May 8, 2026 Henry Baker, Emil Christian Hansen, Gustave Flaubert, The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, and Maurice Sendak

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The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community

Today’s Show Notes

Mother’s Day is this Sunday.

And if you’re a gardener, you’ve probably had the experience of someone you love showing up with a plant you don’t love.

It happens every year.

The intention is beautiful.

The plant is not what you’d choose.

So years ago, I started doing something different with my kids.

Before Mother’s Day, I’d send them to the garden center with an assignment.

I’d say, bring me back two things that are green.

One that’s a vine or a creeper.

And one that’s spiky.

Or I’d tell them, just buy herbs.

You can never go wrong with herbs.

And when it came to flowers—because kids are always drawn to whatever’s blooming—I’d give them a color palette.

This year I’m looking for purple, white, and pink.

Or this year, I only want blue flowers.

And when Mother’s Day arrived, I got exactly what I wanted in the garden.

No gaudy surprises.

Just plants I actually loved.

And here’s the thing.

It taught my kids to see plants through my lens.

It made the whole experience something we shared.

Instead of something I had to pretend about.

So if someone in your life wants to give you a plant this weekend, tell them what you like.

Be specific.

Say, get me something green.

Something that doesn’t flower.

Like lady’s mantle.

Or something aromatic.

Like lavender or thyme.

Givers want to get it right.

They just need us to say what right looks like.

Today’s Garden History

1698 Henry Baker was born.

The English naturalist never planned to become a scientist.

As a young man, he was apprenticed to a bookseller in London.

But at twenty-two, Henry went to visit relatives for a few weeks.

And stayed for nine years.

What kept him was a child.

The family’s eight-year-old daughter, Jane Forster, had been born deaf.

Henry became fascinated.

Not with her limitation.

But with the possibility of reaching her.

Incredibly, Henry figured out how to teach Jane to speak.

To read lips.

And to move through the hearing world.

Then he taught her two younger siblings.

It worked so well that word spread.

And the work became his career.

Henry spent years teaching the deaf children of the British aristocracy.

Charging high fees.

And guarding his methods behind legal bonds.

Every family sworn to secrecy.

It made him wealthy.

And it made Henry one of the most unusual scientists of his century.

Once the teaching made him secure, Henry turned to the microscope.

For a new challenge.

And everything changed again.

In 1742, Henry wrote The Microscope Made Easy.

The first practical guide to help ordinary people use a microscope at home.

But he didn’t write it for professors.

Henry wrote it for the curious.

And he believed the microscope gave humans a “new sense” to add to the other five.

A way of seeing into another world.

One day, Henry studied pond water and discovered that the sparkling light in the sea at night was caused by tiny living creatures.

Another time, he watched a hydra get cut in half.

And grow back whole.

Suddenly, everything seemed new under the lens.

And so everything was up for grabs.

That is why Henry also examined pollen.

Crystals.

And the invisible architecture of seeds.

And through his connections at the Royal Society, he helped introduce the Alpine strawberry and rhubarb to England.

Plants that crossed borders because Henry built relationships around them.

For his work, Henry won the Copley Medal.

He also helped found the Society of Arts.

And when Henry died, he left money to the Royal Society to fund an annual lecture.

The Bakerian Lecture.

Still delivered every year.

Henry once wrote:

“The works of nature are the only source of true knowledge.”

And in his poem The Universe, he asked us to remember how small we really are:

“And what is Man? A crawling worm! An insect of a day!”

I reflect on Henry whenever life gets too big.

I imagine him at his microscope.

Using his sixth sense to really look at things.

A grain of pollen.

A drop of water.

Tiny things that held the whole universe.

And against the whole universe, our troubles seem small.

Henry Baker knew that.

1842 Emil Christian Hansen was born.

The Danish botanist grew up very poor.

His father was a French Foreign Legion soldier turned alcoholic drifter.

And his mother was a laundress.

By thirteen, even though Emil was the brightest student in his class, he had to leave school to help feed his family.

Later, in his twenties, Emil finished high school.

And found a mentor in a local botanist named Peter Nielsen.

Who showed him the world under a microscope.

And through that lens, Emil fell in love with fungi.

By thirty-four, he won a university gold medal for an essay on Danish mushrooms.

And in 1879, he was appointed to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen.

A position Emil would hold for the rest of his life.

In the 1800s, brewing beer was a gamble.

Entire batches would go bitter or oily without warning.

They called it “beer sickness.”

And nobody could explain it.

Emil looked at the yeast under a microscope.

And saw the problem immediately.

It wasn’t one organism.

It was a crowd.

Like a garden bed full of weeds and wheat all tangled together.

Wild yeasts.

Uninvited.

Invisible.

Contaminating every batch.

Emil found a single cell.

Just one perfect cell.

And he isolated it.

Then he put it in its own clean jar of sugar water.

And let it multiply.

One became two.

Two became millions.

And because they all descended from that one pure original cell, they were identical.

No weeds.

No contamination.

Just pure.

Emil called it Saccharomyces carlsbergensis.

Named for the brewery that gave him a chance.

It was 1883.

And Emil and Carlsberg did not patent it.

They gave it away.

Free.

To every brewer in the world.

The man who grew up with nothing made the most generous discovery of his career.

And simply handed it out over the fence.

Unearthed Words

In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who died on this day in 1880.

Gustave spent most of his life at his family estate in Croisset.

Along the Seine in Normandy.

He was known as the Hermit of Croisset.

Gustave was a large, booming man.

With a walrus mustache.

And a temperament that swung between thunder and silence.

When he paced the lime-tree walk in his garden—his allée de tilleuls—Gustave shouted his sentences aloud to test their rhythm.

As a gardener and a writer, he believed that if a flower was going to be written into a story, it had better be seasonally correct.

In Madame Bovary, Gustave used gardens to mirror the inner life of his characters.

Like when Emma’s early hopes begin to wither in the overgrown garden at Tostes.

He wrote:

“The garden, longer than it was wide, ran between two mud walls … the espaliers were dying, the boxwood was growing wild, and a few lilacs, choked by the nettles, were losing their leaves.”

Gustave once wrote that anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Which explains why he walked that same lime-tree path every day of his adult life.

The same trees.

The same worn stones.

And every morning he went back.

Because it was interesting.

And because he kept showing up.

And somewhere in the dailiness, he fell in love with it.

Book Recommendation

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng.

It’s Mother’s Day Week here on The Daily Gardener.

And that means all of this week’s Book Recommendations are devoted to garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next.

Set in post-war Malaya, the story centers around a Japanese garden built in the Cameron Highlands.

It follows a woman who returns to the mountains years after the war.

To study under a former gardener to the Emperor of Japan.

The garden Tan builds in this novel is shaped by the principles of Zen design.

Moss.

Stone.

Water.

And deliberate emptiness.

Every rock placement carries intention.

And every clipped branch is restraint made visible.

The garden becomes a vessel for silence.

And for memory.

Tan’s novel reminds us that gardens are not always decorative.

Sometimes they are containers for sorrow.

And sometimes they are the place where healing begins.

Botanic Spark

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

2012 Maurice Sendak died.

The American author and illustrator spent his later decades in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

In a quiet house with old maples outside his studio window.

He walked his dogs.

And gardened.

Near the end of his life, he called the world “beautiful, beautiful”.

And said it was “a blessing to grow old.”

He was in love with life.

All of it.

And that love had started early.

Maurice grew up in Brooklyn.

The son of Polish Jewish immigrants.

Shadowed by stories of relatives lost in the Holocaust.

Mortality arrived early in his imagination.

So did trees.

In Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice gave us a bedroom that becomes a forest.

A small boy is sent to bed without supper.

And the walls of his room “became the world all around.”

Vines hung from the ceiling.

The floor softened into earth.

And a private loneliness grew leaves.

The transformation was not loud.

It happened slowly.

A room thickening with green.

A child’s anger given teeth and claws.

And a kingdom to rule.

Maurice understood that children do not need protection from their feelings.

They need somewhere to let those feelings loose.

In the studio, he drew trees with quiet devotion.

Cross-hatched trunks.

Heavy canopies.

Branches that feel older than the page.

When Maurice died on this day in 2012, spring was well underway in Connecticut.

Leaves were widening.

And the light filtered green through the glass windows of his room.

Final Thoughts

If someone wants to give you a garden gift this Mother’s Day, let them.

But feel free to tell them what you see when you imagine your garden at its best.

Give them a color.

And a direction.

Something green and aromatic.

Or something that climbs.

It’s not about control.

It’s about invitation.

When you share what you love, you teach the people around you to see your garden the way you see it.

And that gift—telling someone what you love and watching them bring it home—is one of the best things a gardener can do.

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