids Charles collected in Panama.

Soon, dozens of species were named for Charles Wesley Powell, all carrying the name powellii, the latinized version of his adopted last name.

Had he never made the change, the orchids would have been named Pullenii, for his original family name of Pullen.

But Charles had turned that page.

Near the end of his life, Charles’s daughter Adelaide moved to Panama, where she too worked for the Canal Company.

But then, suddenly, she died.

She was just thirty-six years old.

When Adelaide was born, she was named for her mother, the wife Charles lost in New Orleans twenty-four years earlier.

That was the moment he decided to start again.

And he had.

But with the loss of his daughter, Charles felt his own time was slipping away.

And he needed to make sure his orchids would be cared for long after he was gone.

So he made arrangements to gift them all to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

The following year, in 1926, Charles Wesley Powell returned to the States to see his orchids arrive at their new home. Charles told the reporters: 

“I am proud to be a part of Shaw’s Garden.” 

“That slat covering on the orchid houses is remarkable.

They have had slat coverings in England for a long time, but none to compare with this.

The sun percolates through quarter-inch openings between the slats.”

For two whole days, Charles walked the greenhouses at Shaw’s Garden, absorbed in talking orchids with the horticulturist George Pring—barely stopping and barely sleeping.

Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tennessee, as people read about the man responsible for the finest orchid collection in the world, they had absolutely no clue they were reading about the man they knew as Charles Leslie Pullen, who had served fifteen days in the Shelby County workhouse thirty-five years earlier.

After the careful transfer of his orchids, Charles returned home to Panama.

To an empty garden.

He died the following year.

Charles was seventy-three years old and was buried at the Corozal American Cemetery in Panama, just like his daughter, Adelaide.

Today, most seasoned gardeners love orchids for their beauty and their long-lasting, symmetrical blooms.

But after learning about Charles and his life before Panama, I find myself thinking more and more about their role in his redemption—and how one hundred years after his life ended, we only remember the good part.

Charles Wesley Powell.

Orchid hunter.

1861 Thomas Hayton Mawson was born.

The British landscape architect grew up in Lancashire.

He was the second of four children.

At twelve, he left school to begin working.

When his father died four years later, a sixteen-year-old Thomas moved to London alone to better support his mother and younger brothers.

When he found work in nurseries and with landscape gardeners, he learned about soil and stone experientially and how to work alongside the people he worked with.

By his mid-twenties, Thomas had settled in the Lake District with his wife Anna Prentice, a trained nurse and the daughter of a surgeon.

There, Thomas opened a nursery and then a design practice.

Commission by commission, he began to reshape how England thought about the relationship between house and land.

For Thomas, a garden should wrap itself around the house.

The stone terrace should flow into the path.

The path should meet the hedge.

And the hedge should frame a view—a mountain, a gate, a statue—so that even a small garden feels like a journey.

Thomas was also a writer.

In 1900, he published The Art and Craft of Garden Making, a book that quickly became the guiding text for Edwardian landscape design.

It went through five editions.

As Thomas matured in his career, his work expanded beyond private estates.

He designed public parks, insisting that working people deserved the same green space the wealthy could afford.

He even won an international competition to design the gardens for the Peace Palace at The Hague.

Then came Parkinson’s.

Thomas was diagnosed in 1923.

Slowly, he handed over the reins of his business to his eldest son Edward.

Anna, the nurse Thomas had married nearly forty years earlier, cared for him through the long, narrowing decade that followed.

But Thomas did not stop.

When he could no longer hold a pen, Thomas dictated his autobiography to Edward, summing up his fifty-year career as “most congenial.”

In 1929, Thomas became the first president of the Landscape Institute, the professional body that still governs landscape architecture in Britain.

Four years later, Thomas died on a November day, with one final garden season behind him.

It was fitting that Thomas was buried in Bowness Cemetery, overlooking the Lake District landscapes that had launched his career.

And the parks Thomas designed still do exactly what he intended.

They give ordinary people something green.

Unearthed Words

In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear journal reflections from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, born on this day in 1813.

Søren loved to walk, and he believed it not only kept him healthy but also cured him of ailments and illnesses as they came along.

As Søren walked the streets of Copenhagen every day of his adult life, he connected to nature—to lilies, to birds, and to silence.

The therapeutic value of his daily habit was not lost on him.

Early in his journals, Søren wrote:

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.

Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.

I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

Søren also loved walking in fall the best.

He wrote:

“Here is why I so much prefer autumn to spring. In the autumn one looks at heaven. In the spring at the earth.”

In his 1849 meditation The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Søren focused on his favorite flower, the lily.

Søren wrote:

“So it is also with the lily; it is silent and waits.

It does not impatiently ask, ‘When will spring come?’ because it knows that spring will come in due season, knows that it would be least useful to itself if it were allowed to determine the seasons of the year.

It does not ask, ‘When will we get rain?’ or ‘When will we get sunshine?’ or say, ‘Now we have had too much rain,’ or ‘Now it is too hot.’

It does not ask in advance what kind of a summer it will be this year, how long or how short.

No, it is silent and waits—that is how simple it is.”

Søren walked every day until his body would not let him anymore.

He died at forty-two.

And my thoughts immediately drift to Søren every time I almost talk myself out of a walk.

Book Recommendation

Napoleon’s Garden Island by Donal P. McCracken

It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Napoleon’s Garden Island by Donal P. McCracken.

This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener, and that means all of this week’s Book Recommendations feature gardens from around the world.

In the book, we’re taken to St. Helena, the remote Atlantic island where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled after Waterloo in 1815.

When Napoleon arrived on the night of October seventeenth, his first bed ashore was in the boarding house of the island’s Company gardener, Henry Porteous.

The little house was crowded—cramped rooms meant to hold as many officers as possible.

Needless to say, the conqueror of Europe did not stay a second night.

Over the five years and ten months that followed, Napoleon settled at Longwood House.

There, he turned to gardening.

He planted trees.

Designed paths.

And reshaped the grounds into something of his own.

The book traces how confinement became cultivation.

A man stripped of empire and power, left with nothing but the soil beneath him.

In a rare moment of candor, Napoleon admitted to General Gaspard Gourgaud:

“The life that I live here on St. Helena, if I were not a captive, would suit me very well. I should like to live in the country.

I should like to see the soil improved by others, for I do not know enough about gardening to improve it myself.

That kind of thing is the noblest existence.”

Through this book, we’re given a gift.

A Napoleon most histories ignore.

A man with nowhere left to go, who turned to the garden and called gardening itself the noblest existence.

Botanic Spark

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

1998 Nicole Maxwell died.

The American ethnobotanist grew up in a strict Christian Science family in San Francisco.

Even as a young girl, she understood what it meant to follow the rules.

When Nicole broke her arm, her family refused medical treatment and took her to church to pray.

The pain was unbearable.

Nicole eventually found a doctor herself.

As a young adult, Nicole left the church and married, moving to France.

In Paris, she trained as a dancer and moved through drawing rooms where orchids stood in crystal vases and conversation rarely ventured beyond the weather.

Soon Nicole realized she had traded one rigid life for another.

Then, at forty, after a quiet reckoning with herself, Nicole packed her bags and traveled to the Amazon rainforest.

There she found her calling.

Nicole was not collecting plants for display.

She was studying how people healed with them.

During her time in the rainforest, Nicole spent long hours sitting with healers among the Witoto and the Jívaro.

Listening.

She learned that the forest was not wilderness in the romantic sense.

It was a dispensary.

Leaves cooled fever.

Bark stopped bleeding.

And sap closed wounds.

Once, while clearing brush, Nicole gashed her arm badly with a machete.

Her guide stepped into the forest and returned with dark red sap.

The guide gave some for her to drink and poured the rest into the wound.

The bleeding slowed.

And then stopped.

Within days, the cut healed without a scar.

That’s why, as forests were cleared for cattle and timber, Nicole saw more than trees disappearing.

The Green Pharmacy, as Nicole called it, lived not only in plants but in the memory and daily life of the indigenous people.

In their language.

And in the apprenticeships between elders and children.

Burn an acre of forest, and what was lost was not just trees, but a lineage of knowing.

Nicole tried to preserve as much knowledge as she could.

She spent decades traveling by canoe, writing in worn notebooks, recording plant knowledge with care.

And when Nicole died on this day in 1998, the Amazon forest was fully leafed out.

Vines tightening their spirals.

Sap rising invisibly through trunks older than any city Nicole had known in the United States.

In the end, she’d become a daughter of the Amazon.

Today, Nicole’s notebooks survive her.

They hold decades of plant names, remedies, and the voices of healers who trusted Nicole enough to share what they knew.

Final Thoughts

A garden is a lovesome thing.

God knows.

The garden is lovesome.

It is worth loving.

And just as walking has a power we don’t fully understand, the garden does as well.

And in that way, it loves you back.

Especially right now in May.

As light is expanding.

And then into summer.

And those first warm, quiet days of fall.

So get out there.

And enjoy it.

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