May 6, 2026 Jean Senebier, Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach, Maurice Maeterlinck, The Gardens of William Morris by Jill Duchess of Hamilton, and Ellen Schulz Quillin

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Today’s Show Notes

All things are difficult before they’re easy.

And I think about that every May.

Because right now, the garden is all effort.

You’re hauling bags of soil. You’re staking things. You’re tidying up. You’re buying the plants and dreaming the dreams.

There is so much to do.

And nothing feels easy right now.

It’s a lot of work.

And that’s the right feeling for this part of the season.

The easy comes later.

Or I should say, easier.

It actually does get easier.

But you don’t get there without this part—the watching, the waiting, the second-guessing, and the exhaustion.

So if your garden looks like a construction zone this morning, that’s May.

And yes, it’s not easy.

Today’s Garden History

1742 Jean Senebier was born in Geneva, a city built on calm water and careful theology.

As a young man, Jean trained as a pastor, and by his early thirties, he became the chief librarian of the Republic of Geneva, where he settled into a quiet life of books and public duty.

Across the city, a wealthy naturalist named Charles Bonnet had spent years studying leaves submerged in water.

He noticed that they produced bubbles—tiny, silver, mysterious.

But he couldn’t identify the gas.

When Charles’s vision started to go, he needed someone with patience, with method, and with a librarian’s obsession for detail.

So he created a competition on what he called “the art of observing.”

When Jean entered and won the grand prize, Charles found his protégé and began mentoring him by giving Jean the question that would define his life:

What were those bubbles?

That quest for the answer meant Jean’s days split in two.

In the mornings, he worked in the library—cataloging manuscripts and helping students find volumes in the stacks.

By midday, he was chasing light, moving glass jars filled with water and submerged leaves to windows and terraces, wherever the sun was strongest.

Then he watched and waited for bubbles to appear.

In his work, Jean became a botanical detective.

And the bubbles were clues that revealed everything he needed to know.

When Jean took away the carbon dioxide, the bubbles stopped.

When he doubled it, the bubbles doubled, too.

After three long decades of searching, Jean eventually found his answer.

And after all that time, it’s fitting that one of Jean’s most famous quotes is: “Observation and experiment are two sisters who help each other.”

But he also knew the work was not easy.

It demanded both stamina and courage.

Jean once wrote to Bonnet with admiration for his mentorship, saying:

“It was in studying you that I learned how to read from nature, and to paint her, but in studying you I despaired forever of resembling you; [you have mastered] the art of seeing well.”

The scientific truths Jean discovered are canon today.

Plants are not made of soil.

They’re made of air and light.

Sunshine turned to life.

And while we exhale carbon dioxide, plants inhale it as food.

In turn, plants breathe out oxygen, and we inhale it to stay alive.

Plants and people.

We need each other to live.

In 1791, Jean wrote poetically about man’s perfect symbiotic relationship with the natural world:

“I see my blood form in a spike of wheat... and wood in winter gives back the heat, fire and light it has stolen from the sun.”

As for Jean, all that time staring into bright, sunlit water and squinting to count those tiny silver bubbles came with a price.

It cost him his vision.

Jean worried about the loss of sight for other naturalists and even warned them to take breaks when they worked to avoid eyestrain.

Speaking from his own experience, he advised:

“When the senses are fatigued, they become unfaithful.”

In his old age, Jean didn’t leave his desk.

But he needed help getting to it.

And from that post, he dictated his work to the assistants in the library.

That’s how, essentially in the dark, Jean finished his five-volume masterpiece on plant life.

Jean died on the last day of October in 1809.

He was sixty-seven.

It is especially poignant now to go back to a time when Jean was in the middle of it all—counting tiny bubbles, trying to figure out what it all meant.

He wrote about the experience in a book called The Art of Observing.

In it, Jean wrote:

“[The observer] regards Nature as a book, in which it is necessary to attempt to read the characters with rigor without presuming to imagine what signification they ought ultimately to have.”

I think about those words every time I am confused or unsure about what to do in the garden.

If nature is a book, then when I’m stuck, I just need to spend a little more time reading her.

1889 Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach died in Hamburg, Germany.

Heinrich was sixty-six years old.

From the time he was a little boy, Heinrich grew up in the Dresden Botanical Garden because his father, Heinrich Sr., was the garden’s director.

As a boy, Heinrich learned to draw plants by hand.

He discovered how to see the architecture inside a petal and learned how to spy the story inside a dried specimen.

By his late thirties, Heinrich had followed in his father’s footsteps and worked at the Botanical Gardens in Hamburg, where he was the expert plant hunters trusted to name orchids.

When crates of orchids arrived from all over the world, Heinrich felt like a boy again.

And when he wrote about orchids, his descriptions were vivid and relatable.

On the Mooreana, an extraordinary variety of L. Locusta Orchid, Heinrich described it this way:

“Green sepals, green petals, green lip, green callus, green ovary, green bract, green sheath, green peduncle, green bulbs, green leaves—just as green as a green grasshopper or the dress of some Viennese ladies.”

Over twenty-five years, Heinrich named more orchids than almost anyone of his time and helped create the frenzy known as the Orchid Craze.

He named each orchid like he would his own child, often naming them to honor his friends who collected the plants and nearly died finding them.

He also named the plants after wealthy orchid lovers who built glass cathedrals to house them.

Still, sometimes he simply named them after one of their many stunning features.

Heinrich’s closest ally was the great orchid collector Frederick Sander.

Frederick sent his best finds to Heinrich first.

And in return, Heinrich wrote such beautiful descriptions that he helped Frederick prosper by fueling the very craze that made them both famous.

When Heinrich learned that the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew had appointed a new orchid expert, he took it as a serious blow.

Robert Allen Rolfe was a self-taught former garden boy who had risen through the ranks.

While Heinrich had spent his entire life drawing, promoting, and naming orchids, it felt like a complete and utter dismissal.

When Heinrich died in 1889, he left his entire collection—over seventy thousand specimens—to the Natural History Museum in Vienna with one single condition.

The entire collection had to remain sealed from the world for twenty-five years.

In his will, he wrote:

“My herbarium and my botanical library, my instruments, collection of seeds, etc. accrue to the Imperial Hof Museum in Vienna, under the condition that the preserved orchids and drawings of orchids shall not be exhibited before twenty-five years from the date of my death have elapsed.

Until this time my collection shall be preserved in sealed cases.

In the event of the Vienna Institution declining to observe these conditions, the collection falls under the same conditions to the Botanical Garden at Upsala.

Should the last-mentioned institution decline the legacy, then to the Grayean Herbarium in Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

If declined by that institution, then to the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, but always under the same conditions, viz., of being sealed up for twenty-five years, in order that the inevitable destruction of the costly collection, resulting from the present craze for orchids, may be avoided.”

This was the choice of a man who loved something too much to simply hand it over to people he felt weren’t worthy.

But when the seals were finally broken at the Imperial Hof Museum in May of 1914, the orchid craze was over and the world was on the brink of war.

A botanist named Friedrich Kränzlin from the Natural History Museum was sent to catalog the collection and spent years trying to decode Heinrich’s private shorthand.

Friedrich’s biggest job was comparing Heinrich’s records against twenty-five years of independent work, since botany had moved on after Heinrich died.

And that’s how Friedrich’s audit made orchid classification even better.

Heinrich’s collection somehow survived both world wars.

And because the specimens were locked away for a quarter of a century, they are unusually well preserved compared to many other collections from the late 1800s.

Ultimately, when Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach locked that door, he ended up opening it wider than he ever intended.

Unearthed Words

In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the Belgian playwright and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck, who died on this day in 1949.

Maurice grew up in Ghent, a city of dark water and cold stone in northern Belgium.

As a young man, Maurice became one of the most celebrated playwrights in Europe and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.

Maurice once wrote: “Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?”

For Maurice, that question wasn’t rhetorical.

It lived in everything he did.

And his deep appreciation for beauty and the natural world explains the joy and mystery Maurice found in a greenhouse.

For years, Maurice kept bees and studied flowers with the same devotion he once gave to plays.

In 1907, Maurice published a book called The Intelligence of Flowers.

He wrote:

“We shall see that the flower sets man a prodigious example of insubmission, courage, perseverance and ingenuity.”

When Maurice looked at flowers, he didn’t see something delicate.

He saw something that grew where it shouldn’t be able to—pushed through soil, stone, drought, and shade, adapting constantly, bending, turning, reaching for light.

A flower never complains or gives up.

Maurice went on to say that if we applied just half of the same effort to the things that “crush us, such as pain, old age and death” the world would be a different place.

For much of his adult life, Maurice lived in a restored Norman abbey at Saint-Wandrille, where he wrote in silence every morning in a cold stone room and then spent his afternoons with his bees.

Of them, he wrote:

“Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue Work except in secrecy.”

And:

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”

Later in life, Maurice wrote a play called The Blue Bird.

In it, two children search for an ethereal blue bird and the source of all happiness.

Their travels take them far away.

But then, eventually, they find the bluebird in the most unexpected place—back at home.

Similarly, Maurice spent a lifetime searching for answers.

Yet he spent his final years at a villa above the Mediterranean, surrounded by lavender and salt-crusted cypress trees.

In the end, I think Maurice knew where the answers lived all along.

I sometimes find myself thinking about the bluebird and Maurice with his flowers and bees when I wonder if there’s something else I should be doing with my life instead of spending so much time in the garden.

But I think, like Maurice, I already know the answer in my heart.

Book Recommendation

The Gardens of William Morris by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart, and John Simmons

It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: The Gardens of William Morris by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart, and John Simmons.

This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener.

That means all of this week’s Book Recommendations feature a journey through gardens beyond our borders—exploring how culture, climate, and history shape landscapes around the world.

William Morris was a British designer, poet, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement.

He believed that beauty and usefulness were inseparable.

William once wrote:

“I know a little garden-close, set thick with lily and red rose, where I would wander if I might from dewy dawn to dewy night.”

The authors open a window into the private gardens connected to William’s life.

Red House.

Kelmscott Manor.

And the places where climbing roses, dense borders, and fruit trees were not merely decoration.

They were a green philosophy William could walk through and gather from.

The book includes over fifty examples of William’s designs shown alongside the real plants that inspired them.

For William Morris, daily life always began in the garden.

Botanic Spark

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

1970 Ellen Schulz Quillin died in San Antonio, Texas.

The American botanist, author, and museum director was eighty-two years old.

Ellen grew up on a farm in Saginaw, Michigan, the daughter of German immigrants.

She lost her mother young and left Michigan at twenty-nine for a teaching job in Texas.

She never went back.

In San Antonio, Ellen became a high school science teacher who loved wildflowers so much that she wrote a field guide listing five hundred different species.

In the preface, Ellen described the Texas landscape this way:

“Texas is a land of flowers.

From the time the first warm breath of spring awakens sleeping buds in the south until the last purple aster is nipped by the frost in the north, the state is a vast garden of color and beauty.”

As a young teacher, Ellen wanted her students to see that garden.

So Ellen helped organize a fundraiser, selling bluebonnets, until the class had raised five thousand dollars—enough to buy a natural history collection that became the foundation of the Witte Museum, which opened in 1926 with Ellen as its director.

Ellen ran that museum for thirty-four years.

In 1927, Ellen married Roy Quillin, an ornithologist who loved birds the way she loved wildflowers.

On weekends, they disappeared into the Texas brush together—Roy looking up, and Ellen looking down.

When the Depression hit, Ellen worked at the Witte for a dollar a year.

Her operating budget was almost nothing.

To keep the museum alive, Ellen cleverly built a Reptile Garden.

She paid ranchers a dime a pound for live rattlesnakes and charged visitors ten cents to see them.

And the garden paid for itself in one week.

Ellen wasn’t just moved by nature.

She felt it was a divine connection.

Ellen once wrote:

“How often, in the early morning light, we pause in the out of doors, in the natural surroundings of our garden, and feel close to life, and to our Creator.”

When she retired in 1960, the city of San Antonio honored Ellen with her own day.

She had proven herself a daughter of Texas.

Today, the Witte Museum is still standing.

And Ellen’s original collection is still inside.

And yes, there are still live snakes to draw the crowds.

Final Thoughts

Things are always difficult before they’re easy.

It’s just part of the deal with May.

So here are some ideas on how to deal with it.

Work in the morning when it’s cooler.

And maybe only work in one- or two-hour shifts.

Whatever’s right for you.

Bring a fan outside and have it blow on you, because mosquitoes aren’t good flyers.

Use sunscreen.

And drink plenty of water.

Putting together a strategy for how you work outside will keep you from burning out and burning up.

And both are important.

Because there’s a whole season ahead of us before the garden goes back to sleep.

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