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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.
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