The Daily Gardener

The Daily Gardener is a weekday podcast celebrating garden history, literature, and the small botanical stories that shape how we garden today. Each episode follows an “on this day” format, uncovering the people, plants, books, and moments that have quietly influenced gardens across time. New episodes are released Monday through Friday, and each show features a thoughtfully chosen garden book.

June 23, 2026 Patrick Barry, Anna Frances Walker, Anna Akhmatova, My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner, and Joyce Lambert 06/23/2026

June 22, 2026 Wilhelm Barthlott, Claude Cormier, Hugh Algernon Weddell, My Garden in Summer by E.A. Bowles, and Nina Jones 06/22/2026

June 19, 2026 Beatrix Farrand, Theodore Payne, J. M. Barrie, The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and Emperor Maximilian of Mexico 06/19/2026

June 18, 2026 Mary Bristow and Elyza Fraser, Karl Theodor Hartweg, Bertha Damon, The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz, and Chris Van Allsburg 06/18/2026

June 17, 2026 Philip Willem Schonck, Elsie Maud Wakefield, The Knight of the Garden Spade by Henry Lawson, Poems for Gardeners compiled by Gaby Morgan, and Anne Whiston Spirn 06/17/2026

June 16, 2026 William Saunders, Daphne Osborne, Bloomsday and James Joyce, Poetry in the Garden edited by Jacqueline Bachar, and Lady Ottoline Morrell 06/16/2026

June 15, 2026 The Oxford Physic Garden, Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle, Amy Clampitt, The Colossus by Sylvia Plath and John Lennon and Yoko Ono 06/15/2026

June 12, 2026 Pierre d’Incarville, Wilhelm Lauche, Annie Oakes Huntington, Consider the Lily by Elizabeth Buchan, and Johanna Spyri 06/12/2026

June 11, 2026 Jean Louis Marie Poiret, Father Julius Nieuwland, Ben Jonson's Song: To Celia, The Restoration Garden by Sara Blaydes, and Johan Herman Hofberg 06/11/2026

June 10, 2026 Robert Brown, George Caley, Edward Osborne Wilson, How to Know the Wild Flowers by Frances Theodora Parsons, and Frances Theodora Parsons 06/10/2026

June 9, 2026 Peter Henderson, Carl Ludwig Blume, John Howard Payne, The Garden Book by Monty Don, and Vincent van Gogh 06/09/2026

June 8, 2026 Marguerite Yourcenar, Brenda Colvin, Gillian Clarke, The Garden of Lost and Found by Harriet Evans, and George Lamming 06/08/2026

June 5, 2026 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Anna Maria Hussey, Benington Marsh, Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi, and Robert Hermann Schomburgk 06/05/2026

June 5, 2026 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Anna Maria Hussey, Benington Marsh, Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi, and Robert Hermann Schomburgk Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes One of my favorite garden books is A Year at Brandywine Cottage by David L. Culp. And tucked inside it is the most magnificent recipe for strawberry rhubarb upside-down cake. This is the week I’m usually making it for the third time. And I’m already on the hunt for the next good rhubarb recipe to try. I’ve put David’s recipe in the Facebook group for the show. And I’d love to know what you’re making with rhubarb right now. Everyone has a favorite. They are all worth trying. Today’s Garden History 1656 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was born in Aix-en-Provence, France. The French botanist grew up under a plan his father had carefully arranged. The Church. A priest’s life. A certain future. At the Jesuit college in Aix, Joseph followed the plan — visibly. His prayer books had botanical texts tucked inside them. Before dawn, he slipped out to climb the limestone hills, returning with dried flowers pressed inside his coat. He never fought the rules. He used them as cover. When his father died in 1677, Joseph was twenty-one. He walked out of the seminary and went straight to the mountains — the Pyrenees, the hills of Savoie. In the Pyrenees, bandits stopped him on the trail. They took his horse, his coat, and his money pouch. They left him with his shirt and his walking shoes. What they couldn’t see was that Joseph had anticipated this. He had sewn gold coins into the soles of his boots. He kept walking — standing on his father’s money, moving toward a life his father never imagined for him. By 1683, Joseph was appointed professor at the Jardin du Roi — the King’s Garden in Paris. Louis XIV wanted medicines, trade crops, imperial glory. Joseph said: of course. And then, quietly, reorganized the garden beds according to his own classification system — grouping plants by the shape of their flowers, their corolla. The King thought he was growing medicines. Joseph was building the world’s first genus garden. He didn’t announce a revolution. He just tended it, bed by bed, until it was done. Before Joseph, plant names were long Latin sentences nobody could carry in their head. Joseph wanted a gardener to look at a flower and know its name from ten feet away. His masterwork, Institutiones rei herbariae, organized nearly seven hundred genera for the first time in history. In December of 1708, Joseph was walking home through a narrow Paris street, carrying a heavy bundle of botanical proofs — the printed pages of his latest work. The pole of a passing carriage struck him in the chest. He lingered for weeks in his apartments at the Jardin du Roi, surrounded by nearly seven thousand dried specimens, each one pressed by his own hands. Joseph spent those final days making sure every page was in order. Every genus correctly named. He bequeathed his entire collection to the King — so the garden he had quietly built inside the royal pharmacy would outlast them both. Joseph died on December 28, 1708. He was fifty-two years old. Carl Linnaeus, the man who would eventually replace Joseph’s system with his own, admitted that before Joseph, botany was chaos. To honor the man he dethroned, Linnaeus named a genus after him. Tournefortia. It still blooms. 1805 Anna Maria Hussey was born in Leckhampstead, Buckinghamshire, England. The British mycologist grew up in a rectory garden — the daughter of a clergyman, one of seven children, educated well beyond what most girls received, and curious about everything that grew in the overlooked corners of the world. When she married the Reverend Thomas Hussey in 1831, she married a man who shared her hunger. Thomas was an astronomer. He built a thirteen-foot copper-domed observatory in the garden of their rectory in Hayes, Kent. For a while, they looked at the sky together. Then in 1839, Thomas sold the telescopes. He went quiet. The observatory became a schoolroom. The shared horizon closed. Anna Maria walked into the woods. Not the manicured gardens. The dark ones. The damp shady lanes where the sun never penetrated, where the moss was deep and the air was heavy with the scent of earth. Most Victorian women who studied plants chose flowers at their peak — upright, colorful, hopeful. Anna Maria chose fungi. The organisms that live on dead things. That fruit from rot. That need no light. On the forest floor, she found her mirror. She had buried four of her six children. She was living alongside a man who had sold his wonder and kept his silence. She was writing anonymous romantic fiction for magazines just to pay the bills — telling her mentor, the mycologist Reverend Berkeley, that the fiction paid well. “Much better than Mycology.” And yet, every morning, Anna Maria went back to the woods. Back to the things that thrive in the dark. Back to the brief, strange, honest kingdom no one else wanted to look at. She brought specimens home and painted them at the dining table long after the house went quiet. She painted the rot alongside the beauty. She put flies in the corner of the plate. She refused to make nature prettier than it was. She once wrote that she loved the rain that drove everyone else indoors — because it was the rain that brought out the mycologist’s jewels. Anna Maria’s great work, Illustrations of British Mycology, took years and cost nearly everything. She fought her publishers for the finest paper. She insisted on Royal Quarto size — heavy, authoritative volumes that announced she was a scientist, not a hobbyist. Her sister Frances walked every shady lane beside her, co-illustrating every plate. Together they produced 140 hand-colored lithographs so precise that botanists still use them today. Her mentor Berkeley named a genus after her — Husseia, later reclassified as Calostoma. Beautiful mouth. A shouting thing rising from the dirt. Anna Maria died in August of 1853. She was forty-eight years old. The second volume of her masterwork was unfinished on her desk. Frances picked up the brush and finished it. She made sure the world saw the science and not the shattering. The plates went to Kew. The watercolors went to Chicago. The names went into the taxonomy — where they remain. Anna Maria had once written that the study of nature offered, “a source of pure and exhaustless pleasure that the world cannot give, nor take away.” She was right. Thomas could go quiet. The parish could whisper. The bills could mount. The dark could come. But the forest floor was always full of life. And Anna Maria always knew where to look. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from a letter by the English writer and gardening enthusiast Benington Marsh, written on this day in 1971. Benington’s letter appeared in The Guardian. It was later collected in Ruth Petri’s book Notes from the Garden: A Collection of the Best Garden Writing from the Guardian. Benington titled the letter Trees Putting Elbows on the Lawn. Benington wrote, “We should alas sympathise with boys and girls who put their elbows on the table at meals: it shows they understand what tables are for. But how many gardeners are alive to the charms of trees that put their elbows on the lawn?” Benington had a name for this. Gardening tolerance. The willingness to let living things pursue their wayward impulses without let or hindrance. Benington wrote, “They reveal lavender leaning unashamedly upon close-mown grass, St John’s wort overhanging a path, and a lusty oak threatening to enter bedroom windows.” Benington ended the letter with a yew tree. The tree grows in Whittingham, in East Lothian, in Scotland. Benington wrote, “A remarkable 700-year-old yew rests a host of gnarled limbs upon the ground in a grand circle — it was under this canopy, we are told, that the plot to murder Lord Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots, was hatched in 1567.” Benington wrote that and then moved quietly to the next paragraph. I think about that oak reaching for the bedroom window. I think about what we tidy away without ever asking why. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Yotam Ottolenghi has spent his career making vegetables the most exciting thing on the table. Ottolenghi Simple is his argument that bold flavor doesn’t have to mean complicated cooking — just thirty minutes, or ten ingredients, or one pot, or something already in your pantry. Here’s a recipe that proves it: hot, charred cherry tomatoes with cold yogurt. “One of the beauties of this dish lies in the exciting contrast between the hot, juicy tomatoes and fridge-cold yogurt — so make sure the tomatoes are straight out of the oven and the yogurt is straight out of the fridge. The heat of the tomatoes will make the cold yogurt melt, invitingly — so plenty of crusty sourdough or focaccia to mop it all up is a must alongside.” That’s the whole Ottolenghi philosophy in three sentences. Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi — the book that belongs on the counter, not the shelf. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1804 Robert Hermann Schomburgk was born in Freyburg, Saxony. The German-born explorer had lost everything twice by the time he was twenty-seven — a tobacco business in Virginia, and then every possession he owned in a fire on the island of St. Thomas. Broke and without a path, he taught himself to survey and walked into the jungle. On New Year’s Day in 1837, paddling up the Berbice River in British Guiana, he rounded a bend and stopped. Leaves the size of tables floated on the surface. Each one rimmed in crimson. Each one holding its shape against the current without a ripple. The giant water lily — Victoria amazonica. Robert wrote: “All calamities were forgotten. I felt as a botanist, and felt myself rewarded.” He sent his sketches back to England. Among them — the underside of the leaf. Not the flower. The ribs. A web of ridges radiating out from the center like the bones of a cathedral — a design that held six feet of leaf flat on the water and could bear the weight of a child. Joseph Paxton, the head gardener at Chatsworth, studied those ribs. He placed his daughter Annie on a lily pad to prove they held. And when he was asked to design a building for the Great Exhibition of 1851, he drew the Crystal Palace from the lily’s own logic — iron ribs, glass panels, light pouring through. Robert was in the Caribbean when the Crystal Palace opened. He never stood inside it. He just sent the sketches. And the lily did the rest. Final Thoughts Rhubarb doesn’t wait. It comes in fast and bright and tart and then it’s gone. If you’ve been meaning to make something with it, this is the week. David’s recipe is in the Facebook group. And if you have one you love — share it. That’s what the group is for. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812535

June 4, 2026 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, Walter Edward Lammerts, Robert Fulghum, Ruffage by Abra Berens, and Sarah Martha Baker 06/04/2026

June 4, 2026 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, Walter Edward Lammerts, Robert Fulghum, Ruffage by Abra Berens, and Sarah Martha Baker Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes The British writer William Earle Johns once wrote in The New York Times Magazine: “Queer things happen in the garden in May. Little faces forgotten appear, and plants thought to be dead suddenly wave a green hand to confound you.” The garden holds our dreams. And it holds our disappointments. Every gardener has a plant they quietly grieved — something that didn’t come back the way they hoped, something written off over a long winter or a dry summer or just the slow accumulation of not knowing. And then one morning, there it is. Waving a green hand. As if it never heard you give up on it. Today’s Garden History 1868 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward died in St. Leonards-on-Sea, on the Sussex coast. The English physician and botanist was seventy-seven years old. Nathaniel grew up in London. And Nathaniel wanted to be a sailor. So at thirteen, Nathaniel’s father put Nathaniel on a ship bound for Jamaica. The sea cured Nathaniel of the sailor idea. But Jamaica did something else entirely. Nathaniel walked into the interior — the dripping, impossible green interior — and Nathaniel never fully came back. Nathaniel returned to London to study medicine. And Nathaniel spent the rest of his life trying to get that green back. Nathaniel set up his practice in Wellclose Square, in the East End docks — one of the sootiest, most crowded corners of Victorian London. Nathaniel wrote that the earliest ambition of his life was to possess “an old wall covered with ferns and mosses.” So Nathaniel built one. Nathaniel stacked rock in the yard. Nathaniel ran a little pipe down the top so water could trickle over the stones. Nathaniel planted ferns, mosses, primroses, wood-sorrel. The coal smoke killed every single one. In 1829, Nathaniel was trying to hatch a moth chrysalis. Nathaniel buried it in damp soil inside a sealed glass bottle and set it on the windowsill. Nathaniel forgot about it for a while. When Nathaniel looked again, there was no moth — but there was a fern. And a blade of grass. Growing inside the sealed bottle. Alive. Watering themselves from the moisture on the glass. A tiny microclimate contained in glass. Nathaniel didn’t open it. Nathaniel watched it for four years. Nathaniel’s sealed glass cases — Wardian cases — made it possible to ship living plants across oceans for the first time. Tea from China to India. Rubber from Brazil to Malaysia. Medicinal plants from the Andes to everywhere. Nathaniel never patented any of it. Nathaniel gave the design away freely — to any carpenter, any nursery, any hospital that asked. On Christmas Day, 1866, two years before Nathaniel died, Nathaniel wrote to his friend, the American botanist Asa Gray. Nathaniel admitted that in thirty-three years, Nathaniel had never received “the slightest acknowledgement or thanks from any public body” in England. And then Nathaniel wrote: “But were my time to come over again, I should do precisely as I have done — considering that my life, though one of constant labour, has been one of great delight.” Nathaniel died the following June. And by Nathaniel’s own request, was buried in an unmarked grave. A genus of African mosses bears Nathaniel’s name: Wardia. And all the terrariums sitting on windowsills — every sealed little world made of fern and moss and damp stone — is a nod to Nathaniel’s humble offering to anyone trying to keep something green alive. 1996 Walter Edward Lammerts died in California. The American horticulturist was ninety-one years old. Walter grew up in the sagebrush town of Kennewick, in eastern Washington, the son of a farmer. As a boy, Walter watched his father press a branch from one tree into the rootstock of another — watched the graft take hold — and understood that a plant was not fixed. It could be guided. Rebuilt. Made into something it had never been before. That understanding took Walter to Berkeley, where Walter earned his doctorate in genetics in 1930. By 1935, Walter was at Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario, California, building their rose breeding program from scratch. Walter’s first great rose won an All-America award in 1940. Walter named it Charlotte Armstrong — after the owner’s wife. Then came Descanso Gardens in La Cañada, California. And the camellias. In 1948, Walter learned that Yunnan Province in China held camellia varieties no one in the Western world had ever grown. Walter arranged a shipment — twenty rare plants — just as China’s civil war was closing the country off for good. When the shipment arrived in California, the plants were infested. USDA inspectors ordered them destroyed. Walter refused. Walter argued, negotiated, pushed — and won a high-risk fumigation as an alternative to incineration. Five plants died in the treatment. Fifteen survived. Walter grafted every survivor onto hardy rootstock before anything else could go wrong. Those fifteen plants are still at Descanso today. But Walter’s crowning moment came in 1954. Walter crossed his Charlotte Armstrong rose — a Hybrid Tea — with a Floribunda called Floradora. What Walter got was something awkward. Too tall for a Floribunda. Too cluster-blooming for a Hybrid Tea. The American Rose Society had no category for it. So they invented one. They called it the Grandiflora. They named the rose Queen Elizabeth, in honor of the new British monarch. A rose so distinct it forced the classification system to make room for itself. Walter lived forty-two more years after that — a man of faith in a world of labs, a man of science in a world of creeds. Walter never fully belonged to either side. Walter died in 1996. But at Descanso Gardens, the camellias Walter wrestled from the inspectors still bloom every winter — proving they were worth all the fuss. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It by the American essayist Robert Fulghum, born on this day in 1937. Robert spent years as a Unitarian minister. Robert stood in front of people week after week, trying to find the right words for how to live. Later, Robert became a writer. Robert wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. And then Robert wrote this. Robert wrote, “The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.” Robert understood a brown thumb. Robert had probably had one himself. But Robert could not understand standing by and watching something wither when the answer was right there in your hand. For Robert, love was not something you waited for. It was something you did. Every day. Even when the ground was hard. Even when the results were slow. Even when you were not sure it was working. You showed up anyway. You watered anyway. That was the whole sermon. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Ruffage by Abra Berens. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Abra Berens was a farmer before she was a chef. And that changed everything about the way she cooks. Here’s Abra Berens: “Plants are sensible creatures. Their whole goal is to create seed, protect that seed, and ensure germination the next season — thus continuing the plant’s existence. Even the most rudimentary understanding of what a plant does has made me a better cook — because I am playing to the strengths of the vegetable instead of trying to conform it to my desires. It is true, you are in charge — not the cauliflower. It is also true that by playing to the inherent strengths of a particular ingredient, you can coax out the most delight with the least amount of fight.” Ruffage covers twenty-nine vegetables, from asparagus to zucchini, with more than a hundred recipes and three variations on each one. A James Beard Award nominee. Named a best cookbook by The New York Times and Bon Appétit. Ruffage by Abra Berens — the book that will make you stop fighting with your vegetables. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1887 Sarah Martha Baker was born in London. The English botanist was the only daughter of a Quaker family. As a girl, Sarah had two loves: Art. And the living world outside the window. Sarah’s first plan was to become a medical missionary — to sail to the South Sea Islands and serve. Sarah’s parents said no. So Sarah turned to science. Sarah studied art at the Slade School in London. Then chemistry and botany at University College London, where Sarah took her degree with First Class Honours. But the real classroom was Sarah’s family’s cottage on Mersea Island in Essex — where the tide moved in and out across the salt marsh, and the brown seaweeds clung to the rocks in their distinct bands. Sarah wanted to know why. Why did certain seaweeds grow only at certain tidal depths? Why didn’t they trade places? Sarah discovered that each species could survive only within its own narrow band — defined by how much drying, sunlight, and immersion it could bear. Sarah spent years finding out — wading into the marsh, taking measurements, running experiments back in her lab. Sarah often sang while she worked. Sarah’s colleagues remembered it for years. On June 4, 1914 Sarah’s twenty-seventh birthday, she was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society. A new lectureship was being created for Sarah at University College. Sarah died on May 29, 1917 — five days before her thirtieth birthday. Sarah had been working without ceasing — her research, her teaching, her wartime volunteer work — until her body gave out. Sarah had told her Sunday school children: “The universe is always singing, and we must learn to listen, so that our heart may join the universal chorus.” Sarah heard it in the seaweeds, in the tide moving over Mersea Island. Sarah heard it in her lab, where she sang while she worked. Still listening — right up to the end. Final Thoughts The garden has a longer memory than your disappointment does. It held the thing you wrote off. And then, when the conditions were right — not when you were ready, but on the garden’s own schedule — it handed it back. So this spring, don’t be too quick to decide what’s gone. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812530

June 3, 2026 Katherine Bashford, Patrick Blanc, Kliment Timiryazev, Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari, and Margaret Gatty 06/03/2026

June 3, 2026 Katherine Bashford, Patrick Blanc, Kliment Timiryazev, Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari, and Margaret Gatty Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes How does Annette Wynne’s poem go? Why was June made? Can you guess? June was made for happiness! Even the trees Know this, and the breeze That loves to play Outside all day, And never is too bold or rough, Like March’s wind, but just a tiny blow’s enough; June was made for happiness. I believe that. And June was also made for garden-adjacent chores — the ones that don’t add to the gardening to-do list, but make the garden more worth being in. String up those cafe lights. Clean the outdoor fixtures. Add a cushion to that chair you keep meaning to sit in. The garden is already doing its part. This week, do yours. Today’s Garden History 1953 Katherine Bashford died at her home in Pasadena, California. The American landscape architect was sixty-seven years old. Her grandfather Levi came around the Horn to California on the Argonaut in 1849. Her father Coles built the family into one of the most prominent households in Los Angeles. And Katherine, born in 1885, grew up knowing that the West was still being made — and someone would have to decide what it would look like. She graduated from the Marlborough School for Girls and then did what the women of her era with the means to do it did: Katherine went to Europe. She spent a summer moving through the famous gardens of Italy, Spain, France, and England — not as a tourist, but as a student. She came home a landscape architect. There were no formal programs for women in the West at the time. So in 1921, she apprenticed under Florence Yoch — the most formidable woman in Southern California landscape design. Two years later, she opened her own firm in Pasadena. The architect Myron Hunt, who watched her work for years, said Katherine had an “inborn interest” in the planting and yearly renewal of the annuals and perennials whose blending colors make the jewels of the garden. But she was not a romantic. Rather, she was an engineer of atmosphere. Katherine believed a garden should contain only plants that could grow freely in the place where they were planted — that no plant flourishes in unnatural localities. She carried clinker bricks in her purse — the ugly, over-fired cast-offs nobody wanted — so she could thump one on a linen tablecloth and show a client how its burnt-umber color matched the bark of a Sycamore. At a 1929 dinner honoring young architects, the Los Angeles Times noted Katherine’s presence — “the lone exhibitor of her sex in the profession.” There were two hundred men in the room. And Katherine Bashford. She designed terraced rock gardens and sandstone fountains for the grand estates of the wealthy. She designed the grounds of the Palm Springs Woman’s Club — desert verbena and bougainvillea and rows of manzanita and olive trees. Katherine worked with Wallace Neff and with the architects who built the showplaces of Southern California’s golden age. And she designed Ramona Gardens — the first public housing project completed in Los Angeles, finished in 1941. The same eye. The same standards. Whether the client was a millionaire or a family in Boyle Heights. By 1943, Katherine’s health forced her into early retirement. She spent her final decade at home on Virginia Road in Pasadena, with her sister beside her. She never married. She wrote no book. But she left behind many terraced stone gardens, and courtyards built to last, in a city that she filled with gardens that looked like they had always belonged there. Katherine’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times ran just four lines: A Fellow of the Landscape Architects Society. Who designed many Southland gardens. Survived by a sister. And the places Katherine created still stand. 1953 Patrick Blanc was born in the suburbs of Paris. The French botanist was around ten years old when his mother took him to a large flower exhibition in Paris. Most children looked at the colors. Patrick looked at the rocks. Beside the exhibition waterfalls, orchids and ferns were growing straight out of wet stone — no soil, no one tending them, just clinging and alive. Patrick said later, “Nobody was taking care of the plants growing on the waterfalls. I was impressed by this freedom.” At twelve, Patrick had an aquarium in his bedroom. Patrick fixed a board above it, rigged a small pump to carry water up from the tank, and trained plants to grow along the wall. The roots dangled into the water. The plants thrived. Patrick had built his first vertical garden in his childhood bedroom before he had a name for it. In 1972, at nineteen, Patrick traveled to Thailand and Malaysia and found the same thing he had seen at the flower show — but wild, and vast, and everywhere. Ferns and orchids covering cliff faces and waterfalls. The earth, irrelevant. Patrick spent the next decade at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, perfecting a system — a metal frame, a layer of PVC, a polyamide felt that wicked water to the roots the way moss holds rain on a cliff. Patrick patented it in 1988. In 1986, Patrick installed his first public wall at the Cité des Sciences in Paris. Engineers had said the roots would rot the masonry. The wall thrived. That same year, Patrick and his partner Pascal Héni decided to dye their hair. Pascal chose blue. Patrick chose green. Pascal lasted one week. Patrick has never changed it back. Patrick covered the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris — hundreds of species at once, ferns and mosses and epiphytes clinging to felt the way they once clung to stone. Patrick once called his walls “a kind of redemption — a way of going back to Eden.” In the Philippines, Patrick found a tiny dark-leaved plant on a wet rock face in Palawan. It was a new species. In 2011, botanists named it Begonia blancii in Patrick’s honor. Patrick still works. At seventy-two, Patrick still travels the world half the year — looking for plants that grow where they’re not supposed to. Patrick still wakes each morning in his home in Ivry-sur-Seine, where the floor is glass and beneath it, twenty-one thousand liters of water, fish, and the dangling roots of his indoor jungle. Patrick looks down before he starts his day and sees exactly what he saw at ten years old: Plants that don’t need the earth to keep themselves alive. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a passage about plants and sunlight from the Russian plant physiologist Kliment Timiryazev, born on this day in 1843. Kliment’s mother, Adelaide, was English. Adelaide taught him at home. In her language. Adelaide gave Kliment — he would say later — his boundless love for truth. Kliment spent decades studying the green leaf. What happened when sunlight touched it. What the leaf was actually doing in all that light. Kliment visited Darwin at Down House. Kliment defended Darwin’s ideas in Russia for years. And Kliment never stopped going back to the leaf. In 1903, Kliment stood before the Royal Society of London. Thirty-five years into his work. Kliment gave the lecture in Adelaide’s language. Kliment said, “A plant is a mediator between heaven and earth. It is the true Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven.” Near the end of his life, Kliment wrote his final book dedication. His hand was trembling. Kliment sent the book to Lenin. But Kliment dedicated it to his mother. Adelaide had given him, Kliment wrote, his boundless love for truth. The book went to Lenin. The dedication went to Adelaide. Kliment knew the difference. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Luay Ghafari is an urban gardener in Toronto who has spent more than a decade figuring out how to grow abundant food in small spaces — and how to cook it the moment it comes out of the ground. Here’s Luay Ghafari: “Garden-to-table borrows from the farm-to-table movement and shrinks that radius down to one’s own backyard. You are the chef, the farmer, and the consumer. You are invested in every step of the process.” And this: “Ask any gardener and they will tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that a vine-ripened tomato is the stuff dreams are made of. There is simply no comparison to store-bought. Seasonality matters.” And this: “Walking into my garden with a basket in hand and harvesting homegrown fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness — that is what I love about having a garden. Taking what my garden provides and creating seasonal recipes is what garden-to-table living is all about.” Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari — for everyone who has ever wanted to close the distance between the ground and the plate. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1809 Margaret Gatty was born in Burnham, Essex. The English writer and naturalist married a Yorkshire vicar and settled into a quiet life in a country parsonage. Margaret had children — eventually ten of them. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Margaret’s body began to fail her. By 1848, after the birth of her seventh child, Margaret was sent to the seaside town of Hastings to recover. Margaret was thirty-nine years old, and she had seven months ahead of her with almost nothing to do. So Margaret looked down. At the shore, where the tide pulled back, Margaret found what she would later call the unseen flowers of the sea — seaweeds, clinging to rocks, delicate and strange and completely ignored by everyone walking past. Margaret was smitten. Margaret spent those seven months collecting, pressing, studying. And when Margaret came home to Yorkshire, she didn’t stop. Margaret kept going for fourteen years. By then, Margaret’s illness had crept into her arms. Eventually Margaret could no longer hold a pen. So Margaret dictated her scientific notes to her daughters while they wrote. Margaret called seaweed collecting her “consolation of consolations.” In 1863, Margaret published British Sea-weeds — a book that stayed in use for nearly a century. Margaret died on October 4, 1873. She was sixty-four years old. After Margaret was gone, a memorial tablet was placed in her church. It wasn’t funded by a scientific institution. It was funded by more than a thousand children from across the country — children who had read Margaret’s stories and her nature parables — who each sent in small coins. A thousand small offerings for the woman who had taught them to look down. Final Thoughts June was made for happiness. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that lives in a garden chair with a cushion on it, under a string of lights you finally hung. The garden has been working all spring. It’s June now. Go enjoy what it made. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812525

June 2, 2026 Charles von Hügel, Joachim Zinner, Vita Sackville-West, The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West, and Edwin Way Teale 06/02/2026

June 2, 2026 Charles von Hügel, Joachim Zinner, Vita Sackville-West, The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West, and Edwin Way Teale Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Gertrude Jekyll asked a question once that I think about every June. Gertrude wrote, “What is one to say about June — the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade?” What is one to say about June. I think about that every year when I walk outside and the garden has finally, fully arrived. There is nothing tentative about June. No apologizing. No hedging. Just the wood-dove cooing, the butterflies, the sweet earth-scents — and the whole world saying the same thing over and over again. Gertrude wandered up into her wood and said out loud, “June is here — June is here; thank God for lovely June!” I think Gertrude had the right idea. Go outside today and say it out loud. Nobody has to hear you. The garden already knows. Today’s Garden History 1870 Baron Charles von Hügel died in Brussels, Belgium. The Austrian explorer and botanist was seventy-five years old. Charles was born in 1795 in Regensburg, Germany — the son of a diplomat who filled the house with botanical drawings and dried specimens from foreign posts. At seventeen, he rode into the Napoleonic Wars as a Hussar officer. By thirty, he was decorated, a fixture in the Viennese court, and engaged to be married. Her name was Melanie. And the man who quietly broke the engagement while he was away was Prince Metternich — the most powerful man in Austria. Charles came home to a wedding invitation where his future used to be. Then he left. Not for a country estate. Or for a quiet post abroad. But for six years — through the Punjab, through Kashmir, through the scrublands of Australia — collecting plants from places no European botanist had reached. When Charles returned to Vienna in 1837, he found a patch of land in Hietzing. Then, he began to build. Twenty-three interconnected glasshouses. Thirty thousand species. Lilac hibiscus from Western Australia. Blue lace flower from the Swan River. Himalayan cedar from Kashmir — the tree Charles loved most. Visitors came expecting a baron. They found a man in a leather apron, hands in the soil, crouched over a specimen. When the heating failed one winter night, Charles didn’t send for a servant. Instead, he went into the glasshouse and covered his most delicate plants with his own military cloaks. He refused to let anything that had survived the journey die in his care. The 1848 Revolution ended it. The Austrian economy collapsed. The estate had to be sold. Thirty thousand plants scattered to other collections, other gardens, other hands. That’s when Charles left Vienna for the second time. He spent his final years in Brussels — in a rented house with a small terrace and a few potted plants where his glasshouses used to be. His family said Charles never seemed bitter. Somehow, after all his struggles, he had come to believe that a garden wasn’t something you owned. It was something you set in motion. In his final weeks, Charles planted bulbs in the small patch of earth behind the house. He knew he wouldn’t see them bloom. But he planted them anyway. Charles von Hügel was buried at the Hietzing Cemetery — just down the road from the glasshouses he once kept burning through Viennese winters. His name still grows. Alyogyne huegelii — the Lilac Hibiscus — blooms in gardens Charles never lived to see. 1814 Joachim Zinner died in Brussels, Belgium. The Austrian landscape architect was seventy-two years old. Joachim was born in Vienna around 1742 — the son of Anton Zinner, court gardener to Prince Eugene of Savoy at the Belvedere. He grew up inside the most spectacular baroque garden in Europe. Watching his father command nature the way other men command armies. His father Anton died when he was twenty-one. And that’s when Joachim was sent to Brussels — capital of the Austrian Netherlands — to manage the forests and parks of a territory he had never seen. Joachim’s first great commission was the Brussels Park — Parc de Bruxelles. Built on the ruins of a royal palace that had burned and sat empty for forty years. Joachim and the architect Guimard felled twelve hundred old trees. They planted thirty-two hundred new ones. They laid out avenues radiating from a central point — three long lines of sight connecting the Royal Palace to the Parliament with mathematical precision. Joachim was so proud of it he spent two years building a scale model of the park in miniature. Every path. Every tree. Every building. Rendered in cork and wood shavings. Joachim packed the model up and hauled it across Europe to Vienna to show the Emperor. The Emperor reimbursed him for the trip. It was the closest thing to praise Joachim ever received. His second commission was the Sonian Forest — a vast woodland south of Brussels. The Emperor’s instruction was simple. Grow timber. Joachim grew a cathedral. He planted beech trees — tens of thousands of them — in dense rows. The trunks grew straight and smooth as stone columns. They rose fifty meters before their branches opened into an interlocking canopy like the vaulted ceiling of a Gothic church. Joachim knew the trees would take two hundred years to reach their full height. He planted them anyway. His private life was quieter. And harder. Joachim had secretly married his first cousin in Brussels in 1761. They had four children. He outlived all of them. His wife died in 1802. Jeanne Marie at five. Louise Jeanne at twenty-four. By the end there was no one left. For more than thirty years, Joachim funneled nearly everything he earned into his uncle’s debts. And although the debts were not his, he paid them in full — out of a stubbornness no one asked for and no one rewarded. Joachim lived alone at The Swan — La Maison du Cygne — a guildhall on the Grand-Place of Brussels. His rooms were full of maps and models. He avoided the theater, the salons, the social machinery of the city he had helped build. The only person who came regularly was his barber — Corneille Hommelen. When Joachim died on this day in 1814, he left his barber everything. His furniture. His tools. His drafting maps. His savings. Because Hommelen, the records say, had taken good care of him. The Swan is still standing. The Brussels Park still follows Joachim’s geometry. And the Sonian Forest is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The beech trees are more than two hundred years old. Still rising in their columns. Still holding the light the way Joachim imagined it from a workshop full of cork in a city that never quite knew his name. There is a street in Brussels called Rue Zinner. That is what Joachim got. The barber got the rest. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear garden thoughts from the English poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West, who died on this day in 1962 at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England. She was seventy years old. Vita created the garden at Sissinghurst with her husband Harold Nicolson. They began with the ruins of an Elizabethan manor. A tumbledown, nettle-choked wreck. She fell in love with it on sight. She spent the rest of her life making it one of the most beloved gardens in the world. Vita wrote a gardening column for The Observer for years. Her voice was as distinctive on the page as her garden was on the land. Precise. Sensory. Entirely her own. On the subject of June, Vita wrote, “It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June. Larger than any rose, it has something of the cabbage rose’s voluminous quality… it sheds its petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap.” Vita knew exactly what she was looking at. And she never tired of saying so. Vita died on a warm sunny day in the Priest’s House at Sissinghurst. The small tower room she made her own. Her golden retriever, Glen, nosed the door in her final hours. Vita looked up and said her final words: “Oh, Glen.” Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Kevin West comes from East Tennessee farmers and Smoky Mountain settlers — people who grew food because that was simply what you did. In The Cook’s Garden, he argues that the surest path to a successful garden leads through the kitchen door. You don’t start with the seeds. You start with the meal. Here’s Kevin West: “It was black raspberry season when I went to see Talea and Doug Taylor at Montgomery Place Orchards. They are fruit people, and the extraordinary apples they grow read like poetry: Hidden Rose, Belle de Boskoop, Ashmead’s Kernel, Duchess of Oldenberg, Black Twig, Cox’s Orange Pippin, and dozens more. But Talea and Doug also grow vegetables to stock their farm stand until apples come in. Garlic is a reliable crop for them, and their daughter Caroline Olivia upcycles the scapes to make pesto — the recipe for which she generously shared. On many, many nights it has proven to be the solution to the urgent question: what’s for dinner?” The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West — for everyone whose cooking begins in the soil. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1899 Edwin Way Teale was born in Joliet, Illinois. The American naturalist was the kind of man who rented the insect rights to a two-acre field. The right to photograph every creature living in it. Edwin spent whole days crawling through it with a magnifying glass. Neighbors watched from a distance, trying to figure out what on earth he was doing. But Edwin was making friends. He estimated there were eighteen hundred varieties of insects in that field. He photographed fifteen thousand of them. Once, Edwin befriended a praying mantis. He named her Dinah. Dinah lived in his study for weeks. Once Edwin took Dinah to New York City. Dinah escaped from his pocket on Broadway. There, Edwin — well-dressed, and six feet tall — ran down the street after a bug. Back home, one afternoon, Dinah devoured her own arm. He had just enough time to get the picture. Edwin married Nellie Donovan in 1923. Nellie became his navigator, his note-taker, his companion in the field. Every day on the road they wrote things down together. Birds. Insects. Blossoms. Weather. The slow movement of the season itself. Then the war came. Their son David was killed in Germany. Edwin and Nellie got in a black Buick and started driving. Seventeen thousand miles. Following the advance of spring north. The season moving up the continent at about fifteen miles a day. Sweeping up the valleys. Climbing the hillsides. They followed it all the way. That journey became North with the Spring. Three more books followed. The last one won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. Edwin once wrote — “How strangely inaccurate it is to measure the length of living by length of life. The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.” In 1974, Edwin was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He did what he had always done. He kept field notes. Documenting the progression with the same care he had given to insects in a meadow and spring moving up a continent. Edwin Way Teale died on October 18, 1980, in Norwich, Connecticut. He was eighty-one years old. Final Thoughts Gertrude asked what one could say about June. And then answered her own question by walking into the wood and saying it out loud. June doesn’t show its hand. It just gives — fully, without reservation, without a word about what comes next. That’s worth something. That’s worth going outside for. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812520

June 1, 2026 Johann Sebastian Müller, William Bull, Henry Beston, The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom, and Mary Beal 06/01/2026

June 1, 2026 Johann Sebastian Müller, William Bull, Henry Beston, The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom, and Mary Beal Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Let’s talk about rhubarb — one of the spring garden’s greatest gifts. I grew up with a big rhubarb patch right by the back fence. Those enormous, celery-like stalks just took over that corner of the yard. My mom would cut them and mix them with strawberries for the most delightful crumble. She’d dish it up and serve it with Schwan’s vanilla ice cream. I still make it. Rhubarb is one of those plants that keeps coming back no matter what. It dies back at the end of the season, disappears completely, and then — right when you’ve almost given up — there it is again. That’s a good thing to remember on the first day of June. Some of the garden’s best gifts keep coming back. Today’s Garden History 1792 Johann Sebastian Müller died in Lambeth, London. The German-born botanical illustrator was seventy-seven years old. Johann was born in 1715 in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of a Kunstgärtner — a professional art-gardener who tended the private gardens of the noble Stromer family. That’s how Johann knew plants so well. Because he lived beside them day after day. But while Johann loved plants, he didn’t want a spade to work the land. Instead, he wanted to capture it — artistically, with engraving tools and paintbrushes. And so in 1744, after apprenticing for nearly a decade, Johann packed his portfolio and crossed the Channel with his brother Tobias, headed for London. Somewhere in that crossing, Johann Sebastian Müller became John Miller. Not a lie. Just a way to make his name legible in a city that would not have met him halfway. John settled in Westminster. And whenever he needed a specimen, he walked three miles down to the Chelsea Physic Garden. He refused to draw from dried herbarium sheets. Instead, John found his inspiration exclusively among living plants, where he took a very matter-of-fact approach and didn’t hide what was right before him. He painted not only the beautiful blossoms, but also the stamens and the pistils — the husbands and the wives, as Linnaeus called them — classifying plants by their reproductive parts. Critics called all of that material lewd and morally suspect. But John just kept working. Over the course of seven years, he self-published his masterwork — the Illustratio Systematis Sexualis Linnaei, An Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus — in twenty installments. Eighty-five subscribers supported him, including a fellow transplant from Germany and garden lover, Queen Charlotte, who ordered two copies. In July of 1775, a letter arrived from Carl Linnaeus himself. It was about John’s engraving of the sunflower — a plate so precise it showed the flower from every angle, its seeds, its stem, its reproductive parts — nothing omitted, nothing softened. Linnaeus wrote that it was “more beautiful and more accurate than any seen since the beginning of the world.” The father of modern botany had looked at John Miller’s sunflower and said: no one has ever seen a plant more clearly. John worked until the very end. He fathered twenty-seven children and trained two of his sons, John Frederick and James, to follow in his footsteps. They both went on to illustrate the voyages of Captain Cook. John died on this day in 1792 and was buried at St. Mary’s Church in Lambeth — which, as it turns out, was the most fitting place imaginable, because that church is now the Garden Museum. And John is still there — under the floor, beneath a building devoted entirely to the history of gardening. John Miller gave the living world its most precise, most honest portraits of plants — no apologies, no prettifying, and no hiding what was actually there. 1902 William Bull died in Chelsea, London. The English nurseryman and plant collector was seventy-four years old. William was born in Winchester, England, and lost his father young. He was raised by his grandfather in Shirley, near Southampton — a comfortably off household that expected him to do something sensible with his life. At fourteen, he chose gardening. And to their credit, his family supported his choice. William spent the rest of his life proving it wasn’t a mistake. He apprenticed first in Winchester, then made his way to London to join Henderson’s nursery in St. John’s Wood — one of the finest establishments in the city. By twenty, William was traveling the country as a representative, carrying delicate plant specimens to private estates, walking the last miles himself so nothing shifted in transit. When a later employer refused him a partnership, William took over the nursery of John Weeks on King’s Road in Chelsea — a world-class establishment with state-of-the-art glasshouses and a seventy-foot winter garden. William was thirty-three years old and couldn’t afford the purchase price, so he negotiated an annuity instead — three hundred pounds a year — and spent the next thirteen years building his dream on borrowed ground. William called his establishment Bull’s Establishment for New and Rare Plants. His peers called it something else. Fellow nurseryman Benjamin Williams declared that Bull’s nursery was “Horticulture in Excelsis” — horticulture at its absolute highest. As the business grew, William paid to send plant hunters to Colombia, Liberia, Panama, and the Eastern Archipelago — the most dangerous corners of the globe — to bring back species no European greenhouse had ever held. Some of those men didn’t come home. Richard Pearce, one of the finest plant collectors of his generation, died of yellow fever in Panama at thirty-three years old, looking for orchids for William’s collection. Beginning in 1883, William held annual orchid exhibitions at his King’s Road nursery. For fifteen years, it was one of the great sights of the London season — visited by the King of Siam, the Prince of Wales, and what felt like every duke and earl in England. The Morning Post declared it “a sight that could be seen nowhere else in the world.” 1878 A disease called coffee rust swept through the plantations of Ceylon — modern-day Sri Lanka — and wiped out the coffee crop entirely. An entire island’s economy collapsed overnight. William had been quietly growing a Liberian coffee variety that was immune to the blight. He called the ruined planters his “suffering brethren of the soil,” and he sent them everything he had — thousands of seedlings, packed into his specially patented plant cases, germinated to exactly the right height to survive the journey. The plantations recovered. The island found its footing again. In 1897, the Royal Horticultural Society named William one of the first sixty recipients of the Victoria Medal of Honour — the highest honor the botanical world could offer. The following year, William sold some of his grounds and stepped back from the grand exhibitions. But still, he kept working — with a smaller operation, and thirteen employees — until a short illness took him in the spring of 1902. William died on this day and was buried at Brompton Cemetery in London. His sons carried William Bull & Sons fourteen more years after he was gone. And somewhere in a botanical garden today, beside a plant that arrived in England because a young man walked into a jungle and didn’t come back — a label still reads W. Bull. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from The Outermost House by the American writer Henry Beston, born on this day in 1888. In 1926, Henry went to Cape Cod for a two-week vacation — at a small cottage he had built on the sand dunes near Nauset Beach. He never left. Instead, he stayed a full year — alone with the tides, the shorebirds, the winter storms, and his journal. That year became The Outermost House — one of the great works of American nature writing. In it, he wrote about gardens. Henry wrote, “A garden is the mirror of a mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms.” Henry stayed with me after I read that. I think about it every time I walk into the garden for just a few minutes — and stay until my husband comes to get me. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. There is a quote on the cover of this book by Alys Fowler, and it says everything: “The minute I finished reading this book, I went outside and sowed some lettuce.” That is exactly what Joy Larkcom does to you. Joy spent years traveling through Europe in a caravan with her husband and two young children, collecting the seeds of local vegetable varieties that were quietly vanishing from the world. Here she is, from the introduction: “Finding these plants and learning how to grow them has been a long and wonderful voyage of discovery. Its first leg was what we fondly call our grand vegetable tour. In August of 1976, my husband Don Pollard and I, with our children Brendan and Kirsten, who were then seven and five years old, left Montrose Farm for a year to travel around Europe in a caravan. Our main purpose was to learn about traditional and modern methods of vegetable growing — and to collect the seed of local varieties of vegetables which, as a handful of far-sighted people had begun to appreciate, were an invaluable genetic heritage that was vanishing fast.” And this is what she did with everything she learned: “To get height — a key element in potagers — I train tomatoes up an attractive spiral steel support, sometimes intermingling them with ornamental climbers. I always leave a few clumps of chicory to run to seed in their second season. They grow over seven feet high and produce fresh flushes of sky blue edible flowers every morning over many weeks. The giant winter radishes will do the same, making glorious pink or white flowered clumps in their second spring and seemingly endless crops of delectable edible seed pods. To make the most impact with colorful plants, I almost always plant in groups at equidistant spacing rather than in traditional rows. Bull blood beetroot is a favorite with its scarlet leaves — red cabbage, ornamental cabbages and kales — and for textured effects, I add the ground-hugging ice plant, glossy-leaved purslanes, dill, and fennel. And every year I succumb to the temptation to make patterns with the many salad plants grown as cut-and-come-again seedlings.” The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom — the book that will send you straight outside the minute you finish it. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1964 Mary Beal died in Daggett, California. The American botanist and painter was eighty-five years old. In 1910, Mary was working as a librarian in Riverside, California, when pneumonia stopped her cold. Her friend — the naturalist John Burroughs — knew someone who might help. John Muir’s daughter Helen had moved to a ranch in the Mojave Desert for her own health, and Muir arranged for Mary to come and stay. That’s why she pitched a tent on the Van Dyke Ranch in Daggett. And although she planned to stay a year or two, she ended up staying fifty-four years. Friends would stop on train layovers and bring her flowers and their sympathy. They called it a desolate place. But Mary looked at the sand and saw a universe. She taught herself botany from Jepson’s manual. Each morning, she mounted her horse, Dolly Varden, and rode out into the canyons with a camera and a notebook and a pocketful of chia seeds for lunch. Mary’s friend Harold Weight described her this way: “If you should come upon a small active woman in some isolated corner of the Mojave, wrapped about with photographic equipment and clinging to the canyon wall with fingers and toes — it will be quite safe to say: Hello, Mary Beal.” For years, Mary searched for a flower called the Samija — the stick-leaf — that she had photographed once on Ord Mountain and never found again. A decade passed. The memory grew hazy. And Mary began to doubt her own eyes. Mary wrote: “If it had not been for the photograph I had taken of that Ord mountain specimen, I would have doubted my memory of finding it.” Then one spring, a small box of tagged flowers arrived to be identified. Number one was Mary’s elusive Samija. Two days later, she rode out to the Bullion Mountains. Mary wrote: “One small winding canyon held treasure-trove beyond my most wishful dreams. Even today I have a vivid memory of one gorgeous specimen that was truly the queen of the desert garden.” Mary Beal arrived in the Mojave to survive. She stayed to learn every plant by name, paint them by hand, and send their scent to botanists who had never seen them. Mary died on this day in the desert she had chosen. And a trail at Mojave National Preserve still carries her name. Final Thoughts If you have a rhubarb plant, go easy on it. Never take more than a third of the stalks at once. Leave the rest and let it grow back. Then come back in a couple of weeks and it will have more for you. And if your rhubarb hasn’t been quite right — fewer stalks than usual, a little sluggish — try a handful of lime worked into the soil around the base. Sometimes that will do the trick. Rhubarb is generous. And it’s a great gardener gift. Divide it every so often and give some to a friend. That’s how the best things travel: one gardener to the next, roots and all. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812515

May 29, 2026 Henry Wickham, Joseph Grinnell, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Book Recommendation Placeholder by Unknown, and Edith Schryver 05/29/2026

May 29, 2026 Henry Wickham, Joseph Grinnell, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Book Recommendation Placeholder by Unknown, and Edith Schryver Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes The other day, as I was going through my little page-a-day calendar by the front door, I came across a quote I had saved from last year. It was one of those lines that sticks with you. And this one is from Alan Alexander Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh: “A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.” Now, I’m not so worried about the tubby part. But the exercise part — that one landed. Because this time of year, I have to remind myself that the gardener I am in October — strong, seasoned, used to the hours — is not the gardener I am right now. A few springs ago, I planned to be out there three hours a day. That year, I was gassed after two. Because the work accumulates faster than you expect, the garden will always have more for you to do. It just keeps multiplying. And it doesn’t run out of work. But you can run out of you. So as you move through these early days of the season, pace yourself. Leave something in the tank. The garden will be there tomorrow. And so will the laundry. Today’s Garden History 1846 Henry Wickham was born. By the time he reached his twenties, Henry was living along the Tapajós River in Brazil — where the air clung to the skin, where insects hummed in the canopy, and where the river moved wide and brown through the heat. As he tried to make a life there, he cleared land, planted crops, and tried to make something succeed. As the region began to change around him, the rubber boom was underway. Fortunes were being made in the forest. And Henry saw an opportunity for himself. In 1876, he began collecting seeds from wild rubber trees — Hevea brasiliensis — deep in the Amazon. Anticipating how valuable they could become, he gathered rubber tree seeds by the tens of thousands, packed them in wooden crates, and then sealed them inside glass Wardian cases. Then he labeled the shipment “Exceedingly delicate botanical specimens,” and sent them off to Kew. In a letter describing the shipment, Henry called the seeds “a great prize.” Surprisingly, most of them germinated. And some of the seedlings were sent on to British colonies in Asia. For Henry, at the time, it was simply about doing his job — and being in the right place at the right moment. Years later, he was knighted for his service to tropical agriculture. But back in Brazil, Henry’s shipment of seeds is still remembered as the day the rubber left the forest. 1939 Joseph Grinnell died. He was sixty-two. As he was growing up in California, Joseph watched the landscape change. The grizzly bear, hunted out. The passenger pigeon, gone. In places like Pasadena, the dry riverbeds and scrubby hillsides were paved over. And the boom never stopped. As Joseph came of age, he realized he could not stop any of it — but he could document it. So on New Year’s Day, when he was seventeen, Joseph opened his notebook and began again. The entry read: January 1, 1894. A Red-shafted Flicker — specimen 72. And he recorded the date, the location, the elevation, and the details in permanent ink. From that morning forward, Joseph recorded everything — wind direction, habitat, and absence. Joseph wrote: “You can’t tell in advance which observations will prove valuable. Do record them all.” When he trained his students in the field, Joseph worked them the same way. And there was no dinner, no sleep, and no beer until the notes were transcribed. As part of that discipline, Joseph inspected notebooks with a magnifying glass. Because he wanted precision above sentiment, he banned the word beautiful. And he wanted data clear enough to last. And yet — in his own private journals, Joseph followed a softer set of rules. He wrote of the “shimmering” outdoor light and the melancholy song of a thrush. It turns out, he felt it all. He generally kept the feeling separate from the record. As he aged, Joseph believed the world was changing faster than anyone admitted. And he believed if he did not write it down precisely, it would vanish twice — once from the hills, and once from memory. But Joseph did not live to see the proof. Decades later, scientists retraced his routes. They climbed the same ridges and stood on the same slopes. And they opened their notebooks where he had opened his. The birds had moved higher. The ranges had shifted. And the blooming had changed. After Joseph’s death, his wife Hilda wrote that his work was, “for the use of the student of the present and the analyst of the future.” It turns out, Joseph was writing to us. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a passage about making a garden from the English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton, born on this day in London in 1874. As a man, Gilbert was a broad-shouldered figure — with a hat, a cape, and a cane. As he worked, he wrote essays quickly and constantly, at a desk or in a train compartment, on faith, politics, paradox — and sometimes, about gardens. In later years, Gilbert lived in Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, where cottage plots sat behind brick walls and May would have meant fresh turf, early roses, and the first red geraniums set into beds. Here is an excerpt from one of Gilbert’s essays: “The moment you have a garden, you have a very dangerous thing. You have a place where something may happen. You have a place where something may grow.” Gilbert may have written these words in a train compartment, or at a cluttered desk, turning them out in the middle of everything else he was writing. And I think about Gilbert every time I plant something in a straight line, or choose one color over another, and then stand back and wonder if it’s good enough. And it’s in that moment that I think of him — because to Gilbert, it was never about getting it right. It was about taking pleasure in making something your own and then not evaluating it — just the doing. Book Recommendation It’s time to grow the Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: A Therapist’s Garden by Erik Keller. This book is part of Specialty Gardens Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations focus on a particular plant or a particular practice. This book explores the healing potential of gardens and plants — not as decoration, but as companions in recovery, reflection, and emotional restoration. Erik Keller writes about how gardens can become spaces that calm the nervous system, restore attention, and help people return to themselves through beauty, pattern, and care. It is a book about the quiet way a garden can hold a person. And how plants can become part of a life that is more grounded, more observant, and more alive. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1984 The American landscape architect Edith Schryver died in Salem, Oregon. She was eighty-three years old. By then, her friends called her Nina — a nod to her small stature. And over time, her last name, Schryver, came to feel especially fitting. It comes from the Dutch word for scribe or writer. As a landscape architect, Nina was a writer of gardens — using a T-square instead of a pen. Back at the beginning, she grew up in Kingston, New York, in an apartment directly above her father’s railroad restaurant. As a teenager, Nina spent summers at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in nearby Massachusetts — one of the only places in America that would train women in the field. After she graduated in 1923, Nina was scooped up by the most prestigious female-led firm in the country — Ellen Biddle Shipman’s New York office. There, Nina was the one at the drafting table. She calculated drainage, engineered the grades, and inked the plans. But Shipman’s name went on the plaques. Looking back, Nina laughed: “We were free-swinging career girls and no one questioned us.” By the time she reached her mid-twenties, Nina needed a break. She took a sabbatical to study the gardens of Europe. And during the crossing, a steward unknowingly seated her at the Children’s Table. It wasn’t until later, when Nina asked for a glass of wine, that she realized she wasn’t where she belonged. After she demanded to be moved, the table change led her not just to a new seat — but to her destiny. Sitting across from her was Elizabeth Lord — a landscape architect from Salem, Oregon, whose father had served as the state’s governor. By the time the ship docked, Nina and Elizabeth had created plans for their own business, based in Salem. When the doors opened in 1929, Lord and Schryver became the first women-owned landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest. Nina was the bones. Elizabeth was the bloom. In 1932, Nina and Elizabeth built their own home at the base of Gaiety Hill and lovingly called it Gaiety Hollow. There, Nina carved six outdoor rooms from a parcel barely half an acre. She saved a three-hundred-year-old white oak by building the entire garden around it. She planted her favorite camellias, boxwood, and a grape-covered pergola that they never stopped walking toward. In that moment, the girl who grew up with trains rumbling beneath her had finally built something that couldn’t move. For forty years, every evening at five, work stopped. The drafting pens went down. Nina and Elizabeth sat on the back porch with dry martinis and watched the light change through the garden they had made. Later, Nina reflected on those years: “Salem was so different then. We had a wonderful social life, as well as a profession that took us all over the Northwest. All the historical people were still living — there was entree into all those houses because Miss Lord’s family was prominent here.” When Elizabeth died in 1976, she was buried in her family’s mausoleum in Salem. And in the years that followed, Nina lived on for eight more years, alone in the house they had built together — still clipping the boxwood by hand, keeping the lines sharp, and refusing to let the geometry blur. Before Nina died, she made sure the house and garden would go to someone who would tend them. For decades after, the Strand family kept faith with the garden before selling it to the Lord and Schryver Conservancy. When Nina died, her family brought her back to Kingston — back to the railroad town she had spent her life writing into the earth. But back in Salem, the garden is still there. Gaiety Hollow. The boxwood rooms. The pergola. The double dark pink camellia still blooming under the oak just as it did when they were both alive. Final Thoughts The garden doesn’t ask you to do everything. Just something. Just enough. And if you were out there today, even for a little while, then you’ve already done more than you think. Because the garden isn’t keeping score — it’s simply waiting for your return. And tomorrow, when you step back into it, you’ll pick up exactly where you left off — a little stronger, a little steadier, and a little more yourself. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812455

May 28, 2026 John H. Bartlett, William Herbert, May Swenson, The Apothecaries Garden by Sue Minter, and Patrick White 05/28/2026

May 28, 2026 John H. Bartlett, William Herbert, May Swenson, The Apothecaries Garden by Sue Minter, and Patrick White Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes In her 1968 memoir Plant Dreaming Deep, the Belgian-American writer May Sarton wrote: “From May on, I can hardly wait to get up to see what has happened overnight, for one of the pleasures of a garden is that something is always happening; it is not static, even for a day. I go out by six-thirty and sometimes earlier, still in my pajamas and a wrapper, to take a look around before breakfast.” There is something about a garden that makes us feel comfortable enough to come to it like that — in our pajamas, without makeup, without shoes, before the day has made any demands. We do not get ready for the garden. We just go. And the garden never seems to mind. Today’s Garden History 1919 The governor of New Hampshire, John H. Bartlett, signed his name to a law declaring the purple lilac the official state flower. The law said the lilac was more than a flower. It was a symbol of the hardy character of the men and women of the Granite State. But John was not naming something new. He was acknowledging something that had already endured. In 1750, an Englishman named Benning Wentworth — the colony’s first royal governor — planted lilacs at his home near Portsmouth. When he left England, Benning carried them across the ocean — small roots tucked in with other trees and shrubs, brought from England to a new and colder place. They took. Over time, they grew tall beside the house. And they flowered each May, lavender against timber and stone. Fast forward nearly two centuries later. In April of 1939, another governor, Francis P. Murphy, stood on the Capitol grounds with six root cuttings taken from those original Wentworth lilacs. Just before pressing them into the earth, he said: “Six roots were taken from the famous lilac trees in the garden of the first colonial governor of New Hampshire. So today, we are placing root cuttings in the earth of the Capitol grounds from the very first lilacs ever to come to America. We are very proud of this little flower, which is uniquely ours, and as I plant these roots today, I ask you to join with me in the hope that they may thrive and, over time, grow into full beauty.” Those roots were not ornamental. They were continuation. And here is something else — the lilacs planted at Mount Vernon, at the home of George Washington, are believed to be slips taken from the Wentworth estate. They were a passing of wood, beauty, and will. Today, in some of the oldest parts of New England, there are lilacs blooming in places where houses no longer stand. And one of the reasons they are still there is simple — like peonies, lilacs can live for over a century. For generations, people have planted lilacs close enough to smell from the front porch or their kitchen window. They have been used to mark the edges of properties, to hide a clothesline pole, and to provide a backdrop for family photos. And on this May morning in 1919, John signed his name to the lilac — giving the Granite State something fragrant, something beautiful and soft, and something that returns reliably year after year. 1847 The English clergyman and botanist William Herbert died. He was seventy-one. For most of his life, William moved between two kinds of rooms. On Sundays, he stood in a stone church among his parishioners. On weekdays, he worked alone in a greenhouse, where the glass caught the light and the soil stayed damp underfoot. William devoted himself to the amaryllis family, Amaryllidaceae. And at a time when many naturalists dismissed hybrids as mistakes, as unstable, and even improper, William saw something different. In the natural world, bees carry pollen from one plant to another without hesitation. But when a person did the same, it raised a question — whether such crossings overstepped what nature, or even God, intended. William did not turn away from that question. As a clergyman, he knew the Bible and the language of creation intimately. Yet he understood plants not as something fixed, but as a living gift — something that could be tended, worked, and even, carefully, joined for man’s enjoyment. He understood plant breeding as participation, not disruption. Hand-pollination moves slowly. It requires closeness, repetition, and the willingness to begin again the following season. So he gathered pollen and lifted it carefully, sometimes with a camel-hair brush. He crossed one bloom with another, and then he waited. William recorded what happened when species met. Some crosses failed. Some faltered. But others opened into colors no one had seen before. William saw deeper crimsons, unexpected striping, and petals thick as velvet. And when morning light struck certain blooms, their surfaces shimmered, as though the flower had been brushed by frost. Gardeners later called this the diamond dust effect — light caught in the cells of the petal, scattering into brightness. William lived among it. He saw it again and again in the greenhouse light, and he kept working to bring it forward. He kept crossing amaryllis plants until his death on this day in 1847. After he was gone, the church grew quiet. But the greenhouse stayed warm, a different kind of parish, still opening into color, light, and that fine, sparkling diamond dust. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a poem from the American poet May Swenson, born on this day in 1913 in Logan, Utah. May grew up with mountains on the horizon and a big sky overhead. She carried that sky with her everywhere she went. Here is an excerpt from May’s poem Strawberrying. “We’re picking near the shore, the morning sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there, their squishy wounds . . . . Flesh was perfect yesterday . . . . June was for gorging . . . . sweet hearts young and firm before decay. ‘Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,’ a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot in the furrows. ‘Don’t step on any. Don’t change rows. Don’t eat too many.’ Mesmerized by the largesse, the children squat and pull and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half for the baskets, half for avid mouths. Soon, whole faces are stained. When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty, still attached to their dead stems— families smothered as at Pompeii — I rise and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped head. Red-handed, I leave the field.” May and her ten siblings grew up listening to their Swedish mother read stories aloud to them every evening. And when I read May’s poetry, in my mind it sounds exactly like something she heard her mother read to her right before she fell asleep when she was just a little girl. Book Recommendation This book is part of Specialty Gardens Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations focus on a particular plant or a particular practice. In 1673, the Society of Apothecaries founded a garden in Chelsea to research and classify the plants that healed people. For more than three hundred years, the Chelsea Physic Garden led the world in that work. Here’s Sue Minter: “At the dawn of the new millennium, the Chelsea Physic Garden remains the only botanic garden to retain physic in its title — after the old name for the healing arts. At a time when there is great interest in both health and in garden history, no doubt this re-establishment of its role will continue.” And from the postscript: “Despite these approximately four acres having been continually cultivated from 1673 until 2000, there has always been a level of interest and influence beyond the walls. The degree has varied. Sometimes the garden has been a veritable conduit of influence between Britain and the rest of the world — and vice versa. Certainly in terms of the introduction of species to British horticulture, these four acres have probably been more influential than any other. Inventions popularized from here, such as the Wardian case — the portable glass terrarium that made it possible to transport living plants across oceans — have dominated some countries’ economies, making some and ruining others. Agricultural cropping techniques have been revolutionized partly as a result of research work done here in the twentieth century.” Four acres. Three hundred years. One wall between it and everything that changed because of it. The Apothecaries' Garden by Sue Minter — The Hidden History of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1912 The Australian novelist Patrick White was born in London. Patrick grew up in Australia, but his childhood was shaped by severe asthma. Even between attacks, he could never quite get enough air. When he turned thirteen, his mother sent him to England hoping that the climate might help his breathing. But it did not save him. It only uprooted him. And so he spent years between two worlds, never quite belonging to either one. It’s part of the reason why Patrick once described himself as an unplanted tree, bearing roots from another soil and bent by a harsh sun. In 1948, Patrick and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, bought six acres at Castle Hill, outside Sydney. The first thing they did was plant four dogwood trees — and they named their farm after them: Dogwoods. At Dogwoods, Patrick rose at six each morning to weed. Then he would milk the cows and haul produce to market. And though he often called himself a slave to the garden, he said he never felt happier than he did on that small piece of land. But then, in 1951, during a rainstorm, Patrick slipped in the mud and fell face-first into the earth. He picked himself up, went inside, and began writing The Tree of Man. In the novel, Patrick follows a man carving a life in the Australian bush — planting, building, and staying. While Patrick wrote, he planted his own rose at Dogwoods — a pale pink climbing rose called Cécile Brunner, the same rose he gave his character. Patrick wrote of that rose: “The rose that they would plant was already taking root outside the window of the plain house, its full flowers falling to the floor, scenting the room with its scent of crushed tobacco.” Years later, Patrick wrote about what he had been searching for in the novel, in the mud, and in the farm itself: “I felt the life was, on the surface, so dreary, ugly, monotonous, there must be a poetry hidden in it to give it a purpose — and so I set out to discover that secret core, and The Tree of Man emerged.” The Tree of Man ends with an aged Stan Parker dying on his garden path as suburbia inches toward his land. The last line belongs to his grandson — a budding poet — who writes: “So that, in the end, there was no end.” When Patrick accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, he credited his asthma for everything — the reading, the writing, the work. When Patrick died in 1990, his ashes were scattered in Centennial Park, where he had walked every day for twenty-six years. He once wrote about the hollow where he lived — about the fine pollen from the paspalum grass, a common Australian grass that drifts and settles over everything. It was always, he said, threatening to engulf them. And in the end, it did — softly, completely — as he returned to the same ground he had spent a lifetime trying to understand. I keep thinking about that fall. Face-first into the dark earth. Most falls ruin lives. His was a great clarifier. Final Thoughts We are often our own harshest critic in the garden. We see the bare spots. We see what’s been left behind. We see what we should have done two weeks ago and didn’t. The garden sees none of that. It sees you. In your pajamas, at six-thirty, showing up. And it just keeps blooming. The critic is ours. The welcome is the garden’s. And the garden always wins. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812450

May 27, 2026 Charles Waterton, Robert Kyd, Helen Morgenthau Fox, Citrus by Pierre Laszlo, and Georgina Burne Hetley 05/27/2026

May 27, 2026 Charles Waterton, Robert Kyd, Helen Morgenthau Fox, Citrus by Pierre Laszlo, and Georgina Burne Hetley Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Spring always feels a little unsettled to me until I plant the kitchen garden. It sits just outside the deck door. Close enough that I can step out barefoot with a pair of scissors in my hand. The thyme settles first. Then dill and parsley. Rosemary. Sage. Mint that refuses containment. And later — basil in generous handfuls. I tuck a few pots near the table and by the chairs. Slipping in lemon verbena so the air carries something bright when evening comes. All winter long, food feels finished when it leaves the stove. In spring, there’s something waiting just outside the door. A handful of green. A torn leaf. A small correction. Today’s Garden History 1865 Charles Waterton died at Walton Hall in Yorkshire, England. He was eighty-two. When Charles was a boy at school, two older boys dared him to kill a goose. Although he felt it was wrong, Charles did it anyway. When the schoolmaster heard what happened, he punished the older boys. But not Charles. The mercy stayed with him. As Charles finished school, an older priest pulled him aside and said he worried that one vice might undo him. And he made Charles promise never to drink. Charles agreed. And he kept that promise for the rest of his life. As a young man in British Guiana, Charles saw how quickly animals were killed. For sport. For trade. For habit. Once, standing on a sandbank with a group of men, Charles faced a giant caiman. He wrote, “They wanted to kill him, and I wanted to take him alive.” Charles leapt onto its back. And wrestled it down. The story later appeared in his popular book Wanderings in South America. In 1806, when his father died, Charles inherited Walton Hall. He was only twenty-four. Yet somehow already certain of what he wanted. His first instinct was to build a wall around his property. Not to keep people out. But to keep wildlife safe inside. A place where there would never be hunting. The wall was three miles of stone. And nine feet high. Charles liked to say he paid for it with the wine he did not drink. While his neighbors measured their worth by the quality of their hunts, Charles measured his by how many birds found refuge inside his walls. Herons stood unstartled even when gunshots rang out beyond the wall. People would later call it the world’s first bird sanctuary. Then in the 1830s, when a soap factory was built nearby, smoke began drifting across Walton Hall. Charles successfully sued the factory. Arguing that the fumes damaged his property. Killed the trees. And fouled the land. In 1829, when he was forty-seven, Charles married Anne Edmonstone. Who had been promised to him three decades earlier when he was exploring Guyana with Anne’s father. Anne was just seventeen. Not long after giving birth to their son Edmund, Anne died. That’s when her sisters came to Walton Hall to raise their nephew. After Anne’s death, something else happened. Charles began sleeping on the floor. And rising at three each morning to pray. It became another lifelong discipline. At the end of May in 1865, Charles was working in the park when he fell hard. He knew the injury was serious. But he took the time to give a blessing to his grandchildren and family. In his introduction to Wanderings in South America, Norman Moore wrote: “He was buried on his birthday, the 3rd of June, between two great oaks at the far end of the lake, the oldest trees in the park. He had put up a rough stone cross to mark the spot where he wished to be buried. Often on summer days he sat in the shade of these oaks watching the kingfishers.” Moore remembered Charles once saying: “Cock Robin and the magpies will mourn my loss, and you will sometimes remember me when I lie here.” At the foot of that cross is the inscription Charles wrote himself: “Pray for the soul of Charles Waterton, whose tired bones are buried near this cross.” 1793 Robert Kyd died in Calcutta, India. He was forty-seven. By then, Robert had lived and worked in Bengal for more than twenty years. In 1770, when he was still a young officer there, famine swept through the region. Monsoon rains failed. Rice crops collapsed. And millions died. Robert could not change the weather. But he believed something else could change. What people chose to plant. What else could grow alongside rice when the monsoon failed. Robert believed famine could be softened if more reliable food crops were grown alongside rice. So he began experimenting with plants. In 1787, at forty-one, Robert secured three hundred acres at Shalimar. A stretch of marshland on the opposite side of the Hooghly River from the city of Calcutta. The land was difficult. Wet. And unstable. Canals were dug to make more soil usable. Then he planted food plants that could survive difficult conditions. Robert chose sago palms because they store starch inside their trunks. When they are cut open, that starch can be dried into flour. He planted teak for durable timber. And tea to see if it could thrive locally. He also selected date palms so there would be fruit in dry seasons. By day, Robert crossed the Hooghly River into Calcutta to serve as Secretary to the Military Department. By evening, he returned to Shalimar. To walk the young plantings with local malis. Gardeners. Checking which species survived. And which failed. Robert liked to call the garden a “magazine” — a military word for a storehouse of supplies. In May of 1793, as illness weakened him in Calcutta, Robert decided to write a will. He requested a simple burial at the Shalimar garden he founded. But the East India Company instead buried him at South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta. Two years later, in 1795, a marble urn sculpted by Thomas Banks was placed in the Botanic Garden in his memory. And his successor, William Roxburgh, named the genus Kydia after Robert. Today the garden at Shalimar is known as the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden. And on that riverbank, the work Robert began — testing plants against hunger — still continues alongside the Great Banyan, now over two hundred fifty years old and one of the widest trees in the world, covering about four and a half acres. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a recipe for Marigold Custard from the American garden writer Helen Morgenthau Fox, born on this day in 1903. In 1933, Helen published Gardening with Herbs for Flavor and Fragrance. A book that grew out of three years devoted almost entirely to herbs. At her home, Foxden, in Peekskill, New York, she raised dozens upon dozens of aromatic plants. Seeking seeds and cuttings. Experimenting in her kitchen. And recording what she learned. Helen’s book described sixty-seven herbs. And included more than fifty recipes. Dishes that drew herbs out of the medicine chest and placed them squarely on the table. Among them was this older recipe for Marigold Custard. A dish that used marigold petals as a kind of poor man’s saffron. For color. And a faint, warm bitterness. Here is Helen’s documentation of the traditional preparation: Marigold Custard Recipe. Ingredients: 1 pint of milk 1 cup of marigold petals, freshly gathered A pinch of salt 3 tablespoons of sugar A piece of vanilla bean or a dash of nutmeg 3 eggs, beaten Rosewater, optional, for a traditional finish Preparation: Infuse the Milk: Pound the marigold petals in a mortar, or crush them to release their color and essence. Add them to the milk and bring it slowly to a boil. Strain: Once the milk has taken on a yellow hue and the flavor of the petals, strain the mixture through a fine cloth. Combine: Stir in the sugar, salt, and chosen seasoning — vanilla or nutmeg. Thicken: Gradually pour the warm milk into the beaten eggs, stirring constantly to avoid curdling. Cook: Pour the mixture into a double boiler or individual custard cups. Cook gently until the custard coats the back of a spoon, or a knife inserted comes out clean. Serve: Chill before serving. A dash of rosewater can be added just before serving for an authentic old-world aroma. There’s a whole kitchen hiding in the garden. Helen reminds us that marigolds can stand in for saffron. Offering color and warmth and flavor from something we deadhead without thinking. We’ve just forgotten how to read it. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Citrus by Pierre Laszlo. This book is part of Specialty Gardens Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations focus on a particular plant or a particular practice. Nearly a hundred million tons of citrus are produced around the world every year. Pierre Laszlo wants to know how we got here. Tracing the fruit from Southeast Asia in 4000 BC. Through the Roman Empire. Through the gardens of Versailles. Through the canvases of Van Gogh. All the way to the orange groves of California. But first, he wants you to try something. He writes: “Take a piece of peel from lime, lemon, orange, grapefruit. It does not matter. Bend it between thumb and index finger over a piece of paper and note the dots of oil that spurt onto it. These are the essential oils.” Those tiny glands in the peel, Laszlo writes, are miniature gold mines. For centuries, the oils they produce became perfumes. Orange bitters. Furniture wax. And some of the most valuable trade items in the world. We have been throwing away the most valuable part of the fruit ever since. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1832 Georgina Burne Hetley was born in Battersea, England. As a young woman, Georgina crossed oceans. First to Madeira. And then to New Zealand. Where her mother bought land near New Plymouth and named it Fernlea. Georgina married there. But not long after, her husband died suddenly. And Georgina, who was twenty-five years old, found herself alone with a newborn son and land that required tending. For a time, she managed the farm. But then the war started. Smoke from burning bush rolled across the hills. And homes were abandoned. The forest she loved began to thin under the press of settlement. Years later, Georgina wrote of a town “hidden by the smoke of the burning ‘bush,’” and of a beautiful forest “fast disappearing before the tide of cultivation.” By her fifties, living in Auckland, Georgina attended a lecture at the Auckland Museum. She learned how few of New Zealand’s native flowers had ever been painted from living specimens. Most existed only as dried and browned sheets in herbaria. And so Georgina began to paint them from life. She carried paper and pigments into gardens and along rough roads. She waited for blossoms to open. And she worked quickly because petals fold. Georgina refused to paint from dried remains. And worked only from living plants. In 1888, she traveled to London to oversee the publication of her masterwork, The Native Flowers of New Zealand. While she was there, she asked the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for a commission so she could continue her botanical drawings. But sadly, they declined. Undaunted, Georgina returned to New Zealand. And spent the last decade of her life painting the flowers of her country and fighting for their preservation until her death in 1898. Final Thoughts There’s something about a kitchen garden that lives just outside the door. Close enough that you don’t have to plan for it. You can simply step out while something simmers. Clip a stem. Pinch a leaf. And come back in. No trek across the yard. No basket required. Just the quick trip. The snap. And the green that finds its way straight into the pot. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812445

May 26, 2026 Orra White Hitchcock, William Jackson Bean, Waldemar Januszczak, Orchid A Cultural History by Jim Endersby, and Felicity Bryan 05/26/2026

May 26, 2026 Orra White Hitchcock, William Jackson Bean, Waldemar Januszczak, Orchid A Cultural History by Jim Endersby, and Felicity Bryan Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes The nighttime temperatures are finally holding. Another garden season is opening wide before us. This is when I buy the biggest Boston ferns I can find for the front porch. The morning glory seeds go in by the trellis. And the terracotta pots get a good once-over. It’s officially checklist season. Every day in the garden there are boxes to tick. And new ones get added. It will be like this until the last fall tasks get done. Or not. It’s funny how when spring finally arrives, those leftovers from autumn don’t seem so important anymore. It’s all relative. How can you compare putting away tools to harvesting the first radish? Or that first stalk of rhubarb? Check away. Today’s Garden History 1863 Orra White Hitchcock died in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was sixty-seven years old. Orra was born in 1796. And unusually for the time, her father believed a daughter should study as seriously as a son. So she learned Latin. Greek. Higher mathematics. And she also learned to draw. In her early twenties, Orra became a teacher at Deerfield Academy. There, a young minister named Edward Hitchcock was falling in love with geology. And then fell in love with her. In 1821, Orra and Edward married. She was twenty-five. Edward was twenty-eight. After their marriage, they moved to Conway, Massachusetts, where Edward served as a pastor. In Conway, they lost a baby. The grief was real. And it stayed with her. Years later, traveling in Europe, Orra would stop in front of funerary sculptures of young mothers who died in childbirth. And she could not look away. In the winter of 1825, Orra and Edward moved to Amherst. This is where her work quietly transformed how science was taught. Edward needed images to make geology intelligible. The college had no funds for teaching charts. So she made them. Enormous classroom illustrations. Large enough for students to see from the back of the room. Geology. Botany. Zoology. Anatomy. Most dramatically, one reconstruction of an Iguanodon stretched seventy feet across linen Orra had painted herself. For decades, whenever Edward needed a visual, she stopped what she was doing. And picked up her pencil. Throughout all of this, Orra also raised six children. And kept a house that welcomed students and scholars. In the dedication of his book The Religion of Geology, Edward wrote to her: “While I have described scientific facts with the pen only, how much more vividly have they been portrayed by your pencil.” In 1850, Orra and Edward visited Europe. She was fifty-four. And she had never left the country. In a small plain notebook, she wrote everything down. At the Botanic Garden at Regent’s Park in London, she found her way to the greenhouse of American plants. Rhododendrons. Kalmias. Azaleas. And she wrote: “I really would never have imagined such a beautiful sight. I am sure I can never forget it.” Then she thought of her daughter Mary, back in Amherst. And wrote: “If Mary could have seen what we have today, it seems to me she would throw all her plants in the street. No, she would not — her perseverance, [she would apply] the same unceasing care as ever, and feel the same delight in seeing them grow, and now and then put forth a bud, and then a flower.” In Switzerland, as Orra watched women labor in the fields, she wrote: “Women doing the hard work such as holding plow, carrying heavy burdens on their heads, indeed all sorts of men’s work. Cows harnessed in carts. Shame for cows and women to be thus treated.” In the spring of 1863, pneumonia confined Orra to bed. Back in her home in Amherst. For a short time, she seemed to rally. But then her strength faded. Orra was anxious to see all her children before she died. When the last one arrived, she said: “All is right.” She died around six in the evening. Long after her death, Orra’s classroom drawings remained. Thousands of square feet of painted science that students learned from for decades. And in a small notebook, written in her own hand, her voice remained too. 1863 William Jackson Bean was born in Leavening, North Yorkshire, England. His family called him Bill. From the beginning, soil was already in him. His father was a nurseryman. His grandfather was a nurseryman. His great-grandfather was a nurseryman. Bill was meant to be next. But when Bill was six years old, his father died. That’s when his mother, Lydia, took over the nursery and seed trade to keep the family afloat. At sixteen, with the business barely holding, Bill left Yorkshire. And took an apprenticeship at Belvoir Castle. Working in someone else’s garden. Learning the trade. Earning his living. At twenty, he arrived at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. And stayed. There, Bill began as a trainee gardener and worked his way up until he became Curator. Responsible for the living collection. Those were the years when new woody plants were arriving in waves from China and the Himalayas. Crates of seeds. Unfamiliar saplings. Labels written in distant hands. They had to be planted. Watched. Tested against frost. Bill understood hardy things. He knew how to spot a plant that could take a winter. Carry time. And ask for very little. In 1914, he published Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles. Quietly, Bill wrote most of it at night. After full days in the gardens. In time, the book was so useful. So exact. So steady in its judgment. That gardeners stopped using the title. And simply called it: Bean. Not the man. The book. Though by then, the two were nearly the same. Above all, Bill had strong opinions. Quietly delivered. Of the variegated plants flooding the market, Bill wrote: “Perhaps more rubbish is foisted on purchasers of trees and shrubs in the shape of variegated sorts than of anything else.” Bill wasn’t trying to wound anyone. He was defending the gardener. Defending the promise that a plant you carry home will be worth the years you give it. Bill retired in 1929. And moved to a house on the edge of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. And kept walking the paths. In his final years, Bill spent his time correcting proofs for a new edition of his book. Fittingly, he was still working when he died in April of 1947. He was eighty-three. And at Kew, the trees Bill raised from seed are still growing. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from a 1979 Guardian essay by the Polish-British art critic Waldemar Januszczak, featured in Ruth Petri’s book Notes from the Garden: A Collection of the Best Garden Writing from the Guardian. The piece was published on this day. Waldemar called it The Artistry of Calling a Spade a Spade. Here’s how he begins: “One of the Earls of Pembroke was described by a contemporary in 1623 as ‘a true Adamist, toiling and tilling in his garden?’ By 1923, PG Wodehouse had built several stories around fervent Adamists, befuddled old earls in corduroy trousers who would have sprayed their own grandmothers to death if they found them clinging to the underside of a rose-leaf. Gardens change but gardeners do not. To call gardening a leisure activity is to forget five centuries of warfare; real gardeners are not enthusiasts, they are madmen.” There’s something bracing about that line. Gardens change. But gardeners do not. You can almost hear the rake on gravel. Waldemar refused the idea of gardening as leisure. He called it warfare. Madness. Obsession. Which, if you’ve ever tried to outwit slugs in May, feels fair. He goes on: “The entrance to the exhibition is crowned by a monumental pediment made up of rakes, shears, hoes and a pair of old gardening boots, painted white to resemble marble…” What a scene. Boots painted to look like marble. Tools turned into monuments. There’s a kind of mischief in bringing the garden indoors. And a kind of longing too. As if the museum needed to be softened. As if scholarship needed soil. And then Waldemar turns backward in time. Showing how each era remade the garden in its own image. Each century arranging its anxieties in beds and borders. And somehow, that feels comforting. Whatever we’re carrying right now. The garden already knows what to do with it. Book Recommendation This book is part of Specialty Gardens Week. Which means all this week’s book recommendations focus on a particular plant. Or a particular practice. Today’s plant is the orchid. And this book asks a question that turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer. Why have humans been so utterly obsessed with them? Jim Endersby follows the orchid through science. Empire. Romance. And death. From ancient Greece. To Charles Darwin’s notebooks. To a James Bond villain whose plan for world domination involves a fictional South American orchid called Orchidae Nigra. He writes: “Orchids have often been thought of as floral aristocrats, rarefied and elite…” And in that idea. There’s a kind of kinship. Between collectors. Between scientists. Between anyone who has ever brought one home. Knowing full well. They might not keep it alive. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1982 Felicity Bryan published an essay in The Guardian called The Female Garden. Felicity spent her life championing other people’s writing. But on this day, she asked her own question: Do women make better gardeners than men? To make her case, she started with two neighbors. Same county. Same era. Completely different gardens. She wrote: “Above all, Phyllis gardened like a man,” said Marjory Fish of her neighbour and friend Phyllis Reiss… Meanwhile… Marjory Fish was perfecting a cottage garden… “The scale is human and intimate. The garden is very much an extension of the house.” As she kept asking. And listening. The answers came back in the same language. Penelope Hobhouse said: “I’m sure that men feel much more strongly about straight lines. With women it’s much more like embroidery — interweaving colours and textures.” Eve Molesworth agreed: “Women prefer to interpret nature and go along with the rhythm of a garden which is so wonderful.” And then Felicity wrote: “Gardening… is essentially a domestic, uncompetitive and solitary art which can be pursued at home.” She didn’t offer a final answer. She ended with a wondering. In 2020, Felicity Bryan died. Thirty-eight years after asking the question. But the gardens that last. The ones people return to. The ones that outlive their makers. They don’t reveal a gender. They reveal something else. A devotion. Final Thoughts The checklist will never be finished. There will always be one more pot to scrub. One more tool to hang. One more thing you meant to do. But the first radish doesn’t wait for tidy. The rhubarb doesn’t care if the shed is organized. Spring has its own priorities. So tick what you can. Let the rest slide. And step back long enough to taste what’s ready. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812430

May 25, 2026 Cyrus Pringle, Anders Dahl, Theodore Roethke, How Not to Kill a Peony by Stephanie J Weber, and Beth Chatto 05/25/2026

May 25, 2026 Cyrus Pringle, Anders Dahl, Theodore Roethke, How Not to Kill a Peony by Stephanie J Weber, and Beth Chatto Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes The garden writer Jamaica Kincaid once said, “I always take this personally — I think a frost is something someone is doing to me. Only me.” If your spring is still cold and slow in coming, you might know what she means. Even now. Far into May. Some of us watch the sky with suspicion. The soil has warmed. Mostly. The light is long. Mostly. But there’s still that moment in the morning. When you step outside and check. Just check. Whether everything made it through the night. It’s what gardeners do. Until the nighttime temperatures are reliably warmer. That moment can take a little longer than we’d like. But it will happen soon. And until it does, gardeners need to be vigilant. Today’s Garden History 1911 Cyrus Pringle died in Burlington, Vermont. He was seventy-three years old. Cyrus was born on May 6, 1838, in East Charlotte, Vermont. His father, George, died on Cyrus’s fifth birthday. A fever epidemic swept through the community. As a boy, Cyrus wandered the woods alone. Writing poetry. Collecting plants. In 1859, Cyrus enrolled at the University of Vermont. He hoped to study writing. But before the semester was over, his brother died. And Cyrus returned home. To manage the farm for his widowed mother. In 1862, Cyrus joined the Society of Friends. And became a Quaker. There, he met a young teacher named Almira Greene. Four months after they married, Cyrus was drafted to serve in the Civil War. Reporting for duty as a resister, Cyrus would not carry a musket or even serve in a hospital. Yet when his uncle offered to pay the $300 fee to free him from service, Cyrus refused. Calling it blood money. On October 3, 1863, at a camp in Culpeper, Virginia, two sergeants led Cyrus from his tent. Forced him onto his back on wet ground. And tied his wrists and ankles to four stakes. In the shape of an X. Even when they threatened to kill him, Cyrus refused to yield. That night, he wrote in his diary: “It can but give me pain to be asked or required to do anything I believe to be wrong.” And then Cyrus wrote one more line: “This has been the happiest day of my life — to be privileged to fight the battle for universal peace.” When President Lincoln heard what happened, he personally saw to Cyrus’s release. After weeks spent recovering from his ordeal, Cyrus and Almira welcomed a daughter. Anne, born in 1864. But soon after, Almira filed for divorce. She had no desire to be a botanist’s wife, and he had no desire to give it up. In a moment of self-reflection, he wrote: “I have sought to surround myself with fruits and to find in Horticulture employment for my hands, recreation for my impaired body and relaxation and diversion for my mind.” In 1858, he followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and started his first nursery, where he grew a pear orchard and other fruit trees, currants, cherries, grapes, peaches, and potatoes. He crossed. Bred. And experimented with many types of crops. Somewhere in those years, Cyrus changed his last name. From Prindle to Pringle. The name his Scottish ancestors carried before crossing the Atlantic. Over the next twenty-six years, Cyrus collected plants in Vermont, the western part of the United States, and south to Mexico, where he returned again and again. Pressing the flowers of an entire continent into paper. In four consecutive years, he covered fifty-six thousand miles. Eventually, between his plant hunting expeditions and his work hybridizing, Cyrus lost his farm to debt. So in 1902, the University of Vermont gave Cyrus a room on the fourth floor of Williams Science Hall. A cot. A desk. A chair. And space for his herbarium. There, Cyrus lived on bread, eggs, and cheese. He needed nothing else. In May of 1911, Cyrus fell ill. A cold soon became pneumonia. In his last delirious hours, he believed he was in Mexico again. Collecting flowers. And reliving his happiness there. After Cyrus died on this day, May 25, 1911, his family buried him in Morningside Cemetery in Charlotte. They placed the old Prindle family name on his marker. But later, on the east side of that same stone, the scientific community added a bronze tablet. With the name Pringle. And the words of Asa Gray: Cyrus Pringle, the prince of plant collectors. 1789 Anders Dahl died in Turku, Finland. He was thirty-eight years old. Anders grew up in Varnhem, Sweden. The son of a parish priest who also served as the village doctor. His father took him into the meadows. And showed him that a weed was never just a weed. A plant could be a cure. A sign of the season. Or even a coded message. If he learned how to read it. When Anders was nine years old, his uncle, a local apothecary named Anders Silvius, gave him his first herbarium. Pressed, dried plants. Each one labeled. At eighteen, he arrived at Uppsala University. To study under Carl Linnaeus himself. The man who organized all of nature into a single clear system. Anders revered Linnaeus. And quickly became one of his Apostles. The students Linnaeus sent across the earth to collect and classify everything that grew. Then in 1771, Anders’s father died. He left the university and his degree unfinished. And spent the next decade as a hired curator. Organizing other men’s collections. Doing the work that made them famous. Then Linnaeus died in 1778. And just a few years later, Anders watched Linnaeus’s widow sell her husband’s entire collection to England. Fourteen thousand plants. Thousands of letters. Gone. That’s when Anders sprang into action. He labeled every duplicate specimen in his possession. Marking them like relics in his own careful hand: from Linnaeus. In all, there were around six thousand specimens. And each one was a testimony to work that had all happened first on Swedish soil. Before it was taken to England. In 1787, Anders carried all of it to Turku, Finland. Where he finally had a professorship. And something of his own to build. He died two years later. Succumbing to a terrible strain of pneumonia. He was thirty-eight years old. Two years after he died, the Spanish botanist Antonio José Cavanilles received seeds from Mexico. For a flower no one in Europe had ever seen. While he was alive, Anders and Cavanilles had never met. But the botanist Carl Peter Thunberg had written to Cavanilles. Twenty-four letters. Sharing news of Swedish botany. Including Anders’s final published work. And that’s why, when the flower bloomed in Madrid in 1791, Cavanilles named it for Anders. In a single Latin phrase: In honorem D. Andreae Dahl, sueci Botanici. In honor of Mr. Anders Dahl, Swedish botanist. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a poem from the American poet Theodore Roethke. Born on this day in 1908 in Saginaw, Michigan. Theodore grew up inside his father’s greenhouse. Twenty-five acres of glass. Steam. And things reaching toward the light. Otto Roethke was not a man of words. He was a man of hands. Pruning. Pressing. Tamping. Turning. It’s no wonder that Theodore said he wrote this poem from the perspective of a very small child. No comment. No interpretation. Just a boy, beside his father, learning every sound by heart. In Theodore's poem Transplanting, Theodore wrote: Watching hands transplanting, Turning and tamping, Lifting the young plants with two fingers, Sifting in a palm-full of fresh loam,-- One swift movement,-- Then plumping in the bunched roots, A single twist of the thumbs, a tamping, and turning, All in one, Quick on the wooden bench, A shaking down, while the stem stays straight, Once, twice, and a faint third thump,-- Into the flat-box, it goes, Ready for the long days under the sloped glass: The sun warming the fine loam, The young horns winding and unwinding, Creaking their thin spines, The underleaves, the smallest buds Breaking into nakedness, The blossoms extending Out into the sweet air, The whole flower extending outward, Stretching and reaching. Theodore was fourteen when his dad died. The greenhouse was sold. And the bench was long gone by the time he became a writer. Theodore spent the rest of his life getting back to that bench. The once, twice, and the faint third thump. The memory of a movement he never forgot. Book Recommendation Peonies have a reputation for being fussy. Temperamental. The kind of plant you admire at the nursery. And quietly put back. Stephanie Weber wrote this book to fix that. It’s ninety-eight pages. Plainspoken. Practical. With real outdoor photos at every stage. Stephanie covers everything. How to choose a variety that won’t flop after rain. How to dig and divide. How to cut fresh buds and cold-store them for up to seven weeks. And how to deal with aphids without reaching for chemicals. And Stephanie is exactly the right person to write this. Back in 2006, she and her husband Mike planted twelve hundred peonies. Forty varieties. In twenty-two rows on half an acre in Indiana. Their intent was to grow them for resale. What Stephanie discovered in the decade that followed is that most people know almost nothing about peonies. She would launch into her standard explanation. And watch people’s eyes glaze over. With boredom bordering on fear. The problem, Stephanie says, is timing. Peonies bloom in May. But they’re planted in fall. You fall in love with the flower. And then discover you have to go home. And wait six months. For an ugly bare root. Stephanie calls this the want/get gap. She wrote: “You are in the mood for a peony in May, when they’re in bloom, but you can’t get your hands on a root until fall. And it’s a root. You want a beautiful flower but all you can get is an ugly old root.” This book is the bridge across that gap. Everything Stephanie learned from twelve hundred peonies. Written plainly. For the rest of us. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1997 Beth Chatto wrote to her old friend Christopher Lloyd from her home at Elmstead Market in Essex. It was Whit Sunday. And in the letter, Beth revealed that her husband’s health was failing. Andrew Chatto, her husband of fifty-four years, could no longer walk the garden paths they had made together. She shared that Andrew was barely eating. And his memory for plants. The thing they had shared longer than almost anything else. Was going. Christopher had offered to send his gardener Fergus to bring Beth north for a visit. But in this letter, she replied: “You know I would love that too, but I could not feel at ease to leave Andrew: he has had several bad times over these past two weeks, and is physically very frail, although his mind is still clear.” So Beth stayed. And she brought the garden indoors. Near Andrew instead. She wrote: “I put by his chair little pots of flowers which he cannot walk out to the garden to see. His memory for plants is going, but it helps to see them.” Beth cooked directly from the vegetable beds. The ones she had been tending since March. And brought the plates to where Andrew sat. She wrote: “And although he eats so little, it is a pleasure to make tempting little dishes we can share. There is already so much in the vegetable garden: young carrots from the tunnel, and broad bean tops, asparagus and true spinach — all are treats.” This is a glimpse of Beth Chatto in 1997. Not the plantswoman. Not the author. And not the gardener who changed how England thought about plants. Just a woman. Carrying a little pot of flowers down a hall. To a chair by a window. Where the man she loved was waiting. Final Thoughts The warm nights are coming. And when they arrive, you’ll know. Not because someone told you. But because you stopped checking. I used to tell my kids when they left the house without a coat on: I can teach you. Or God can teach you. Either way, you’ll learn. The garden teaches the same way. We can listen. Or learn the hard way. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812425

May 22, 2026 José Jerónimo Triana, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Florence E Meier, The Poison Grove by Jill Johnson, and Margaret Mee 05/22/2026

May 22, 2026 José Jerónimo Triana, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Florence E Meier, The Poison Grove by Jill Johnson, and Margaret Mee Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes May is National Salad Month. And if you’ve never grown a salad garden, this is the perfect time to begin. An honest salad garden starts smaller than you might think. Soft bib lettuce. Red and green. Mustard greens. Arugula. Spinach. And Swiss chard that just keeps coming in all those glorious colors. And don’t forget the herbs. Dill. Flat-leaf parsley. Cilantro. And mint — which will take over a bit. And you should let it. Along with chives. And chervil. And then, of course, the radishes. For the weeks before the heat sets in. And then — don’t forget the edible flowers. Nasturtiums are worth growing for two reasons. First, they’re peppery. And beautiful. Second, they’re a trap crop. Plant them near whatever the aphids love. And the aphids will find the nasturtiums first. Other edibles include calendula. And pansies. Both are hardy. Both are beautiful. And both are right at home in a salad bowl. Or a summer drink. And if you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. We’ll come back to that. Today’s Garden History 1828 José Jerónimo Triana was born in Bogotá. He grew up in a country of steep contrasts. River valleys below. And high, wind-swept uplands above. Colombians call those uplands páramos. Treeless alpine moorlands near the top of the Andes. From an early age, José understood that plants belong to place. Altitude matters. Climate matters. Survival shapes form. José’s father was a schoolteacher. And he learned the way good teachers teach. Through the senses. Through touch. Through naming the living things growing just outside the door. As a young man, José joined the Chorographic Commission. A government expedition sent across Colombia to map the land. And catalog its natural resources. It was during this work that José focused on quinine. In the nineteenth century, quinine was the most reliable treatment for malaria. It comes from the bark of the cinchona tree. José studied cinchona closely. Learning to distinguish species. To identify potency. To understand which trees truly held the medicine the world needed. That work mattered deeply to him. And it mattered to Europe. In 1856, the Colombian government commissioned José to go to Paris. To promote Colombian plants of economic value. Especially cinchona. Two weeks after marrying Mercedes Umaña, the couple left for France. Paris was one of the great centers of nineteenth-century science. Alive with botanical gardens. Scholars. And exchange. José entered that world fully. Over more than three decades, José and Mercedes built their family in Paris. Their children were born there. Paris became home. All the while, he continued his botanical work. And served as Colombia’s Consul General. José also used his plant knowledge in practical ways. Developing plant-based remedies for everyday ailments. Corn plasters for sore feet. Tooth powders. And a popular cough remedy known as Triana Syrup. He was versatile. Attuned to the needs of the moment. Comfortable working at the intersection of science and daily life. At the end of his life, his family endured a dark chapter. He had been struck by a horse-drawn carriage. And never fully recovered. José died on October 31, 1890. And just days later, his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Liboria, died in childbirth. Two funerals in one week. Today, José is buried in Paris. At Père Lachaise Cemetery. But his name lives on. Inside Colombia’s national flower. Cattleya trianae. 2021 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander died in Vancouver. She was ninety-nine years old. Cornelia was born in 1921 in Germany. In an industrial city along the Ruhr River. Three moments shaped her life. The first came when she was five. Her mother, a horticulturist, gave her a small section of the family garden to tend. Cornelia planted peas. And her mother said: You are going to be a landscape architect. Seven years later, her father died in an avalanche. Her mother raised the family alone. Then, in 1938, Cornelia survived Kristallnacht. She and her family fled Germany. Eventually settling in New England. At twenty-six, she became one of the first women admitted to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. There, she met and married the urban planner Peter Oberlander. The couple made their home in Vancouver. A coastal city between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Mountains. Over the next seventy years, Cornelia helped shape Vancouver into a city rooted in nature. She wrote: I work with a concept driven by the idea that people want to be surrounded by nature — it’s in our genes. She designed more than seventy playgrounds. And helped shape landmarks like Robson Square and the Museum of Anthropology. “There’s no froufrou here,” she once said. Pragmatic. Clearheaded. Her philosophy was simple. Everyone deserves access to green space. After her husband died, she kept working. Continuing the projects that defined her life. She described her work as invisible mending. Restoring native plants so seamlessly they seemed to have always belonged. Vine maple. Douglas fir. Wild ginger. Still visible all over the Pacific Northwest. Just four days before her death, the city awarded her its highest civic honor. She died on this day in 2021. And fittingly, she is buried in a cemetery she designed. In the shade of a cedar grove she had planned decades earlier. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we revisit a newspaper feature from May 22, 1937. It appeared in The Hutchinson News. The headline read: Woman Mixes Fun And Work! Dr. Florence E. Meier Is Expert On Algae. The article begins: “It’s a dark day when the elevator refuses to run to the office of Dr. Florence E. Meier of the Smithsonian Institution staff. She has a little hexagonal room on the top floor of the flag tower, which makes it the highest office in Washington.” That line was a nod to the Smithsonian Castle. Built in 1855. With towers and turrets rising like something out of a storybook. Florence worked in the tallest one. The Flag Tower. Getting there was no small thing. “But sometimes the asthmatic elevator rebels, and then Dr. Meier… has to trip lightly up 11 floors on an iron ladder…” Eleven floors. Inside a stone tower. Up an iron ladder. Through a trapdoor. Often carrying trays of specimens. Up in that tower, Florence studied algae. Microscopic plants gathering in green films along the edges of ponds. The article praised her as a “pure scientist.” Someone free to follow her curiosity wherever it led. She wrote letters to colleagues in Hungary, France, and Japan. Debating her findings. Building knowledge. And she believed in balance. Scientists can become very dull if they don’t arrange a well-balanced life. The reporter visited her apartment. Tennis rackets by the door. Schubert on the piano. Books stacked beside her chair. But later that same year, something changed. While giving visitors a tour, Florence demonstrated the ladder. As the elevator carried her guests downward, she stepped backward. Waving goodbye. Forgetting the trapdoor had been left open. She fell through. And broke her back. She survived. At the hospital, she was treated by Dr. William Wiley Chase. Two years later, they married. The tower that nearly ended her career. Became the beginning of her marriage. Florence continued her work. Raised a family. And lived a long life in science. She died in 1978. At seventy-five. Book Recommendation This book is part of Garden Mysteries Week. Which means all this week’s book recommendations feature tales of intrigue, plants, and poison straight from the garden. Professor Eustacia Rose is done with murder cases. She has a partner. Matilde. She has her university work. She is ready, finally, for a normal life. But then a murder victim turns up poisoned with hemlock. One of the plants stolen from Eustacia’s own illegal garden. Bella Donna is the second book in Jill Johnson’s series. And by now, Eustacia feels like someone you already know. Brilliant. Difficult. And completely unable to leave a poisonous mystery alone. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1909 Margaret Mee was born in Chesham, England. Her earliest memory of flowers came from walking the Chiltern Hills with her father. He taught her how to truly see wildflowers. By 1945, Margaret was thirty-six. Divorced. And searching for her purpose. She found her footing in night classes at St. Martin’s School of Art. There, she met Greville Mee. A fellow artist. And her lifelong companion. In 1952, they traveled to São Paulo, Brazil. What was meant to be a short stay became a lifetime. About every other year, Margaret traveled into the Amazon. Painting plants where they grew. She called the rarest ones “botanical dodos.” Plants she feared would vanish. For nearly thirty years, one flower eluded her. The Amazon Moonflower. She saw it in bud once. But lost it in the dark. By morning, it had bloomed and faded. Gone. The flower blooms for just one night. Open for twelve hours. Then collapses at dawn. In May of 1988, on her final expedition, she found one again. This time, still in bud. Margaret was seventy-nine. She didn’t let it out of her sight. When darkness fell, she used a flashlight. Watching the petals move. She wrote: The first petal began to move… I was spellbound… by dawn, the flower was limp and dying. She painted through the night. Later that year, her book was published. And days later, she was gone. Killed in a car accident. Margaret left behind more than four hundred paintings. And a record of plants that may no longer exist. Final Thoughts I promised you a place to start. Here it is. One red bib lettuce. One green bib lettuce. That’s your foundation. Add one herb you’ll actually use. Parsley. Chives. Or mint in a pot. Then one edible flower. Nasturtiums are easy. They spill. They bloom all summer. And you can tuck them into salads. Or float them in lemonade. Start there. Because a garden doesn’t begin big. It begins with one thing in the ground. And the decision to keep watering it. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812420

May 21, 2026 Pierre Magnol, Emily Dix, Robert Creeley, Bella Donna by Jill Johnson, and Henri Rousseau 05/21/2026

May 21, 2026 Pierre Magnol, Emily Dix, Robert Creeley, Bella Donna by Jill Johnson, and Henri Rousseau Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes On this day in 1950, the English gardener Vita Sackville-West sat down with her garden journal and noticed something she couldn’t let go of. In her earnestness for horticulture, Vita wrote that snobbishness lives in gardens the same way it lives everywhere else. That we sometimes pass a plant not because it lacks beauty — but because it has become too familiar. Too common. Too easy to overlook. Once Vita asked: What do we lose when we stop seeing something because we’ve decided we’ve already seen it? May has a way of putting that question right in front of us. Right now, the garden is at its fullest. And we find ourselves moving past whole sections of it without stopping. Maybe today is a good day to slow down. The common thing. The familiar one. The one you stopped being surprised by. It might still have something to say. Today’s Garden History 1715 Pierre Magnol died in Montpellier. A city he had never really left. And a city that had never quite let him in. Born in 1638 as the youngest son of a generational apothecary family, Pierre grew up in a household that smelled of crushed herbs and drying roots. He earned his medical degree in 1659. And then, instead of practicing medicine, Pierre turned almost entirely to plants. As a young man, he spent long seasons walking — the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the islands off the coast — filling his journals. For much of his life, Pierre’s biggest dream was to manage the Montpellier Botanic Garden. The oldest botanic garden in France. But Pierre was Protestant in a France that was becoming Catholic in its bones. And when the position of Demonstrator of Plants opened in 1664, Pierre was the strongest candidate. But he was passed over. And when a professorship opened in 1667, he was again the most qualified. And again, he was passed over. But through every rejection, he kept walking. And at the same time, he kept filling his journals with dreams. Thinking about the way plants related to one another. Not just as lists. Everyone made lists like that. But as families. As connections that were not obvious to most gardeners. In his heart, Pierre knew the way a rose and an apple carried the same arrangement of petals and stamens. He knew that characteristics in families were shared. Passed down. To him, it was history written into the shape of a living thing. Waiting for someone to read it. In 1685, the Edict of Nantes was revoked. The law that had protected Protestants in France for nearly a century. Suddenly, Pierre had a choice: His faith. Or his life’s work. He converted. Within two years, the doors that had been shut for decades finally opened. In 1687, he was appointed Demonstrator of Plants at Montpellier. In 1689, he published his masterwork. For the first time in history, Pierre used the word “family” to describe natural groupings of plants. He organized seventy-six of them. Not by one feature. But by what he called the total composition. The whole shape of a thing. Before Pierre, botany was a list. After Pierre, it was a tree. Sixty years later, Carl Linnaeus would arrive and build his famous system on this foundation. Pierre didn’t get that credit. But he finally got the garden he always wanted. In his final years, he served as Inspector of the Montpellier Botanic Garden. Surrounded by the seventy-six families he had spent his whole life arranging. He was seventy-six years old. By then, the botanist Charles Plumier had already named something for him. A magnificent flowering tree discovered in the Caribbean. He never saw one bloom. But every spring since, when the magnolias open — first, before anything else, before the gardener is ready — they are still delivering a tribute to a man who gave up his faith to be allowed to do what he loved. 1904 Emily Dix was born in Penclawdd. A small town on the Gower Peninsula in Wales. Where the coastline meets the edge of coal country. And the landscape carries both. Growing up on a farm, Emily’s family worked the land. She was bright and gregarious. And at eighteen, a scholarship brought her to University College Swansea. There, she found Arthur Trueman. A geologist who had figured out how to date rock layers using fossilized mussels. When Trueman looked at her, he saw something rare. And called her the most extraordinarily brilliant student he had ever taught. After Emily graduated with First Class Honors, she found her subject: The fossilized plants trapped inside coal. Three hundred million years ago, the land that became Wales was a tropical swamp. There were giant ferns. Towering clubmosses. Ancient horsetails. They lived and died in dark water. Pressed into rock over millions of years. During the 1920s, the coal mines of South Wales were working around the clock. And Emily was granted access to go inside them. An unusual privilege for a woman. The mining engineers didn’t just tolerate her. They admired her. As Emily descended, she looked for leaves on the walls. The farther down she traveled, the more she realized that the fossilized plants changed over time in a specific order. One family of ancient ferns dominated a certain era. Then another family replaced it when the climate shifted. As the fossilized leaves changed across layers of rock, she could identify exactly where she was in time. From her repeated observations, Emily created nine floral zones. Nine distinct timestamps in the Welsh coal. As a result, a mining engineer could hand her a piece of rock. And she could tell him which layer he was working in. And how deep the coal beneath it would be. From all of that work, Emily turned fossilized leaves into a map. In 1936, the Geological Society of London awarded Emily the Murchison Fund. One of their highest honors. While the president gave a long speech about the high industrial value of her work, the archives note, simply, that Emily herself made no reply. She let the fossils speak. Then came 1941. While Emily was evacuated to Cambridge, German bombs hit London. Her records were destroyed. Years of field notes. Her catalogs. All her books. The fossils survived. But Emily’s work did not. Afterward, she tried to carry on. But the war had scattered her colleagues. And the loss of the records had shaken something in her. In June 1945, just as the war in Europe ended, Emily led one last geological field trip. Then she stopped. At forty-one years old — at the very height of her powers — she suffered a complete mental breakdown. Then she entered The Retreat. A Quaker hospital in York. And stayed for twenty-seven years. That’s how a woman who could read three hundred million years of plant life from a piece of stone spent most of the rest of her life. In a quiet room. She died on New Year’s Eve, 1972. Back at home in Swansea. Emily Dix’s nine floral zones are still used today. And somewhere in a Welsh archive there is a piece of coal with a fern pressed into it. A plant that lived before the first dinosaur took a step. And Emily Dix is the reason we know exactly when it lived. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a poem and a garden memory from the American poet Robert Creeley, born on this day in 1926. Robert grew up in Massachusetts. After he lost his father when he was four, he spent much of his adult life moving — from New England to rural France to a farm in New Hampshire. No matter where he went, he was always writing. Robert once tried farming. And he wrote about that hungry summer: “That was the summer we lived for the most part on chickens and blackberries since that was all we could get hold of. The garden hadn’t come in yet and what we had canned ran out in the early spring. It was all an idea, in a way, but we were certainly serious — and we were also young enough to bumble along without falling completely on our faces. There was a smaller garden for the kitchen, close to the house, but the big one was where we had the potatoes, corn, beans, all the vegetables we used primarily for canning.” Robert’s poems moved the same way. In short, powerful lines. He once wrote: I think I grow tensions like flowers in a wood where nobody goes. Each wound is perfect, encloses itself in a tiny imperceptible blossom, making pain. Pain is a flower like that one, like this one, like that one, like this one, does not remind, does not concern. Robert wrote for fifty more years after this poem. The lines he wrote stayed short. But the feelings stayed large. Book Recommendation This book is part of Garden Mysteries Week. Which means all this week’s book recommendations feature tales of intrigue, plants, and poison straight from the garden. Professor Eustacia Rose is done with murder cases. She has a partner. Matilde. She has her university work. She is ready, finally, for a normal life. But then a murder victim turns up poisoned with hemlock. One of the plants stolen from Eustacia’s own illegal garden. The Poison Grove is the second book in Jill Johnson’s series. And by now, Eustacia feels like someone you already know. Brilliant. Difficult. And completely unable to leave a poisonous mystery alone. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1844 Henri Rousseau was born in Laval. Known as Le Douanier. The toll collector. By day, Henri worked the Paris city gates. But he spent his free hours at the Jardin des Plantes. There, he stood for hours in the glass hothouses. Orchids dripping overhead. Palms arching in the humid shadow. Ferns curling tight against the Paris chill. Though he had never left France. And had never seen a jungle. He had stood inside those rain-streaked glass rooms long enough to feel what a jungle might want. That’s how he could return home and paint them. With enormous, impossible greens. Tigers mid-breath. And every frond thick with elsewhere. When Henri called them his Exotic Landscapes, the formal art world didn’t know what to do with him. Of course, they mocked him at first. But Henri kept on painting. And while there were twenty-five jungle scenes that made up his work, every one of them was built from memory. Through greenhouse glass. And whatever the light did on a rainy Sunday in Paris. When Henri died in 1910, he left behind a world no one else could have invented. Because it came entirely from what he loved. One heated room. One afternoon. One window full of impossible green. Final Thoughts Vita named something most gardeners know but rarely say out loud. We fall out of love with plants. Not because they changed. Because we did. One season — obsessed. The next — done. No reason. No warning. And sometimes, years later, we come back around. And that’s what Vita noticed on this day, over seventy years ago. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812405

May 20, 2026 Mabel Keyes Babcock, Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, Sigrid Undset, The Woman in the Garden by Jill Johnson, and Elizabeth Fox 05/20/2026

May 20, 2026 Mabel Keyes Babcock, Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, Sigrid Undset, The Woman in the Garden by Jill Johnson, and Elizabeth Fox Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes I’ve been thinking about where we go to do our best thinking. A lot of people put their desk by a window that overlooks the garden. Or they carry a notebook outside and sit in a shady spot and let the ideas come. There’s a long tradition of this — the garden shed. The garden hut. The bench at the end of a path where nobody interrupts. Two summers ago, I put two reclined wingbacks in my garden shed. It was one of the best things I ever did. They’re a great place to sit and admire the garden. But really, they’re a place to rest and reflect. And I think that’s what the garden does for us when we let it. It doesn’t make us more creative by trying. It just gives us a place to be still — and the ideas find their own way in. If you’re in a creative slump, maybe give that a try this year. Go outside. Sit near something growing. See what happens. Today’s Garden History 1862 Mabel Keyes Babcock was born in Somerville, Massachusetts. And since her father was a botanist, Mabel spent her childhood growing up in a garden. After high school, Mabel earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern. Twenty years later, at forty-six years old, she became the first woman to earn a master’s in landscape architecture from MIT. After graduation, Mabel went on to teach horticulture and landscape architecture at Wellesley — all while running a solo design practice on the side. In 1916, MIT asked Mabel to design the Great Court at the center of the new campus in Cambridge. As an alumna, she saw it clearly. And she wrote all of her notes in purple ink. Since her vision would follow the French style, there would be more gravel. And not grass. And the pièce de résistance would be an enormous reflecting pond beneath the Great Dome. For plantings, Mabel added groupings of maples with conifers and magnolias to soften the bare outlines of stone. She also placed a border of rhododendrons to brighten the base of buildings with greenery — and a dash of brilliant color when they bloomed. During the First World War, Mabel directed agricultural courses at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women in Groton, Massachusetts. She also taught food conservation as a way to support the country — a precursor to Victory Gardens. But then in 1928, Mabel’s vision for MIT came to an end. The university wanted something different. No more gravel. Instead, they wanted lawns meandering throughout the campus. Although Mabel had lived long enough to see her vision built, she also lived to watch it dismantled and taken apart. And as the steam shovels dug it all up — even the reflecting pond which was her quiet formal oasis — it all disappeared forever to live on only as part of the school’s history. Three years later, Mabel Keyes Babcock died on December 3rd, 1931, in Boston. She was sixty-nine. Yet every spring, the rhododendrons she planted still bloom at MIT — just in time for graduation. Mabel’s dash of brilliant color still masks the stone at the base of the buildings, doing exactly what she intended. 1902 Horatio Hollis Hunnewell died at his home in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He was ninety-one. Since he never liked his first name — Horatio — everyone called him Hollis. A man of the 1800s, Hollis was born in 1810. By his forties, he had made a fortune in the railroads — all twelve of them — and successfully steered through panics and collapses that ruined many of his friends. Because his wife’s last name was Wells, he named many things in her honor. Including their estate, Wellesley, which rested on the shores of Lake Waban in Massachusetts. Eventually, thanks to his generosity, both the town and the college followed suit. Which is why the Wellesley name is so ingrained in the town. With his passion for gardening and his generous spirit, Hollis loved sharing his garden with others. Throughout his life, his garden was open to the public every afternoon. In his Italian Garden, Hollis created the first topiary garden in America — using native white pine and Eastern arborvitae along seven terraces that rose seventy-five feet above the water. On any given afternoon, guests could arrive by an authentic Italian gondola with a gondolier in traditional dress — gliding across the lake toward the terraces. Visitors said that by moonlight, with the fountain splashing and the statues along the balustrades, the whole scene felt like Lake Como. In his pursuit of new plants, Hollis became the first to try many new garden plants and techniques. For instance, he was the first to bring rhododendrons to New England. And he displayed them proudly in full bloom on the Boston Common in 1855. He also installed a pinetum — filled with rare Japanese and European conifers. Through trial and error, he quickly learned which could survive a Massachusetts winter. Late in life, Hollis reflected: “No Vanderbilt, with all his great wealth, can possess one of these for the next fifty years — for it could not be grown in less time than that.” Ever the pragmatist, Hollis knew that even infinite money can’t rush a tree. In the end, Hollis outlived his beloved wife Isabella by fourteen years. He also, sadly, outlived several of his nine children. It’s fitting that he was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge — the first garden cemetery in the United States. Hollis rests near the Iris Path. And is surrounded by the kind of trees he spent his whole life planting. For sixty years, Hollis Hunnewell worked on a garden he knew he would never see finished. Yet that was exactly the point. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from a novel by the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, born on this day in 1882. She wrote her great medieval trilogy at a place called Bjerkebæk in Lillehammer, Norway — on a rocky plot she cleared herself, stone by stone. She loved fruit trees. Herbs. And roses. Here’s an excerpt from The Bridal Wreath, the first volume of her trilogy about a young noblewoman named Kristin Lavransdatter: “Groves and hill-sward smelt sweet; and as soon as the sun was down there streamed out all around the strong, cool, sourish breath of sap and growing things — it was as though the earth gave out a long, lightened sigh.” And later: “Through the great darkness that would come, she saw the gleam of another, gentler sun, and she sensed the fragrance of the herbs in the garden at world’s end.” Sigrid wrote those words while living alone on that rocky hillside she had cleared herself. She was a woman who had left her marriage and raised her children in a cold house and a garden she built from what the ground gave her. Somehow, Sigrid wasn’t reaching for poetry. She was simply writing what she already knew from kneeling in the dirt. Book Recommendation This book is part of Garden Mysteries Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations feature tales of intrigue, plants, and poison straight from the garden. Professor Eustacia Rose is a botanical toxicologist who lives alone with her collection of poisonous specimens. Her life is quiet. Her schedule never changes. Her closest companions are her plants. She does have one other habit, though — watching her neighbors through a telescope. Taking careful notes on their lives. For what she calls research. When she hears a scream one evening, she cannot look away. The Woman in the Garden is about obsession — the particular kind that only someone who has ever lost themselves completely in a garden will recognize. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1804 A parcel of seeds arrived in England. That’s the whole story, really. A little envelope of seeds. But let’s back up. In the late 1700s, a woman named Elizabeth Fox — also called Lady Holland — was a renowned English political and literary hostess. And a woman who had paid dearly for the life she chose. As a young woman, Elizabeth endured a scandalous divorce and had her children taken from her. And for many years, drawing room doors in London would close quietly whenever she approached. But through it all, Elizabeth turned her home — called Holland House — into the most brilliant salon in the city. She could be sharp-tongued and imperious. But underneath it all, she was someone who knew exactly what it felt like to be shut out. In the spring of 1804, Elizabeth visited the Royal Botanic Gardens in Madrid. Where she met a botanist named Antonio José Cavanilles. There, Cavanilles gave her a small packet of seeds no one in England had been able to grow. Dahlia seeds. Later, the librarian at Holland House — a man named Mr. Buonaiuti — recorded, in his precise handwriting: “On the 20th of May, 1804, the Right Honorable Lady Holland sent home from Spain a parcel of seeds.” That very summer, the dahlias flowered. And within twenty years, the dahlia was touted as the most fashionable flower in England. In a loving gesture, Elizabeth’s husband, Lord Holland, penned an adoring note to mark her accomplishment. Surprisingly, he was not, by reputation, a sentimental man. But Lord Holland still felt moved to write her these words: “The dahlia you brought to our isle your praises for ever shall speak; mid gardens as sweet as your smile, and in colour as bright as your cheek.” Final Thoughts If you need a place to think clearly, you already have one. It’s right outside your door. Your garden doesn’t need a fancy shed. Or a proper writing studio. Just a chair. And a patch of shade. With something blooming nearby. That’s enough. When it comes to creativity, the garden has always been the place where the next good idea finds you — not the other way around. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812355

May 19, 2026 Kate Furbish, Genevieve Gillette, Katharine Stewart, The Alcatraz Rose by Anthony Eglin, and Nellie Melba 05/19/2026

May 19, 2026 Kate Furbish, Genevieve Gillette, Katharine Stewart, The Alcatraz Rose by Anthony Eglin, and Nellie Melba Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Today is Plant Something Day. And I know — you probably don't need a holiday to tell you to plant something. You've been planting for weeks. But I like what this day can be if you let it. Not just — plant something. But — plant something you've been meaning to get to. Something more of what you already love. Something your grandmother grew. Something you keep seeing at the nursery and putting back. Or something to remember someone. It doesn't have to be big. One pot. One seed. Or one division from the thing that's finally big enough to share. May in Minnesota is generous right now. The soil is warm. The evenings are long. And there's still time to put something in the ground and watch it decide what it wants to become. Today’s Garden History 1834 Kate Furbish was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. When she was still an infant, Kate's family moved to Brunswick. And that was where she stayed — nearly all her life. As a child, her father took her into the woods and taught her all he knew about nature. And even though Kate studied painting for a time in Paris and attended botany lectures in Boston — she always came back to Brunswick. But then, in her mid-thirties, Kate gave herself a task that no one asked for and no one funded. To find, collect, and paint every flowering plant in the state of Maine. She started at thirty-six. It took her nearly forty years to finish her quest. Throughout those years, Kate traveled alone to the most remote parts of the state — Aroostook County, the Saint John River, the bogs and the riverbanks and the places where no woman was expected to go. Despite being a single woman, she rode mail coaches with no springs in the seats and no backs to lean on. But she did carry a revolver. Ingenious to a fault, Kate built rafts out of scrap lumber to reach plants growing in the middle of swamps. And she crawled on her stomach through bogs to sketch what she found. And in instances when the ground got too soft, she backed out on her hands and knees. Her unending devotion to wildflowers led the French Canadians in the northern towns to call Kate the Posey Woman. Yet somehow, she didn't mind. Though the people in Brunswick proper simply called her crazy. Kate liked that much less — but it didn't slow her down. She once wrote, “Had I listened to those who discouraged me, I should be as ignorant as they are of its natural beauties.” Traveling along the Saint John River, Kate once came upon a plant with dull yellow leaves — a lousewort no one had ever recorded. She sent her findings to Sereno Watson at Harvard. Watson named the plant in her honor. When Kate responded by letter, to say she would visit the school, she also issued this opinion: “My second reason for writing is to say, that were it not for the fact that I can find no plants named for a female botanist in your manual, I should object to ‘Pedicularis Furbishae’... But as a new species is rarely found in New England and few plants are named for women, it pleases me.” And that is how the plant named for Kate stuck. She gave it her blessing. A tiny leap forward for women thanks to a tiny step forward for herself. Nearly a century later, that same lousewort was rediscovered after decades of no sightings, growing on land about to be flooded by a billion-dollar dam. Its presence helped stop the project — eighty-eight thousand acres of northern Maine forest saved by a little plant found by Kate all those years ago, with mud on her skirt and a revolver on the seat beside her. Ultimately, her Flora of Maine — fourteen folio volumes and more than thirteen hundred watercolors — went to Bowdoin College. The four thousand sheets of dried plants she painstakingly collected went to her friend Sereno Watson at Harvard. Ever humble, Kate claimed no artistic merit. She called it simply truthful representation. Kate once said that flower and botanical books had been her only friends when she collected. She wrote: “The flowers [have been] my only society and the manuals [my] only literature for months [all] together. Happy, happy hours.” Kate Furbish lived to ninety-seven. And if flowers were her only friends, she'd known plenty during her life and was never truly alone. In 2020, the Kate Furbish Elementary School opened in Brunswick. Its hallways were lined with her watercolors — so that children walk past the plants of Maine every morning on their way to class. 1898 E. Genevieve Gillette was born in Lansing, Michigan. Her family and friends called her Genevieve. When Genevieve was three, her family moved to a farm on the Grand River in Dimondale. Every spring, her father would take her into the woods to kneel by the brook with the trailing arbutus flowering around them, and say, “Can you hear what it is saying? It's talking to us.” She never forgot that. When her dad died when she was a teenager, the family sold the farm. But the memories of her father wrapped up in those moments in nature stayed with Genevieve forever. After high school, Genevieve enrolled at Michigan Agricultural College and in 1920 became the first woman to graduate from its first landscape architecture program. After dozens of applications, she received just one offer — from the landscape architect Jens Jensen in Chicago. A man who designed with native trees and believed trees enjoy each other's company. Jensen paid her twenty-five dollars a week. At first, Genevieve was only allowed to answer the phone. But Jensen saw her potential and pestered her to return to Michigan and start a state park system. So she did. When Genevieve went back home, she met an old classmate and friend named P.J. Hoffmaster, who had become Michigan's first superintendent of state parks. Together, P.J. and Genevieve began a quest to find and save special places throughout Michigan. On weekends, she scouted for park land — driving across the state alone, identifying thirty state parks, like Hartwick Pines, Ludington, and the Porcupine Mountains. She slept under the boughs of evergreen trees, inspected shorelines, walked dunes, and knelt in the woods the way she had with her father. And when Sleeping Bear Dunes was about to be developed into condominiums, she made repeated trips to Washington, D.C. until it was protected as a national lakeshore. For decades, Genevieve worked as an unpaid volunteer. The Detroit Free Press called her a saving angel. Although she admitted that talking to legislators terrified her, she did it anyway. And when P.J. died of a heart attack in 1951, she was left to carry their vision alone. She kept going. And didn't stop. Somehow, Genevieve found an inner courage she didn't know she had. Which is how she founded the Michigan Parks Association and then kept working for another thirty-five years. Although she never married or had children, she said she felt that the parks were her life's work. By 1965, President Johnson invited her to serve on his committee for recreation and natural beauty. When Genevieve heard the news, she called it the honor of her career. After all the scouting, and the planning, and the struggle to save the most glorious wild spaces in the state, Genevieve could look back and see her part in all of it. She died on May 23rd, 1986 — just four days after her eighty-eighth birthday. Genevieve's final wish was that money from her estate be used to buy park land. And that's how three hundred thousand dollars went to purchase five thousand acres along Lake Huron — saving the limestone cobble beaches, the deep sand dunes, and the small dwarf lake iris that grew happily only in that place. Even when Michiganders thought she had finished her work, she managed to save the best gift for last. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from A Garden in the Hills, a garden diary by the Scottish gardener and writer Katharine Stewart, written on this day in 1994. Katharine wrote from Abriachan, a hillside village near Loch Ness in Scotland. Katharine's garden lay beside a burn — a small Highland stream — with birches, currants, and wind off the water. After all the years living on the hills, Katharine understood that May in the north is never guaranteed. “If April is the cruellest month, May, so far this year, is not much kinder. Still, the tatties and the first sowings of vegetables are in the ground, though they'll be wise enough to bide their time before emerging. The birches are greening and in the hollow by the burn there's the gleam of celandine. Chaffinches are singing non-stop and a thrush is shouting from the top of the highest pine. Some years ago, when there was no one living in these parts, I came upon a garden, a long, narrow stretch beside the burn. Rhubarb plants had grown to the size of small trees, there were blackcurrant bushes drastically overgrown, but alive, and gooseberries still bearing pale yellow fruit. I took cuttings of these and now have half a dozen good bushes fruiting happily. This little garden must have had a really devoted gardener, for in one corner was a lilac and in another a gean — a wild cherry.” Katharine found that abandoned garden beside the burn — rhubarb the size of small trees, gooseberries still bearing — and her first instinct was to take cuttings. Abandoned gardens are just another way of describing someone else's devotion left dormant for a while, but still alive in the ground, waiting for the right person to find it. Book Recommendation This book is part of Garden Mysteries Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations feature tales of intrigue, plants, and poison straight from the garden. We close the week with another rose mystery — this time from Anthony Eglin, who gave us The Blue Rose on Monday. A thirteen-year-old girl asks botanist Lawrence Kingston to reopen a case: Her mother's disappearance. Eight years unsolved. And almost at the same moment, word arrives that an English rose — extinct for fifty years — has been found growing on Alcatraz Island, five thousand miles from where it last bloomed. Two mysteries. One botanist. And a connection nobody sees coming. The American Rose Society called it a bestseller. Garden Design gave Eglin a Gold Trowel Award. And The Blue Rose won a French award for mystery novel of the year. This is garden fiction from someone who knows exactly what roses mean — and exactly how dangerous that knowledge can be. This week, our garden had secrets. Next week, we go back to the soil. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1861 Nellie Melba was born in Melbourne, Australia. Nellie sang on every great stage in Europe and beyond — for decades. And then, after all of it — the standing ovations, and the farewells — Nellie came home. One evening, driving through the Yarra Valley, she spotted a for-sale sign on a gate near Coldstream. Nellie looked across at the blue hills of her childhood — the same familiar landscape and the same familiar light — and the house, with sixty acres, was bought on the spot. After claiming the property for herself, Nellie named it Coombe Cottage. And quickly set about making it her own. There, she planted a cypress hedge six hundred meters long, enclosing the whole of it — a sense of mystery that has lasted more than a hundred years. When twenty thousand daffodils arrived from the Blue Mountains of New South Wales as a gift from a farmer in exchange for a private performance, they became a happy part of the spring landscape and a stark counterpoint to Nellie's own suffering. Nellie had known real grief — a marriage that became a cage, and a son taken from her and carried to another continent. Nellie held all of that and still, she planted those daffodils. In 1925, as if sensing that people wanted to know her better, Nellie wrote: “If you wish to understand me at all, you must understand, first and foremost, that I am an Australian.” Though she was the most famous voice in the world, in the end, all Nellie wanted was a garden, a cypress hedge, and the blue hills of home. Today, the Nellie Melba rose has a pale pink opening from magenta buds. It is long-stemmed and nearly thornless. It is beautiful. Elegant. And a little mysterious. Final Thoughts May has this way of making everything feel possible. And maybe it is. Maybe that's not the season lying to you. Maybe the season is just giving you a window. And it's up to you whether you use it or stand there admiring the light. I've been thinking about that — how the best planting days aren't the ones you plan. They're the ones where you walk outside with your coffee and something catches your eye and you think: Today. Not because it's perfect. But because it's time. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812350

May 18, 2026 Wilhelm Hofmeister, Wolfgang Oehme, George Meredith, The Blue Rose by Anthony Eglin, and Bertrand Russell 05/18/2026

May 18, 2026 Wilhelm Hofmeister, Wolfgang Oehme, George Meredith, The Blue Rose by Anthony Eglin, and Bertrand Russell Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Mid-May mornings in Minnesota come early now. The light is already there when you walk out. The soil is warm enough to hold what you give it. And if you're lucky, there's someone beside you — handing you a flat, holding the stake, pulling the same weeds you were about to pull. The garden does most of the talking. I gardened with my friend Judy for a few summers, and what I remember most isn't any single plant we put in — it's those early mornings. She'd show up with something in a pot. I'd send her home with something in a bag. After a while we joked that our gardens were becoming one. Many hands, light work. And something else, too — many hands, more noticing. You catch things you'd miss alone. There's no shortcut to that. You just have to show up on the same morning, with dirt on both sets of hands, and let the garden be the thing between you. Today’s Garden History 1824 Wilhelm Hofmeister was born in Leipzig. Wilhelm never finished formal schooling. He worked in his father's shop — selling sheet music, stacking books, and greeting customers. But every morning, before the shop opened, he would sit studying plant specimens with his face mere inches from the leaves. Wilhelm was severely nearsighted, but he refused to wear glasses. So anything beyond six inches was a blur. But up close, his vision was quite vivid. While other botanists squinted through clunky brass microscopes, Wilhelm could just bring a moss, a fern, a sliver of cone right up to his eyes and see plainly what most people would miss. Somehow he could dissect what others needed lenses to see — if they could see it at all. At just twenty-seven, Wilhelm had published a monograph showing something no one had pieced together. In it, he showed that a fern doesn't simply make more ferns. It drops spores that grow into something else entirely — a tiny, flat, heart-shaped thing you'd step right over and never notice. And that tiny thing is what produces the next fern. Parent and child, looking nothing alike — taking turns. He found the same pattern in mosses, in pines, and in every plant he studied. He called the phenomenon alternation of generations. In 1847, he married Agnes Lurgenstein. Together, they had nine children. Agnes held the household steady while Wilhelm focused on his work. Soon, the universities came calling. Heidelberg offered a professorship and oversight of the Botanical Garden — despite the fact that Wilhelm had no degree. Yet he had earned it at his kitchen table, before dawn, with his face two inches from a leaf or petal or stem. But then there was profound loss. Over a brutal five-year period, Wilhelm buried his darling Agnes. Then his youngest daughter. Then both surviving sons. Then his half-brother. Seven of his nine children gone before him. His student Karl von Goebel later wrote that he succumbed to the weight of his own grief. On his birthday, Wilhelm suffered the first of several strokes. Seven months later, he died in Lindenau, near Leipzig — near where his story began. Wilhelm was fifty-two. What lingers is the image of a nearsighted man in a dark kitchen at four in the morning, his face so close to a fern it seemed ridiculous. The man who literally couldn't see far saw the smallest thing — and it changed how we understand every plant alive. 1930 Wolfgang Oehme was born in Chemnitz, Germany. Wolfgang started growing plants at five in a corner of his parents' community garden. He was nine when WWII started. By the time it ended, the cities he knew were rubble. At seventeen, Wolfgang apprenticed at a nursery in Bitterfeld. He learned Latin names and propagation. And he also learned that a plant doesn't care who's in charge of the government. It was there that he discovered the work of Karl Foerster — the famous German plantsman who believed gardens should move, should catch the wind, like the grass named in his honor. Foerster called grasses the hair of the earth. He never forgot that. After Wolfgang fled East Germany, he ended up in Baltimore. He looked around and saw lawns with clipped hedges and foundation evergreens, and impatiens in rows. Wolfgang later said, “When I came to Baltimore, it was like a desert. I went on a crusade.” When American nurseries didn't carry the plants Wolfgang needed — he smuggled seeds into the country through hollowed-out books. He found a partner in James van Sweden — a polished architect who could charm clients into ripping up their lawns. Wolfgang was the opposite. Short. Thick German accent. More at home with a shovel than with people. Together, James and Wolfgang invented what became known as the New American Garden — sweeping drifts of ornamental grasses, black-eyed Susans, Russian sage, coneflowers — planted not in dots but in waves, hundreds at a time, so that when the wind came, the whole garden moved like water. As a result, their firm, OVS, designed gardens for the Federal Reserve, Reagan National Airport, and the National World War II Memorial. Wolfgang never stopped being possessive. If someone had planted impatiens where his grasses had been, he would stop the car, get out, and start pulling them up. In a heat of passion, he once told a client, “This is my garden, not yours.” But in a clearer moment, Wolfgang also said, “Human beings need nature; nature does not need human beings.” And then followed quickly with, “I like it wild.” After thirty years of landscapes, the friction between Wolfgang and James van Sweden finally cracked. In the end, he spent his final years in a small apartment, far from the grand terraces of movement made by his hands. He died at eighty-one, on December 15th, 2011, in Towson, Maryland. But he did not want a funeral. Just before he died, Wolfgang had returned to Bitterfeld in East Germany — the town where he had apprenticed as a teenager in the rubble — taking pictures of the many thousands of grasses and perennials on old industrial land. Somehow, after all the garden making, the photos of that earlier work were what Wolfgang clung to in the end. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from a poem by the English novelist and poet George Meredith, who died on this day in 1909. George spent his final decades at Flint Cottage, at the foot of Box Hill in Surrey. Even when illness confined George to a bath-chair, he insisted on being taken up the hill. He believed a person had to keep walking into the landscape to understand it. His book of poems was published in 1851. In it, he wrote one of his most enchanting and lyrical poems called Love in the Valley. It was said that after Tennyson read it, he could not stop thinking about it. The poem offers vivid imagery of a young country woman and George’s unrequited love for her. George describes a farmhouse, an orchard, and a bubbling wellspring and wrote that the young lady is as “Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, And swift as the swallow along the river's light.” By the end of the poem, he compares her to heaven. Here’s the last verse: Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need. Every woodland tree is flushing like the dog-wood, Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed. Flushing like the dog-wood crimson in October; Streaming like the flag-reed South-West blown; Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted white beam: All seem to know what is for heaven alone. George could barely walk by the time he wrote those words. He was a man being pushed up a hill outside in a chair. And yet the poem is all motion — branches swaying, leaves turning, and light flashing on trees in the sun. And I often think of that moment. George writing from inside a landscape he could no longer enter on his own. Book Recommendation This fiction book selection is part of Garden Mysteries Week, which means all this week’s book recommendations feature tales of intrigue, plants, and poison straight from the garden. Alex and Kate Sheppard have found their dream home — a Wiltshire parsonage with a two-acre walled garden. And in that garden, they find something impossible: A blue rose. No blue rose exists in nature. None has ever been grown. And yet there it is. What follows is a thriller about coded journals, genetic experiments, and what happens when the world finds out you have something everyone wants. Anthony Eglin is a member of the American Rose Society. And it shows — the roses in this book are as real as the danger. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1872 Bertrand Russell was born at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, England — a grand house set inside a sweeping garden overlooking the Thames Valley. Bertrand was orphaned at three, and raised by a grandmother who was strict and Victorian and not given to softness. Over the course of his childhood, he spent a lot of time alone in that garden, watching sunsets, and staying quiet. Bertrand spent decades writing about logic, mathematics, peace, and the question he never stopped asking — how does a person find happiness? And then Bertrand wrote this: Every time I talk to a savant, I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite. To think of Bertrand searching for a happy person only to find the answer lay in his gardener — the man who came each day and waged quiet war against the rabbits — steady but purposeful and entirely at peace. Bertrand also told a story about a parson who had terrified his congregation by announcing that the second coming was imminent — and very imminent indeed. The congregation was frightened until someone noticed that the parson who had foretold a tale of doom was seen out in his own garden planting trees. Bertrand loved that image. Apparently, even a man who believed the end was near couldn't help but put something in the ground and wait for it to grow. Bertrand died at ninety-seven. He never stopped believing that the world was full of what he called magical things — patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. Maybe that's what the garden is. A little magic. And a lot of waiting. Final Thoughts If there's someone you garden alongside — even loosely, even just a few times a season — that's not a small thing. It's not about efficiency, though the work does go faster. It's the fact that someone else saw your garden on a Tuesday in May, when the light was a certain way and the peonies hadn't opened yet. That's a kind of knowing that doesn't get recorded anywhere. It just lives between you. And if you don't have that person right now — you might be that person for someone else and not even know it. The one who shows up with a division wrapped in wet newspaper. The one who says, “That looks good there.” May is still making itself. There's time. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812345

May 15, 2026 William Henry Harvey, Blanche and Oakes Ames, Mikhail Bulgakov, Your Natural Garden by Kelly D. Norris, and Emily Dickinson 05/15/2026

May 15, 2026 William Henry Harvey, Blanche and Oakes Ames, Mikhail Bulgakov, Your Natural Garden by Kelly D. Norris, and Emily Dickinson Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Every gardener has a lost garden. Maybe it was your grandmother’s. Maybe it was the one you left behind when you had to move. Maybe it’s a spot you drove by last week. Just to check. And now barely recognize. Lost gardens stay with us longer than we expect. The smell of a tomato leaf. The color of a peony. The way the light hits a certain spot in the afternoon. You can bring a lost garden back this spring. Not all of it. You don’t need all of it. Just one plant that used to be there. One cutting. One color. Even a windchime or a stepping stone can call a whole garden back to you. Rosemary is the herb of remembrance. That’s why it’s the logo of this show. Remember. If you’ve lost a garden you loved, plant something that remembers it for you this season. And if you know a garden friend carrying a lost garden in their heart, feel free to share this episode. Sometimes it helps just to hear that someone else remembers too. Today’s Garden History 1866 William Henry Harvey died in Torquay, England. He was fifty-five years old. William once wrote that being “useless, various, and abstruse” was reason enough to love a science. And of course, he meant botany. Born in 1811 in Limerick, Ireland, William was the youngest of eleven children in a Quaker family. As a boy, it was his nanny who sparked his love of flowers. William was drawn to the things most people stepped over. Seaweeds. Mosses. Algae. Small organisms clinging to rock at the edge of the tide. He was the first to classify algae by color. Green. Red. And brown. A system still used today. But the real story of William is what he lost. In 1835, his brother Joseph was appointed Colonial Treasurer in Cape Town. William sailed with him. Eager for adventure. Eager to explore the flora of the Cape. But Joseph’s health failed almost immediately. He sailed home. And died at sea. William stayed. Thousands of miles from everything he knew. He took his brother’s post. Sat at his desk. Did the work. And in his spare hours, collected plants. Every specimen was a letter to a ghost. Eventually, William returned to Dublin. To his sister Hannah. His anchor. While he traveled the world—Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Chile— Hannah stayed home. She received his parcels. Damp boxes filled with seaweed and seeds. She dried them. Filed them. Recorded them. Together, they built a body of work. Over one hundred thousand specimens. More than seven hundred fifty species of algae described. William also sent seeds and bulbs back to Europe. Proteas. Heaths. Pelargoniums. Plants now so common, we rarely think about how they arrived. But we have William to thank. He mentored anyone who showed interest. Lighthouse keepers. Clergymen’s wives. Amateur collectors on windy shores. He sent them books. Identified their finds. Gave them a voice. One of his most cherished friendships was with Margaret Gatty. A mother with little money. No microscope. William sent her his own materials. Encouraged her to write. Her book, British Sea-weeds, stayed in use for nearly a century. William didn’t want a legacy for himself. He wanted one for the plants. He wanted them remembered. And for that, he is remembered too. A genus now bears his name. Harveya. But his true monument is the herbarium at Trinity College. Organized with care. Built by a man who believed naming plants was a kind of prayer. 1900 Blanche Ames married Oakes Ames. A partnership that would shape botany for the next fifty years. Their love story began with orchids. Oakes, a young Harvard botanist, sent Blanche rare specimens instead of roses. And Blanche was captivated. They married. And became partners in science. Oakes collected. More than sixty-four thousand orchid specimens. But Blanche was the eye. At her drawing table, she created thousands of precise illustrations for Oakes’s seven-volume Orchidaceae. Her drawings are still used today. Oakes insisted she sign every one. In an era when wives were invisible. He made her visible. He called her his colleague. In 1922, they traveled to Berlin. Blanche copied herbarium sheets by hand. Years later, when bombs destroyed the originals, her copies remained. She had saved them. With her art. Their life together was full of moments like that. Once, when their car broke down in the Yucatán, Blanche repaired it. With a hairpin. And a bullet. She also designed their home. A stone mansion on twelve hundred acres. Borderland. After Oakes died, Blanche carved his tombstone herself. Etching orchids into the stone. She kept going. At eighty, she wrote a six-hundred-page biography of her father. At ninety, she patented an antipollution toilet. When Blanche died in 1969, she was ninety-one. The New York Times called her “Mrs. Oakes Ames, Botanist’s Widow.” Not artist. Not architect. Not inventor. But widow. The world had not caught up to her. But her work remains. Her initials still on every drawing. B.A. Thousands of them. Still precise. Still beautiful. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, born on this day in 1891. Mikhail began as a doctor. And lived through revolution, war, and censorship. Much of his work was banned. At one point, he burned a manuscript in despair. Then rewrote it from memory. His masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, opens with a woman carrying yellow flowers. He wrote: “She was carrying some repulsive, alarming yellow flowers. God knows what they’re called, but for some reason they’re the first to appear in Moscow… She looked at me with surprise, and I was suddenly struck by her extraordinary, lonely beauty. ‘Do you like my flowers?’… ‘No.’” Those flowers were almost certainly mimosa. The first bloom after winter in Moscow. Bright. Feathery. Fragrant. In Russian culture, yellow flowers signal betrayal. Or madness. And yet they also signal spring. Arrival. A beginning. Only a gardener understands how something can be both. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Your Natural Garden by Kelly D. Norris. This book is part of Mother’s Day Week here on The Daily Gardener. And that means all of this week’s Book Recommendations feature garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next. Kelly writes with a deep reverence for place. He invites gardeners to work with native plants. To design in harmony with the local ecology. Not as a trend. But as belonging. In the introduction, Kelly wrote: “Living well with a place requires a relationship… But having a relationship with landscape and the life it supports doesn’t immediately command more work. It does, however, warrant more attention.” He writes about prairie grasses. Wildflowers. Pollinator corridors. Landscapes that reflect place rather than fashion. This book expands what inheritance can mean. Not just roses and recipes. But living systems. Care that can be passed forward. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1886 Emily Dickinson died in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was fifty-five years old. Emily lived most of her life between her home and her garden. She kept a glass conservatory. Growing gardenias and camellias through New England winters. She also kept an herbarium. Over four hundred pressed plants. Each labeled in her own hand. Emily gardened on her knees. She said she felt always attached to mud. Though she lived quietly, she found ways to reach out. She would lower a basket from her window. Filled with warm gingerbread. For neighborhood children below. Small offerings. Made with care. Left at the edge of her world. She knew her world deeply. So deeply that she named what others only felt. She wrote: Summer has two Beginnings — Beginning once in June — Beginning in October Affectingly again — Emily knew that seasons are often sweetest as they leave. She also wrote: For thee to bloom, I’ll skip the tomb And sow my blossoms o’er — Pray gather me — Anemone — Thy flower — forevermore. At the end, when she could no longer write, she dictated her final letter. Four words: Little Cousins — Called back. She was going home. Today, her garden still grows. The same heirloom varieties. Still rooted. After a lifetime of loving plants, Emily knew: Some things are deciduous. And some are not. Final Thoughts Every garden you’ve ever loved is still with you. Not as a photograph. But as a way of seeing. The garden you lost taught your hands something. Your eye. Your sense of color. Of light. Of place. Lost gardens don’t disappear. They show up again. In the next bed you plant. In the next seed you choose. In the next moment you pause and notice something no one else noticed. Every garden ahead of you carries every garden behind you. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812340

May 14, 2026 Albrecht Daniel Thaer, Federico Delpino, Georgia Douglas Johnson, The Regenerative Landscaper by Erik Ohlsen, and Edward Augustus Bowles 05/14/2026

May 14, 2026 Albrecht Daniel Thaer, Federico Delpino, Georgia Douglas Johnson, The Regenerative Landscaper by Erik Ohlsen, and Edward Augustus Bowles Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Here’s an exercise to try. Take a minute today and write a letter that describes your garden. What do you love about it? What do you enjoy doing there? What are your favorite flowers? What areas give you trouble? Be honest. Be specific. Write it the way you’d tell a friend who’s never seen your garden. Then clip a few flowers from the beds. Tuck them into the envelope. Seal it. Date it. And put it away. Now imagine doing this every year. A stack of letters. A record of seasons. A portrait of the gardener you were in May of 2026. And how different that gardener will be in May of 2036. What a gift for a future you. What a gift for your grandchildren. Today’s Garden History 1752 Albrecht Daniel Thaer was born in Celle, Germany. Before Albrecht was a man of the soil, he was a man of the sickbed. At the University of Göttingen, he trained as a physician. And later served as a court doctor for royalty. He was very good at his job. But eighteenth-century medicine was still primitive. He often watched patients die from things he couldn’t fix. And it wore on him. But then came the garden. Attached to his house, Albrecht had a small plot. Nothing grand. Just a place to grow flowers in his spare hours. What started as an amusement quickly became an obsession. He treated the garden like a science class. Experimenting with carnations and auriculas. After his marriage, he expanded. Obtaining four hectares outside the city gates as a wedding gift for his wife. The garden became both ornamental. And productive. From the start, Albrecht kept records. Every input. Every output. Every change in the soil. And he used what he learned to teach others. In 1804, he moved to Brandenburg. And purchased an estate. Gut Möglin. Two years later, he founded the Möglin Agricultural Institute. The first agricultural college in Prussia. Often called the cradle of scientific agriculture. Before Albrecht’s work, farming was guided by feel. By folklore. By instinct. Albrecht made it a science. With textbooks. Lectures. And data. His masterwork, Principles of Rational Agriculture, became the standard across Europe. Earning him the title: Father of Modern Scientific Agriculture. After years of observation, Albrecht championed crop rotation. Never grow the same thing in the same place twice. The soil, like the body, needed variety. And rest. At the center of his thinking was humus. That dark, crumbly, living layer of soil. He believed plants fed on it. He was wrong. A tree doesn’t eat the earth. It builds itself from the sky. From carbon dioxide. From light. But here’s the thing. Albrecht’s advice still worked. Because compost feeds the microbes. And microbes build healthy soil. Healthy soil grows strong plants. He was wrong about the chemistry. But right about the care. Today, regenerative gardeners are circling back to everything he taught. Feed the soil. Not the plant. Build the humus. Close the loop. Albrecht died at seventy-six. On his beloved estate. His eyesight had failed him the year before. The great observer left in the dark. In his final years, he asked to be buried in his garden. On the shore of a clear pond. Surrounded by trees he had planted himself. He called those trees his children. Over his grave, they placed a pyramid of flowers. Not marble. Not bronze. Just petals. One tribute said it best: “The ornaments of nature’s rich temple mourn for their departed friend.” 1905 Federico Delpino died in Naples. He was seventy-one years old. Federico was born in 1833. A fragile child. Thin. Prone to illness. His mother’s remedy was the garden. She kept him outside for hours every day. Not because she knew the science. But because she knew her son. And to her, Federico needed the garden. It worked both ways. The garden needed watching. And Federico watched. Ants climbing stems. Bees disappearing into flowers. Emerging dusted in yellow. Years later, Federico would say that as a child, he had already begun to think about studying plants. Life had other plans. When his father died, Federico left school. Took a job at a customs house. Counting crates. Stamping documents. Supporting his family. For fourteen years, he worked there. But never left the garden behind. In his free time, he studied nature. No university. No lab. No mentor. Just his eyes. And his patience. In 1867, he published Thoughts on Plant Biology. And changed botany forever. Stop naming the parts. Start watching what the plant does. Federico saw plant life as negotiation. A night-blooming flower? That’s for moths. A deep tube of nectar? That’s for butterflies. Nectar, he said, was a wage. Plants hire help. They advertise with petals. They pay with sugar. And when the bee arrives, it carries pollen forward. Work complete. He also saw plants hiring bodyguards. Acacias with hollow thorns. Housing ants. Feeding them. And in return, the ants protected the tree. He called this relationship myrmecophily. Mutual benefit between ants and plants. Federico wrote to Charles Darwin. Darwin was fascinated. And frustrated. Because he couldn’t read Italian. Federico later became director of the Naples Botanic Garden. A long way from the customs desk. He once wrote: “The plant is not a simple machine. It is an individual that acts with a purpose.” He died on this day in 1905. Buried in Naples. Among the Illustrious. All because his mother sent a fragile boy outside. And told him to stay. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the American poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, who died on this day in 1966. Georgia was a central voice of the Harlem Renaissance. By day, she worked a government job in Washington, D.C. By night, she wrote. After the house was quiet. After the dishes were done. She called herself a “writer by night.” As her reputation grew, her home became a gathering place. Young Black poets. Langston Hughes. Countee Cullen. Finding their voices. But when her own heart grew heavy, Georgia turned to nature. Here is her poem Hope: The oak tarries long in the depth of the seed, While the sharp blades of clover rise and fall, And the plants of the garden fulfill their need, But the oak is silent and makes no call. It fuses the strength of the sun and the soil, In the secret dark of the silent years, It weaves a garment of patient toil, And drinks of the rain of the valley’s tears. Till a hundred years are gone and past, And the bough is great and the trunk is vast! Clover rises quickly. Falls quickly. But the oak waits. Some days we are the clover. Quick. Useful. And gone. And some days we are the oak. Doing our work quietly. In our own time. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: The Regenerative Landscaper by Erik Ohlsen. This book is part of Mother’s Day Week here on The Daily Gardener. And that means all of this week’s Book Recommendations feature garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next. Erik opens his book with a scene. You step out your back door. Birdsong everywhere. A basket on your arm. And within ten minutes, it’s full. Vegetables. Herbs. Eggs. Fruit. And a bundle of flowers resting on top. This is what Erik calls “a landscape of real abundance.” Not a fantasy. But something to build. Erik is a permaculture designer. And his book is a field guide to creating landscapes that produce. Not through force. But through relationship. He writes about soil health. Water stewardship. Biodiversity. And resilience. But what holds the book together is the work. Years of building soil. Planting trees whose fruit you may never see. Designing water systems that slow rain. And let it soak. He asks a simple question: What are you leaving behind? Because healthy soil is not built in a season. It is layered. Fed. Protected. Observed. And passed on. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1865 Edward Augustus Bowles was born in Enfield, England. His friends called him Gussie. He was the youngest of four children. And once planned to become a priest. But tragedy changed everything. His sister Cornelia died at nineteen. Then his brother John died at twenty-seven. The same year. Half the children in the house gone. Before New Year’s. Gussie returned home. To his parents. And to the garden. He never went back to Cambridge. Never became a priest. At some point that year, he pressed his initials into the brick wall of the kitchen garden. E.A.B. 1887. Not perfect. Not polished. Just a mark. A young man saying: I am still here. Gussie spent the next sixty-seven years in that garden. And those initials remain. In the brick. Near the gateway to the pond. Still legible today. Final Thoughts Mid-May has a strange quality. Everything is moving. And yet nothing has quite arrived. The whole season still ahead. It asks a different kind of patience. Not the endurance of winter. But the patience of watching something begin. To come to life. In its own way. Maybe not the way you expected. And that’s the work of May. To watch. And to wait. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812335

May 13, 2026 Enid Annenberg Haupt, Beth Chatto, Laurie Lee, In a Green Shade by Allen Lacy, and Daphne du Maurier 05/13/2026

May 13, 2026 Enid Annenberg Haupt, Beth Chatto, Laurie Lee, In a Green Shade by Allen Lacy, and Daphne du Maurier Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes This is the time of year to throw a spring garden party. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A few chairs. A pitcher of something cold. And a neighbor you haven’t seen since the leaves came down. The garden does most of the work. It sets the table. It arranges the flowers. And it gives everyone something to talk about. Because nothing starts a conversation faster than a bloom someone hasn’t seen before. You can offer to walk your guests through the beds. Encourage them to touch something new and green. Or smell an herb. Have a little one pull a radish. If you’ve got one ready. Sharing your garden is the best gift of all. And you don’t have to give anything away. Just open the gate. And let people in. Today’s Garden History 1906 Enid Annenberg Haupt was born in Chicago. She once said, “Nature is my religion. There is no life in concrete and paint.” Enid spent ninety-nine years living that statement. Growing up, she was the fourth child of eight in the Annenberg family. A dynasty built on publishing. And the hard politics of American media. She found her way into the orbit of orchids. It started when her second husband, Ira Haupt, courted her with a single spray of cymbidium orchids. And Enid—raised surrounded by money and power—looked at the orchid and saw something that meant more to her than all of it. Beauty. She was so smitten with orchids that for her wedding, she requested thirteen orchid plants instead of jewelry. Professionally, Enid ran Seventeen magazine for sixteen years. And transformed it into a serious primer on careers and literature for young women. Reflecting on her active lifestyle, she once said, “I haven’t the time for boredom.” But it was gardens that became the great work of her life. When the Victorian conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden was about to be demolished, Enid sold jewelry from her personal collection. To make the first five-million-dollar gift that saved it. As she aged, Enid came to see plants as something people needed. But also something that made the world a better place. And she believed beauty was not just a luxury. But a human right. Over the years, Enid gave more than thirty-four million dollars to the Botanical Garden alone. And she funded a four-acre garden on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Behind the Smithsonian Castle. Above all, she wanted it to feel like it had always been there. Waiting for visitors on the day it opened. So that the average person could walk in and feel peace immediately. When she bought George Washington’s former estate in Virginia. River Farm. She turned around and donated it to the American Horticultural Society. Enid also cared about accessibility. And she built one of the first wheelchair-accessible gardens. At a hospital. Where children could reach the flowers from their chairs. And when the money ran short on many of the projects she helped sponsor, Enid sold Impressionist paintings from her own private collection. Her inheritance. Monet. Van Gogh. Gauguin. Cézanne. Renoir. Fifteen masterpieces. For twenty-five million dollars. Unlike many who found gardens, Enid believed that if you helped create a garden, you must endow it. Because a gift without a future is just a burden. One that often ends up lost to time. By the time Enid died in 2005, she had given away more than one hundred and forty million dollars. Nearly all of it to gardens and green spaces open to the public. Which makes Enid Annenberg Haupt the greatest patron American horticulture has ever known. 2018 Beth Chatto died peacefully at her home in Elmstead Market, in Essex, England. She was ninety-four years old. Beth was born in 1923. Her mother gave her her first trowel. And that was the beginning. When Beth married the botanist Andrew Chatto, his research into the origins of plants helped shape her thinking. Her work centered on a single, radical idea: Right plant. Right place. It sounds obvious now. But it wasn’t at the time. In the 1950s, the British gardening ideal was a manicured lawn. And stiff beds of annuals. Ripped out every autumn. And replanted every spring. If the soil was wrong, you changed the soil. If the ground was too wet, you drained it. Beth said no to all of it. She encouraged gardeners to flip the paradigm. To find plants that already want to grow where they are. In her late thirties, Beth began work on a difficult piece of land. Boggy hollows. Parched gravel beds. Brambles. Scrub. Her neighbors told her to forget it. But Beth saw five gardens. She dug out ponds. Shaped them like clouds. On the dry gravel, she planted silver-leafed plants. That color told her everything she needed to know. Those plants would not need pampering. So she chose euphorbias. Lavender. And giant feathery grasses. That caught the wind and light. Like something breathing. Beth once said, “I don’t want a garden that looks like a florist shop. I want a garden that looks like a piece of the world.” Nearly twenty years later, she brought her ideas to the Chelsea Flower Show. The traditionalists were horrified. Beth displayed grasses. And common plants like cow parsley. Things most people called weeds. And yet she won the gold medal. And then again. In all, Beth won ten consecutive gold medals. Her boldest move came when she was nearly seventy. She planted a gravel garden on a former parking lot. And never watered it. Not once. Outside of rain, it remains unwatered. And still blooms today. Beth credited her artistic eye to her friend, the painter Cedric Morris. He taught her to see the garden as a canvas. And her dearest garden friend was Christopher Lloyd. Christo. Of Great Dixter. In the garden, they were opposites. Beth was silver and restrained. Christo was orange and chaos. She once wrote to him: “I feel like a tired old horse, plodding along… then comes your letter, like a sharp spur.” Beth’s gardens. Seven and a half acres in the Essex countryside. Are now a National Heritage landscape. And her granddaughter Julia runs the nursery today. Her insight remains one of the quietest laws in modern gardening: Right plant. Right place. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the English poet and memoirist Laurie Lee, who died on this day in 1997. Laurie grew up in the Slad Valley in Gloucestershire. A small Cotswold village. With steep lanes. And half-wild gardens. His memoir Cider with Rosie is a love letter to a vanishing rural world. Written especially to honor his mother. Here is Laurie remembering her in the garden: “So with the family gone, Mother lived as she wished… Slowly, snugly, she grew into her background, warm on her grassy bank, poking and peering among the flowery bushes, dishevelled and bright as they. Serenely unkempt were those final years, free from conflict, doubt or dismay, while she reverted gently to a rustic simplicity as a moss-rose reverts to a wild one.” Earlier, Laurie wrote of her gift with roses: “She could grow them anywhere, at any time, and they seemed to live longer for her… She grew them with rough, almost slap-dash love, but her hands possessed such an understanding of their needs they seemed to turn to her like another sun.” Laurie’s mother was not a formal gardener. Or a designer. She worked without a plan. Welcomed self-seeders. And forgave the weeds. Laurie described her this way: “All day she trotted to and fro, flushed and garrulous, pouring flowers into every pot and jug she could find… until [the] dim interior [of the house] seemed entirely possessed by the world outside — a still green pool flooding with honeyed tides of summer.” That passage is more than a description. It’s a restoration. Word by word. Laurie brings her back. Book Recommendation It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: In a Green Shade by Allen Lacy. This book is part of Mother’s Day Week here on The Daily Gardener. And that means all of this week’s Book Recommendations feature garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next. In a Green Shade gathers Allen’s essays on gardens and gardeners. Most of these pieces were originally written for a newsletter called Homeground. A father-and-son project that Allen almost didn’t start. In the introduction, Allen tells the story: “Soon after I gave up my column in the Times, my younger son, Michael, a magazine art director, began mumbling that he and I should publish a gardening newsletter together. I resisted, but he persisted, entreating me to consider the wonders of desktop publishing and the miracles of software programs with strange names not in any known language. Finally, on Christmas Eve, he nudged me again. This time I said yes. On New Year’s Eve Michael dropped by to show me the design dummy for Homeground. The newsletter comes out quarterly and runs to sixteen pages an issue. It’s now approaching its eighth year. I had new things to worry about, such as the costs of paper, advertising, and postage. We started off with no subscribers, and then we got a few, and a few more every month. We have had a satisfying renewal rate, but Martha Stewart need not fear our competition.” On the page, Allen writes like a gardener who has been working the same land for a very long time. He doesn’t give advice. He simply shares what he notices. And for Mother’s Day Week, this book speaks to that gentle continuity. Honoring the gardeners who came before us. Who taught by example. Often without ever naming what they were doing. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1907 Daphne du Maurier was born in London. Most people know Daphne from her novel Rebecca. With that unforgettable opening line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But Manderley was not entirely imagined. It was a real place. Menabilly. On the southern coast of Cornwall. Overlooking the sea. As a young woman, Daphne stumbled upon the property. Pushed through brambles. Followed an overgrown path. And when the house appeared, it felt like a dream. She fell in love with it immediately. With the wildness of the land. Rhododendrons gone feral. Rare specimens planted long ago. All tangled together in what she called an alien marriage. In 1943, Daphne leased Menabilly. Moved in. And began to tend it back to life. Not redesigning it. Simply living with it. Walking its paths every day. Writing her books in a small hut. With the garden just outside her window. Her daughters remembered that wherever she lived, the house was always full of flowers. In one of her books, a child slips away from a garden party and into the woods. And Daphne wrote: “The woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognize her as the garden did.” For Daphne, gardens were not decoration. They were witness. The one place that truly knew you. She lived at Menabilly for more than two decades. And when the lease ended, she was heartbroken. She had given the garden her best years. And it had shaped her life’s work in return. Daphne du Maurier died in 1989. She was eighty-one. Final Thoughts This is the time of year when the garden does most of the work. Take some time to enjoy it. Grab a couple of chairs. Something cold to drink. And sit beside a neighbor you haven’t seen in a while. Fill the kiddie pool. Add a little Epsom salt. Soak your feet. And suddenly. It’s a party. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/40812330

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