May 7, 2026 Gerard van Swieten, Howard Evarts Weed, Alison Uttley, Flower House Mexico by Pili Fuentes, and Edward Augustus Bowles

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

And here’s something a little different to carry into the garden today.

A riddle from the nineteenth century:

“My first we all possess; my second we all should gain; my whole you’ll surely guess: ’tis one of Flora’s train.”

The answer?

Heart’s-ease.

Heart’s-ease is an old name for the wild pansy.

A flower that was said to ease an aching heart.

And if you think about it, that’s not so far from the truth.

Most of us don’t go to the garden because everything is fine.

We go because something needs settling.

And somehow, kneeling in the dirt, hands in the soil, the ache gets a little quieter.

The old herbalists may not have had the science.

But they had the instinct exactly right.

Today’s Garden History

1700 Gerard van Swieten was born.

The Dutch physician and botanist was orphaned at twelve.

As a young man in Leiden, Gerard found Herman Boerhaave, the most famous medical teacher in Europe.

He quickly became his finest student.

And for thirty years, Gerard wrote down everything his teacher said.

Five volumes.

Every word preserved.

As if losing even one was something he couldn’t bear.

When a professorship opened at Leiden, Gerard was passed over.

Not for lack of brilliance.

But because he was Catholic in a Protestant country.

By then, he had a wife and children of his own.

The day Empress Maria Theresa invited him to Vienna, Gerard almost refused.

Because he feared trading his freedom for what he called a “slavish existence” at court.

And that is why Gerard would not go until the Empress promised, in writing, that his wife and children would be provided for if anything happened to him.

The path forward was clear once he knew his children would never face the hard-scrabble life he had faced as an orphan at twelve.

In Vienna, Gerard got to work almost immediately.

He tore out the old medical faculty and replaced it with bedside teaching and clinical observation.

In a move of sweeping generosity, Gerard opened the Imperial Library to the public.

And in 1754, Gerard founded a botanical garden at the university.

Not for beauty.

But for medicine.

Every plant was named.

Every specimen was classified.

And every medical student was required to learn botany before they could practice.

Because Gerard knew that healing starts with plants that were alive and growing.

The following year, the Empress sent him east to investigate reports of vampire attacks in the provinces.

Gerard arrived with a notebook and cold logic.

After he examined the so-called evidence, he explained it all away as simply natural decomposition, fermentation, and the chemistry of buried bodies.

After his visit, Gerard called the panic a “barbarism of ignorance,” and in response, Maria Theresa banned vampire rituals across the empire.

Gerard died in Vienna in 1772.

He was seventy-two.

He left behind a functional medicinal garden along with systems that did not disappear overnight.

Today, the mahogany genus is named in Gerard van Swieten’s honor.

Swietenia.

So every time you see mahogany, that is the botanical world’s way of remembering the man who started out as a twelve-year-old orphan from Leiden and then spent his life making sure nothing was lost.

1870 Howard Evarts Weed was born.

The American landscape architect started out as a young entomologist in Mississippi, specializing in the insects that decimated plants.

Grain weevils.

Borers.

The small relentless things that farmers could not see until the damage was done.

But somewhere in those years of cataloging destruction, Howard got tired of focusing on damage.

Instead, he wanted to create and build something new and uplifting and alive.

And that is when Howard decided to pursue landscape architecture.

He specialized in creating beautiful cemeteries.

In 1912, Howard published Modern Park Cemeteries.

A book that was part design manual.

And part moral argument.

In it, he called rows of monuments and markers a “museum of bad taste.”

Instead, he wanted the headstones gone and the lawns opened up.

He envisioned a place where trees, shrubs, and perennials were planted in vast sweeps of green so beautiful that, in Howard’s own words, “the purpose of the place is forgotten.”

In his futuristic view, Howard wanted the living to walk into a cemetery and feel a sense of peace.

Not dread.

Or morbidity.

That same year, Howard began raising irises.

They became the greatest joy of his life.

As his collection grew, he founded Weed’s National Iris Gardens in Beaverton, Oregon.

And yes, that is his real last name.

The garden featured six acres of blooms that visitors described as a rainbow on a hilltop.

Instead of planting in careful little clusters, Howard planted thousands of iris just to find one new creation worthy of naming.

Popular irises like Azure Glow, Blue Skyscraper, and Beaverton.

These irises all offered huge, dramatic drifts of color that flooded the senses.

Howard died in Beaverton in 1946.

He was seventy-six.

His son Thurlow carried the garden on after he was gone.

Howard Weed spent the first half of his life trying to save plants from destruction.

And the second half proving that beauty could outlast it.

Six acres at a time.

Unearthed Words

In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from the English novelist and children’s author Alison Uttley, born on this day in 1884.

Alison grew up on a farm in Derbyshire, where fields rose steeply and the seasons ruled the day.

As a young woman, Alison studied physics.

She trained to measure light and matter before she ever knew she would become a future writer of fairy tales, including the Little Grey Rabbit series.

After her husband’s death, and through long seasons of sorrow, Alison returned again and again to the memory of her childhood farm and its gates, gardens, and windows.

The following passage comes from her semi-autobiographical novel The Country Child, published in 1931, where a young Susan Garland looks out upon her family garden:

“The parlour window looked out on the roses that nodded close by, and the garden with its wicket gate.

Sometimes the gate opened, and her mother went in for a bunch of carrots, a stick of celery, a spray of parsley, unaware of the still ghostlike face and the brown eyes gazing down at her.

Every window at the farm had its own peculiar magic for Susan.

Each was a peep-hole into some enchanted scene — none was homely or commonplace or dull.”

Alison died in 1976 at the age of ninety-one.

And although her farm in Derbyshire was long gone, she never stopped writing her way back to it.

Book Recommendation

Flower House Mexico by Pili Fuentes

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

And 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.

Every January, floral designers from around the world gather in Mexico for Flower House Mexico.

A public art event and floral showhouse founded by Pili herself.

Each designer is given a room.

And they fill it with flowers.

Pili’s book chronicles the work of more than twenty of these designers and their flower-room creations.

It is part floral-arranging guide.

Part look-book.

With detailed instruction on choosing flowers, extending bloom life, and using non-floral materials like ceramics, textiles, and candles to create atmosphere.

And woven throughout is the symbolism and importance of flowers in Mexican cultural and spiritual life.

The photography by Corbin Gurkin pulses with magenta, orange, indigo, and lime.

With bougainvillea against cobalt walls, courtyard fountains, and clay pots warming in the sun.

In one passage, Pili features the work of New York floral designer Ariella Chezar, who transformed a sterile apartment using thirteen thousand marigolds:

“Using a chicken wire armature and 13,000 marigolds, Ariella and her team constructed a massive serpent-like form that wove throughout the apartment.

The flowers started as a concentrated burst within the room and cascaded outward, spilling onto the floor and overtaking the once-bland hallway in an immersive tide of orange.

Many florists approach bold hues with caution and add only a single pop of color before retreating into neutrals.

Ariella, however, typically takes the opposite approach.

Ariella revels in saturation and allows tones to intensify and resonate.”

Pili’s book expands what a garden can look like and challenges the assumption that beauty means restraint.

In Mexico, flowers bring joy and grow loudly.

Botanic Spark

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

1954 Edward Augustus Bowles died.

The English plantsman was called Gussie by his friends and family.

He lived all eighty-nine years at Myddelton House in Enfield, England.

He did not roam the Himalayas.

He did not chase orchids through jungle mist.

He mostly stayed home.

As a young man, Gussie had intended to enter the Church.

But failing eyesight closed that door.

And he knelt in borders instead and found his devotion there.

His friend, the plant hunter Reginald Farrer, called him “Little Father Augustus,” and the name fit.

By 1901, Gussie was growing more than a hundred species and varieties of Crocus in carefully tended beds.

In 1924, he published A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum for Gardeners.

Complete with his own watercolor illustrations.

Patient.

And exact.

Gussie treated a rare alpine species and a common daisy with the same courtly regard.

People called him the Crocus King.

Not because he collected them.

But because he knew them.

The way you know old friends.

At a garden party, you would not find Gussie at the center of the lawn.

He would be crouched at the margin.

Tweed rumpled.

Pockets bulging with a magnifying glass and a stray bulb he meant to plant.

Gussie kept a garden bed he referred to as the “Lunatic Asylum.”

This was where he planted the twisted, the variegated, the imperfect.

Hazels that contorted.

Leaves that misbehaved.

He gave the outcasts a home.

Gussie never married and had no children.

But he opened his garden to local boys who needed steady hands and quiet work.

They became known as the Bowles’ Boys.

Gussie taught them to sketch.

And to read the veins of a leaf as if it were scripture.

And in his later years, when his sight dimmed almost entirely, he could still identify his crocuses by scent and by taste.

When Gussie died in early May of 1954, the spring bulbs were already thinning.

Snowdrops—Galanthus—had long since bowed away.

And crocus petals were giving themselves back to green.

At Myddelton House, the beds Gussie shaped kept going without him.

The way a garden does when someone has loved it long enough.

Final Thoughts

Heart’s-ease.

The little wild pansy that the old herbalists believed could settle what ached.

And maybe they were right.

Not because the flower has any special power.

But because the garden does.

You go out.

You kneel down.

You put your hands in the soil.

And something that was loud inside you gets a little quieter.

A little less worrisome.

And a little less painful.

That’s heart’s-ease.

And it has been growing in gardens for a very long time.

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