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.

February 16, 2026 Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Hugo de Vries, David Austin, Secret Gardeners, and Staying Power in the Garden 02/16/2026

February 16, 2026 Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Hugo de Vries, David Austin, Secret Gardeners, and Staying Power in the Garden Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes February is a month that quietly rewards persistence. Nothing happens all at once. Progress comes from staying. From watching. From continuing, even when the garden looks unchanged. Today’s stories live right there — with people who kept going long enough for something living to answer back. Today’s Garden History 1727 Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin was born. If you’ve ever wandered through a botanic garden and felt that quiet astonishment — how did all this get here? — Nikolaus is part of the answer. In the 1750s, Schönbrunn, the imperial palace and garden complex in Vienna, was expanding its great glass rooms. Hothouses meant to hold the world. But a hothouse is only useful if you have plants to put inside it. So Nikolaus was sent out — not as a tourist, but as a working naturalist and collector charged with filling those benches. Five years. Tropical heat. Salt air. And a garden waiting back in Vienna, with glass rooms ready and empty. When he returned, Nikolaus didn’t come back with dried specimens alone. He returned with living material — cuttings, roots, and seeds — small botanical promises, carefully packed to survive the long sea voyage. Alongside them came shells, animals, and curiosities — the kind of cargo that turned an imperial garden like Schönbrunn into a living cabinet of wonder. And then Nikolaus did the part that made his work endure. He wrote it down. He named what he saw. Measured petals and stamens. Described leaf edges, sap, and scent. And he insisted that his records be beautiful. Nikolaus’s illustrated books still feel vivid — not dusty, not remote, and not in black and white. His vibrant color choices land like they were painted yesterday. His books are portable gardens — pages you can open anywhere. There was Selectarum Stirpium Americanarum Historia, where plants from the Americas were drawn in ink and pigment. Hortus Botanicus Vindobonensis, a record of rare plants grown in Vienna. And Plantarum Rariorum Horti Caesarei Schoenbrunnensis, a catalog of exotic plants flourishing behind glass at Schönbrunn. His name lives on in the genus Jacquinia, a group of small evergreens valued for toughness and salt tolerance in warm coastal places. Nikolaus also left the garden a spicier legacy by describing the habanero pepper, Capsicum chinense. The name suggests it came from China, but habaneros didn’t come from China at all. That, too, is common in garden history: beauty and error traveling together, and still leaving us with something bright, living, and unforgettable. 1848 Hugo de Vries was born. Hugo’s garden wasn’t meant to impress anyone. It was meant to answer a question. When something new appears in nature — a new form, a new trait — does it arrive slowly, or all at once? That question took root for Hugo after a chance observation near Hilversum, in an abandoned field, where he noticed evening primroses, Oenothera lamarckiana, that didn’t match the rest. Some were taller. Some shorter. Some shaped differently — as if they’d stepped sideways out of the usual pattern. He brought those plants home and began growing them deliberately. What followed looked like an obsession from the outside. Row after row, year after year. In all, Hugo grew tens of thousands of plants, watching carefully for moments when inheritance seemed to change abruptly. A dwarf where none should be. A giant where no one expected it. A red-veined stem. A leaf shape arrives fully formed. He called these sudden changes mutations. Through this patient work, Hugo helped restore something science had nearly lost — Gregor Mendel’s idea that traits are passed along in discrete units. Not blended. Not vague. But trackable. Like Mendel before him, Hugo didn’t arrive at his conclusions quickly. It took season after season, trial after trial, watching plants long enough to be sure. The breakthrough wasn’t dramatic. It was persistence made visible. A man watching a plant, refusing to call the difference a fluke, and giving the mystery a name. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from David Austin, born on this day in 1926. He once wrote: “The perfume of roses becomes more than a fragrance. It is at once familiar and fleeting, a memory, a mood, a gentle companion to the day…” Gardeners know how scent behaves. It doesn’t stay put. It moves. It catches. And later — unexpectedly — it returns. Book Recommendation This is a book of private gardens — not performances, not showplaces. Places where very public people become private again. Sting and his wife Trudi, Jeremy Irons, Anish Kapoor, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, among many others. The gardens are restorative. They quiet the mind rather than amplify it. If February has felt heavy, this is a book that lets the eyes wander through living, imaginative, anchoring spaces — without leaving the couch. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1911 Marie Clark Taylor was born. Marie believed students should study living material — not just diagrams. Plants on the table. Light on leaves. Feeling the texture. Hearing the crunch. Her research focused on photoperiodism — the way plants use the length of day and night as a signal for when to grow and when to flower. In simple terms, plants don’t just respond to light. They respond to time. Marie worked with common garden plants, including scarlet sage (Salvia splendens), garden cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus), and orange cosmos (Cosmos sulphureus). What she showed was beautifully practical: more light isn’t always better. Sometimes, a shorter day length promotes better flowering. Marie helped make visible what gardeners learn by staying attentive: timing matters. That attention matters. And that a common flower, given the right conditions, can change what we understand. Final Thoughts As we close the show today, remember: every story today shares the same quiet strength. Nikolaus. Hugo. David. Marie. None of them rushed into the garden. They stayed. They watched. They kept going. That persistence — more than talent, more than luck — is what gardeners grow best. So if you’ve had failures or think you have a brown thumb, congratulations. You’re just like every other gardener who ever learned anything worth keeping. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39764515

February 13, 2026 Lewis David von Schweinitz, Maria Tallant Owen, Willow Water, The Gardener's Botanical by Ross Bayton, and February Thrift 02/13/2026

February 13, 2026 Lewis David von Schweinitz, Maria Tallant Owen, Willow Water, The Gardener's Botanical by Ross Bayton, and February Thrift Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes February is a good time to remember a small, practical kind of magic: willow water. Around this time of year, willows come into our homes in bundled armfuls — upright stems in a jar, catching the light like quiet fireworks. And then the best part happens after the display: don’t pour that water down the drain. That pale, tannin-tinted water can be used to help root cuttings — slips of geranium, pieces of coleus, a twiggy hope of something you’re trying to keep. A winter bouquet that turns into a rooting aid. February likes that kind of thrift. It’s time for today’s Botanical History. Today’s Garden History 1780 Lewis David von Schweinitz was born. Lewis was a Moravian minister, a father to his congregation, and the man we now honor as the father of North American mycology — the study of fungi. Lewis was shaped by the Moravian faith, a tradition rooted in discipline, service, and order, and in the belief that the natural world was not chaotic, but something that could be understood through careful attention. Moravian ministers were expected to be learned, observant, to keep records, and to tend both souls and systems. So it’s no surprise that botany became a second calling for Lewis — not a hobby, but a responsibility he took joy in. Lewis loved to tell how, at just seven years old, he passed a classroom at Nazareth Hall and noticed a lichen specimen sitting on a table. Nothing flashy. Nothing ornamental. A little odd. Something most children — most people — would walk right past. But Lewis stopped. That pause mattered. Because fungi reward that kind of attention. They live in the margins. They work underground. They don’t ask to be admired. When Lewis came of age, he traveled to Niesky, Germany, a Moravian center where both theology and botany were already well developed. Europe was far ahead of America, and Lewis grew there, deepening his faith, refining his scientific eye, and helping complete a major work on German fungi. What’s striking is what came next. When Lewis returned to the United States years later, he did the same work all over again — methodically, patiently — building knowledge of American fungi from the ground up. A second pass. A second chance. That’s a shepherd’s work. Lewis didn’t crave novelty. He was content to walk the same ground, to grow his herbarium one specimen at a time, to make sure nothing important was overlooked. And so he became the country’s authority — by cataloging what others ignored, by naming what others found unsettling or strange, and by helping gardeners and scientists understand that decay is not failure. It’s a process. It’s part of the cycle of life. Fungi, like willow water, work quietly — unseen — until their work becomes visible. Gardeners don’t often think about fungi, but they are inseparable from our gardens. They support roots. They connect plants. They make life possible beneath the surface. Despite a lifetime devoted to fungi, Lewis is remembered in the name of a flower: Schweinitz’s sunflower, Helianthus schweinitzii. It’s a rare native sunflower of the Carolina Piedmont. A modest, lovely thing. And like all sunflowers, it turns its face toward the light. It’s hard not to hear the echo. A Moravian minister. A careful botanist. A man devoted to the overlooked, orienting himself, again and again, toward illumination. If Lewis could whisper something to us now, it might be this: just as we look to the heavens for spiritual growth, pay attention to what’s happening beneath your feet. That’s where earthly growth begins — in the garden, and in life. 1825 Maria Tallant Owen was born. Maria became, in many ways, a living record of Nantucket flora. She grew up among women who shared a love of plants the way some families share recipes — mothers, sisters, aunts — passing along names, seasons, and what to look for. Maria had a mind for it: quick, exact, and quietly serious. After she married a Harvard-educated doctor, Varillas Owen, the couple settled in Springfield, Massachusetts. For decades, their home became a gathering place — for spirited conversation, for visiting minds, and for shelves that never stopped filling with books. Maria taught widely — botany, French, astronomy, geography — but the study of plants brought her the most happiness. In the 1880s, she began publishing what she knew of Nantucket’s flora, and in 1888, she produced a thorough catalog of the island’s plants. It’s the kind of book that becomes invaluable over time, because Maria didn’t only list what grew. She recorded where it grew and how long it had been there. Until late in her life, Maria kept up a long correspondence with other botanists, staying curious and alert to whatever was newly found on the island she always considered home. Those who exchanged letters with her often learned of some new discovery or lesson. 1894 In one letter, she began with a burst of delight: “Ecce Tillaea simplex!” A small plant, unseen for sixty-five years, had turned up again on Nantucket — as if the island itself had kept it tucked away until the right eyes arrived. Maria died in 1913, having returned to Nantucket late in life — a homecoming. Walter Deane wrote in Rhodora that she died “…on a bright morning in the room flooded with sunshine, which she always loved, and filled with iris, columbine, and cornflowers….” He added that she lived up to the Latin motto of her mother’s family, Post tenebris, speramus lumen de lumine, which she loved to translate as “After the darkness, we hope for light from the source of light.” Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from Géza Csáth, the Hungarian writer, musician, and physician, born on this day in 1887. In his short story The Magician’s Garden, he tells a dark tale of obsession — and the flowers are not ornamental. They’re a warning. Here’s an excerpt about blooms that gardeners will immediately recognize as all wrong: “Rare flowers grew there. Long-stemmed, horn-shaped flowers with petals that looked as smooth as black velvet. In the corner, a bush, in full bloom with enormous chalice-shaped white lilies. Scattered everywhere were more short, slender-stemmed, white-petaled flowers, but one petal — just a single petal — was red. It felt like they emitted that unfamiliar, sweet scent, which, when smelled, makes you feel breathless. In the middle of the garden was a cluster of plump magenta flowers. Their fleshy, silky petals drooped down low into the tall, raging green grass. This small garden of wonders was, indeed, like a kaleidoscope; lilac irises opened their petals in front of my very eyes, the scent of a hundred different flowers combined to produce an intoxicating perfume, and were resplendent, too, with every color of the rainbow.” To a non-gardener, this may sound lush. But gardeners know better. They hear combinations of color and scent that don’t sing. They sour. Too sweet. Too close. Too wrong. This is a garden without restraint — one that overwhelms instead of sustaining. Book Recommendation It’s a companion for anyone who’s ever lingered over a plant label and wanted more than pronunciation — wanted meaning. Because botanical Latin isn’t just naming. It’s a kind of shorthand full of clues — place, habit, shape, story — all tucked right into the name. It’s a way for gardeners across countries and centuries to point to the same plant and agree: this is what we mean. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1825 Julia Dorr was born. Julia was a poet who kept a close relationship with flowers — not as decoration, but as a vocabulary she could trust. She wrote from her home in Rutland, Vermont, at a place called The Maples, and from her desk she could look out at her garden — a refuge, and a constant source of imagery. Her poems are filled with lilies and violets, mignonette and larkspur, and always underneath, the quiet knowledge that choosing is part of living: one bloom gathered, another left behind. Julia feels like a February poet, because February is a month of choosing too — what to save, what to start, what to try again. Final Thoughts As we close the show today, remember: February gardening isn’t loud. It’s saving water. It’s starting roots. It’s keeping records — and rediscovering good ideas for your garden, even if they’re just in your head. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39764475

February 12, 2026 William Mason, Emily Lawless, Frank Lloyd Wright and Jens Jensen, The Beauty of the Flower by Stephen A. Harris, and Revising the Garden 02/12/2026

February 12, 2026 William Mason, Emily Lawless, Frank Lloyd Wright and Jens Jensen, The Beauty of the Flower by Stephen A. Harris, and Revising the Garden Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes February can feel like a month made of drafts. Nothing finished. Nothing resolved. And that’s not a flaw. It can be a good thing. Because gardeners are always iterating — one growing season after the next. It’s a cycle that often looks like this: an attempt, an unexpected result, followed by the quiet correction. Gardens are revised in public — and so are we. Today’s stories are about that kind of forward progress. Today’s Garden History 1724 William Mason was born. William was the poet, the clergyman, and the garden designer who helped the English garden feel like a place with a point of view. He had a gift for giving gardeners a new metaphor. To him, gardens were a canvas, and the gardener was the artist. In his long garden poem The English Garden, he urged gardeners to design a landscape the way an artist would: Take thy plastic spade — it is thy pencil. Take thy seeds, thy plants — they are thy colors. It’s a memorable way to think about design. He truly turned a corner as an artist in 1775. At Nuneham Courtenay, near Oxford, William designed a flower garden for George Harcourt. His ideas spread across the gardens of England. Straight lines began to loosen. Beds stopped behaving like borders on paper. Instead of keeping everything obediently close to the house, planting began to flow outward — toward a walk, a seat, a temple, an orangery, a pause. Mason’s gardens required people to move through them. His landscapes cried out for a little wandering. But they weren’t wild as in careless. They were wild as in natural. When Mason said, “Compose your gardens,” he didn’t mean do less. He meant choose deliberately. He wanted the garden to be arranged, but arranged in a way that felt organic rather than imposed. Maybe that’s why his advice still holds. Gardeners still shape experience. They choreograph a view. They imitate nature. And they decide what is revealed — and what is withheld until the next few steps. 1900 Emily Lawless wrote a diary entry that feels a little familiar. She was on a train near Guildford, England, when she ran into a fellow gardener — the sort of person she usually enjoyed sparring with. But this time, when they started talking, he made a disparaging comment about the British soldiers — the Tommies — after defeats in the Boer War. Emily bristled. Not because she was naïve. She admitted the home front was rattled. But to refer to their own fighting men like that felt insulting and unpatriotic. And then, in the middle of that tension, the man brightened and changed the subject, asking: “Is Anemone blanda in flower in your garden now?” The emotional whiplash hits hard. War. Defeat. National pride. And then — anemones? And yet it’s also painfully true to life. People cope in their own ways. Some reach for the garden because it’s the only place they can still control an outcome. They can’t alter headlines, but they can measure bloom. Emily captured the moment perfectly in her journal. “Anemone Blanda?” I repeated, feeling slightly confused by the rapidity of the transition. [The man answers:] “[I have] sixteen tufts in full flower—beauties! Yours were the pale blue ones, weren’t they? Mine are as blue as, oh, as blue as—blue paint.” “We have numbers of bulbs at present in flower,” I said severely. “Scillas and chinodoxas, and daffodils, and tulips, and Iris Alata, and many others.” “Ah, potted bulbs. They’re poor sort of things generally, don’t you think? Some people, I believe, like them though.” “We have Cyclamen Coum in flower out of doors,” I added; garden vanity, or… ill-humour, arousing in me a sudden spirit of violent horticultural rivalry. “Oh, you have, have you?”—this in a tone of somewhat enhanced respect. “Don’t you shelter it at all?” “Not in the least!” I replied contemptuously. “We grow it out in the copse; on the stones; in all directions. It is a perfect weed with us. No weather seems to make the slightest difference.” …Luckily for my veracity our roads just then diverged; my horticultural acquaintance getting out at the next station, and I continuing on my way to Guildford. I don’t think I have ever in my life felt more ruffled, more thoroughly exasperated than I was by that most uncalled-for remark about the Tommies. I adore my garden, and yield to no one in my estimation of its supreme importance as a topic; still there are moments when even horticulture must learn to bow its head; “Anemone Blanda!” I repeated several times to myself in the course of the afternoon, and each time with a stronger feeling of exasperation. “Anemone Blanda, indeed!” Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from a letter written by architect Frank Lloyd Wright to landscape architect Jens Jensen. In 1943, on this day, Jens wrote Frank to say the two men would never agree. Frank’s reply was stunning. Dear Jens, You dear old Prima Donna- I don't know whether you exaggerate your own sense of yourself or exaggerate my sense of myself. It doesn't much matter either way. You are a realistic landscapist. I am an abstractionist seeking the pattern behind the realism - the interior structure instead of the comparatively superficial exterior effects you delight in. In other words I am a builder. You are an effectivist using nature's objects to make your effects. I find that I can be interested in that with which I supremely disagree, and I continually learn from my opposites. Jens couldn’t resist replying later in March: Dear Frank I did not think I could ever get you to write me a letter. But here it is! Thanks for the compliments. You are still the same Frank, although I fear a little less poetic. Book Recommendation Published in 2023, this book traces how humans learned to see plants well — not just admire them. It treats botanical illustration not as decoration, but as a working language shared by artists, printers, and scientists. Because botanical art wasn’t created to decorate a wall. It was created to carry information: what mattered enough to show, what could be simplified, what had to be exact, what had to be repeated until another mind could recognize the plant, too. It’s the kind of book that makes a gardener pause over a single page and think: oh. That’s why illustration still matters. Not because photographs don’t exist, but because drawing forces examination. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 2024 BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine promoted their #GrowSomethingDifferent campaign. It was a simple nudge: break a habit, try something new, keep learning. What’s something new for the garden this season? A plant you’ve never grown. A method you’ve never tried. A small experiment that keeps the mind awake. Gardens stay alive that way. Final Thoughts As we close today’s show, here’s one thought to carry forward. A garden isn’t built by certainty. It’s built by revision — the way drafts are built: by noticing what didn’t quite work, and trying again. Change-ups. Redos. A spade as pencil. A flower bed as a sentence. A season as a quiet mantra that keeps teaching us to keep going — and keep growing. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39764455

February 11, 2026 Johann Jacob Paul Moldenhawer, Benjamin Franklin Bush, Vita Sackville-West, Plant Lore and Legend by Ruth Binney, and the State Botanical Club 02/11/2026

February 11, 2026 Johann Jacob Paul Moldenhawer, Benjamin Franklin Bush, Vita Sackville-West, Plant Lore and Legend by Ruth Binney, and the State Botanical Club Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes In this month of love, let me just say this: there are many ways to love a garden — as many ways as there are gardeners. Today, we’re celebrating a few people who rose to the top as devoted lovers of the natural world — through their methods, their insight, and their sheer persistence. Let’s dig in. Today’s Garden History 1766 Johann Jacob Paul Moldenhawer was born. Like so many botanists of his era, he began in theology. But it was the natural world that earned his devotion. Moldenhawer is remembered less for ornamental gardens and more for the invisible architecture inside plants — the parts you don’t notice until you’re curious enough to look closely. If you’ve ever taken a plant physiology class, you may have heard of him. Otherwise, probably not. Moldenhawer became one of the founders of modern plant anatomy, working at the microscope with a kind of stubborn patience. He developed ways to separate plant tissues so he could see them clearly — to isolate cells and vessels, to understand how the plant was built. For someone working in the late 1700s, this was slow, complicated, tedious work — the kind that asks for faith. He helped identify the idea of the vascular bundle — those organized pathways of transport inside a stem — and helped distinguish a plant’s conducting tissues from the softer cellular mass around them. It’s hard to overstate what that meant. Because once you can see structure, you can begin to understand growth. Every time a gardener thinks about the care and feeding of a plant — a tree, a perennial, even a lawn — there’s a little echo of Moldenhawer in that thinking, just at a more practical level. In 1792, Moldenhawer’s work shifted from the microscopic to the everyday. At the University of Kiel, he was hired as a professor of botany and fruit-tree cultivation — the kind of post where he could inspire students and bring science back into the orchard. He was fascinated by how woody plants thicken, how trunks add their rings, how growth becomes harvest. We talk about fruit trees as if they’re simple. A little pruning. A little patience. But behind every apple and pear is a quiet miracle of structure — wood laid down season by season, a tree building itself one thin layer at a time. And fruiting, if you stare at it long enough, is miraculous. Moldenhawer spent his life looking at that miracle up close. February feels like that, too — a month that can seem small and unimportant until you remember what’s happening deep down in nature. 1935 The Ogden Standard-Examiner ran an article featuring Benjamin Franklin Bush. His friends called him Frank. Here was a botanist who did not look the part. To most people, he was the shirt-sleeved owner of a little general store outside Kansas City. But to botanical experts in the United States and Europe, he was one of the nation’s top field botanists — consulted by major institutions, corresponding with academics and specialists, and contributing to serious reference works. Frank spent decades learning the flora of Jackson County, Missouri, walking prairies, woods, glades, and river edges, building knowledge the slow way — by showing up. There was virtually no corner of the natural world he hadn’t studied up close — birds, snakes, weeds, the overlooked and the ordinary. To Frank, it was all part of one whole. And he loved the puzzle of it. Frank died on Valentine’s Day in 1937, which feels fitting for someone who gave his life to knowing one place so thoroughly that, through him, it became one of the best-known botanical regions in the country. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from Vita Sackville-West, from her diary entry for this day in 1951, captured in her book In Your Garden. Vita is unmistakably herself here — brisk, practical, faintly scolding, and then suddenly amused at her own limits. She wanted beauty. But she wanted it to be achievable. And she craved natural beauty allowed to be itself. Not decoration. Not prettiness. Not display. Beauty happens when we stop thwarting what plants are trying to do. She isn’t opposed to design. She isn’t opposed to effort. She’s opposed to violence disguised as improvement — the mop-on-a-stick tree, the hacked shrub, the plant forced into a shape that contradicts its nature. Vita’s kind of beauty is trained, not tortured. Guided, not suppressed. Intentional, but not domineering. That’s why espalier delights her. It’s not control — it’s collaboration. And that moment of self-interruption — “Have I made myself clear? No, I don’t think I have.” — is part of her charm. She seems most alive on the page when she’s trying to solve a garden problem — and inviting everyone else to solve it with her. Book Recommendation This is a small, giftable book — the kind that’s easy to keep by a chair and pick up for a few pages at a time. It gathers the old stories that cling to plants: myths, customs, remedies, symbols, superstitions. It doesn’t ask us to believe every tale. But it does ask us to remember that long before plant charts and databases, people made sense of the natural world through story. February is a good month for that kind of reading — when the garden is quiet, and imagination wanders through old calendars and hedgerows. Plant lore grounds us. And in a world of constant acceleration, that kind of grounding matters. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1896 The Burlington Free Press reported on the Winter Meeting of the State Botanical Club at the College Museum. There’s something enduringly funny about that complaint — as if the Latin were a locked door. But maybe the charm has always been there — waiting for us to stop worrying about the names and start noticing the plants. Final Thoughts As we close today’s show, here’s what today’s stories quietly share. Understanding the garden doesn’t begin with beauty. It begins with looking — sometimes at what’s hidden, sometimes at what’s ordinary, sometimes at what’s been dismissed. Moldenhawer looked inside the plant. Frank Bush looked again and again at the same place. Vita looked for solutions that let plants live fully. Plant lore looked backward, so memory wouldn’t be lost. And Rev. Bates looked forward — hoping that botany might be taught with confidence rather than caution. Different approaches. Same devotion. The garden asks the same from each of us. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39764430

February 10, 2026 Carl Linnaeus, Rodney and Rachel Saunders, Charles Lamb, Sitting in the Shade by Hugh Johnson, and Winifred Mary Letts 02/10/2026

February 10, 2026 Carl Linnaeus, Rodney and Rachel Saunders, Charles Lamb, Sitting in the Shade by Hugh Johnson, and Winifred Mary Letts Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes February has a reputation for romance, but gardeners know another side of it. The February blues. The long pause. The stretch where effort feels heavier than reward. And yet, this is often when love shows itself most clearly. Not as delight, but as endurance. Today’s Garden History 1758 Carl Linnaeus wrote a letter unlike any other. Earlier that year, Linnaeus fell into a deep depression. On February tenth, he poured his despair into a letter to his friend Abraham Bäck. “I cannot write more today; my hand is too weary to hold a pen. I am the child of misfortune. Had I a rope and English courage, I would long since have hanged myself. I fear that my wife is again pregnant. I am old and grey and worn out, and my house is already full of children; who is to feed them? It was in an unhappy hour that I accepted the professorship; if only I had remained in my lucrative practice, all would now be well. Farewell, and may you be more fortunate.” It’s hard to reconcile this exhausted, embittered voice with the figure history remembers. Linnaeus was not yet fifty-one. And before that year was out, he made a decision — one that carried risk, debt, and responsibility, but also possibility. He purchased two small country estates outside Uppsala: Hammarby and Sävja. Nothing troubled Linnaeus more than owing money. But the purchase meant summers in the country. Land to pass on to his wife, Sara Lisa, and their children. And a garden that belonged to the family, not the university. In the depths of winter despair, Linnaeus chose soil. Sometimes, choosing soil is what keeps people going. 2018 Rodney and Rachel Saunders were murdered while botanizing in South Africa. Rod and Rachel were British botanists and horticulturalists who founded Silverhill Seeds in Cape Town. They devoted their lives to South Africa’s extraordinary flora, especially the genus Gladiolus. In their final years, they undertook an ambitious project: to find, photograph, and document every known species of Gladiolus in southern Africa. Sometimes the plants were easy to find. Sometimes elusive. Often, they had to wait — for rain, for fire, for the right season, for the brief moment when a flower would finally reveal itself. Rachel once wrote in an email, “The problem with these plants is not only do we have to find them, but then they need to be in flower.” By 2018, they had found all but one known species. Returning from a field trip in KwaZulu-Natal, they were abducted and murdered. Rod was seventy-four. Rachel was sixty-three. Their notebooks were never recovered. But their photographs survived. Their correspondence. Fragments of field notes. Friends, family, and fellow botanists came together to complete the work they had begun. What endured was not just their research, but the way they worked — patiently, together, over time. Some gardeners love by naming. Some by waiting. Some by giving everything. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from Charles Lamb, born on this day in 1775. “Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!” Gardeners understand the longing behind this line. We admire deep knowledge, long study, the fluency that comes from years of practice. But gardening teaches slowly. And it humbles even the well-read. There is always more to learn. And always another season to prove us wrong. Book Recommendation This book isn’t trying to make anyone a better gardener. It’s simply the company of a mind that has lived alongside a garden for decades. For more than forty-five years, Hugh Johnson kept Trad’s Diary, recording what he noticed: the structure of trees in winter, the smell of rain, the pleasure of shade. The entries are brief and seasonal — perfect for the armchair or the bedside. It’s a book written for seasons when the garden gives less, and still asks us to stay. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1882 Winifred Mary Letts was born. She loved gardens — and garden books. In her collection Knockmaroon, she once confessed, “My secret ambition has always been to write a garden book.” During wartime, Letts wrote of a recurring nightmare — one she woke herself from by saying, “I should plant aubretia between the stones.” Not to erase hardship, but to live beside it. Here is her poem, “To a May Baby”: To come at tulip time how wise! Perhaps you will not now regret The shining gardens, jewel set, Of your first home in Paradise Nor fret Because you might not quite forget. To come at swallow-time how wise! When every bird has built a nest; Now you may fold your wings and rest And watch this new world with surprise; A guest For whom the earth has donned her best. To come when life is gay how wise! With lambs and every happy thing That frisks on foot or sports on wing, With daisies and with butterflies, But Spring Had nought so sweet as you to bring. Final Thoughts As we close today’s show, remember: February doesn’t ask for cheer. It asks for patience. For staying. For tending what isn’t rewarding yet. Gardens are loved in many ways — through action, through waiting, through choosing to continue. And sometimes, love looks like nothing more than that. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39764380

February 9, 2026 Fredrik Hasselavist, William Griffith, John Ruskin, The Gardener's Year by Karel Capek, and Henry Arthur Bright 02/09/2026

February 9, 2026 Fredrik Hasselavist, William Griffith, John Ruskin, The Gardener's Year by Karel Capek, and Henry Arthur Bright Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes February is often described as the month of celebrating love. But in garden history, love rarely announces itself. It shows up in persistence. In choices that cost something. In what people are willing to give their lives to — and what they are willing to live alongside, day after day. Today’s Garden History 1752 Fredrik Hasselqvist died in Smyrna, a Mediterranean port city. Fredrik was one of Carl Linnaeus’s students — one of the young men Linnaeus affectionately called his apostles. Linnaeus sent them into the world to observe, to collect, and to extend human knowledge of the natural order. Fredrik was not an ideal candidate. He was brilliant and modest, but frequently ill and perpetually short of money. There were delays. Setbacks. Long stretches when his body would not cooperate. Linnaeus urged him not to go. But Fredrik would not be dissuaded. This was what he had always wanted to do. So he went — not triumphantly, but determined — traveling through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, collecting plants when he could, writing whenever he had the strength. His work came in fits and starts. There were gaps and hardships. Still, he kept going. In the end, his health failed, just as Linnaeus had feared. Fredrik was only thirty when he died — his body spent long before his curiosity was. But his specimens made it home. His notes endured. Linnaeus remembered him as an apostle — sent into the world to serve science, and consumed by the calling. It was devotion, without guarantees. 1845 William Griffith died in Malacca, in what is now Malaysia. William was just thirty-four years old. Unlike Fredrik, William was the real thing. He lived at a time when botany desperately needed information — from places few Europeans had seen, from climates that challenged every assumption. And William delivered. Trained as a physician, he distinguished himself early through precision and discipline. He liked naming plants, but what truly absorbed him was understanding how they worked — structure, reproduction, order. His observations were meticulous. His output astonishing. He traveled widely across India, Burma, the Himalayas, Bhutan, and Afghanistan — bringing back exactly what the field needed at the time. Those who knew him believed he was destined for greatness. So it was no surprise when William was chosen to oversee the Calcutta Botanical Garden after its longtime director, Nathaniel Wallich, was forced to leave for medical treatment. Wallich’s garden was mature, atmospheric, and deeply beautiful — shaped over the course of decades. But William couldn’t see the order through all that beauty. It distracted him. To William, a botanical garden existed to teach, and teaching required clarity. Plant A beside Plant B. If they belonged together on the page, the garden should be organized the same way. While Wallich was away, William went to work. He excavated and removed not just individual plantings, but rows of majestic trees that had stood like sentries since the garden’s earliest days. William wasn’t trying to be malicious. But he was a purist — a man built for the field, placed in charge of curation and care. When Wallich returned in 1844, he wrote to his friend William Hooker: “Where is the stately, matchless garden that I left in 1842? Is this the same as that? Can it be? No — no — no! Day is not more different from night than the state of the garden as it was from its present utterly ruined condition… My heart bleeds at what I am compelled daily — hourly — to witness.” By then, the damage was done. Wallich was given back what remained of his garden. William was reassigned. He left with his wife, Emily — a striking detail in a world where plant hunters usually worked alone. His scientific brilliance did not desert him. But he was not a garden designer. His hepatitis flared as soon as he boarded the ship. He died ten days after landing. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from John Ruskin, who understood this tension instinctively. He wrote: “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.” Not to improve it. Not to rearrange it. Not to force it into meaning. Just to see what it is. And say it honestly. Gardeners know this instinct. It’s the moment you stop arguing with the season. Stop correcting the soil. Stop asking the plant to be something else. And allow the garden to be exactly what it is. Book Recommendation Čapek didn’t set out to write a classic. He simply recorded a year in his garden — the plans, the miscalculations, the waiting. What made the book beloved was its recognition that control is never complete, and that the real work lies in learning when to act and when to let things unfold. It makes room for failure without making it feel like defeat. It’s a snapshot — but one gardeners keep returning to. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1830 Henry Arthur Bright was born. A son of the port city of Liverpool, Henry became a writer known for warmth and charm. He was a generous correspondent, a sympathetic ear, and a steady presence in literary circles. He befriended writers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he met in Concord in 1852. They traveled together and remained friends for life. When Henry wasn’t writing, he tended his garden at his home, Ashfield, on the outskirts of the city. Almost without meaning to, he began recording his life through the small things that happened there — the pleasures, the disappointments, the steady labor, what thrived, what failed, what surprised him. Over time, these moments became quiet meditations, written with such ease and honesty that gardeners began to recognize themselves in his pages. Henry developed strong preferences. He loved thick plantings. Old flowers. Snowdrops that wandered where they pleased. He disliked fashion and surface display. He trusted soil, sun, and time. His most beloved book is called A Year in a Lancashire Garden. But when a gardener reads it, it feels like a lifetime. Final Thoughts As we close the show today, remember: garden history is made not just by plants, but by people — with all their strengths and missteps. People just like us. And that’s why these stories still guide us — because how they loved gardens still shapes how we try to live with ours. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39764325

February 6, 2026 Prospero Alpini, Ugo Foscolo, Susan Wittig Albert, The Lost Gardens by Anthony Eglin, and Capability Brown 02/06/2026

February 6, 2026 Prospero Alpini, Ugo Foscolo, Susan Wittig Albert, The Lost Gardens by Anthony Eglin, and Capability Brown Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes There are gardeners who love what grows on its own. And there are gardeners who can’t help themselves — they lean in. They intervene. They carry pollen on their fingertips. They stop canopies from creeping. They burn up the land. They dig rivers. They make a future where there wasn’t one yet. Today’s stories are for the people who didn’t just admire the natural world. They entered it and left it changed. Today’s Garden History 1617 Prospero Alpini died. Prospero was an Italian physician and botanist, and one of those rare figures who made Europe feel larger simply by describing what he’d seen. In the 1580s, Prospero traveled to Egypt and lived in Cairo for years. He didn’t travel like a tourist. He traveled like a person with a notebook in one hand and curiosity in the other. He studied what grew there — palms, spices, unfamiliar fruits — plants Europeans had heard rumors about, but didn’t yet understand. And then there was the date palm. Prospero noticed something that seems obvious to gardeners now, but at the time in Europe it wasn’t common knowledge: date palms have male and female flowers on separate plants. The trees, in other words, don’t do everything alone. Prospero realized that if the pollen doesn’t reach the female flowers, you don’t get fruit. So he did what gardeners do. He stepped in. He became one of the first people in Europe to write down the idea that plant reproduction could be observed, understood, and helped along — that pollination wasn’t magic. It was a process. There’s something quietly modern about that. A scientist, yes, but also a gardener in the most practical sense: someone willing to use his hands. Prospero’s writings also brought Europeans some of their earliest descriptions of coffee and bananas — not as fantasies, but as real plants grown and used in daily life. Later, Carl Linnaeus honored him by naming a whole genus after him: Alpinia, in the ginger family. If you’ve ever grown a ginger lily, you’ve met Prospero’s name without realizing it. It’s a tall, tender perennial — a plant that feels like warmth. And when it blooms, it carries that rich perfume people often compare to gardenias, one of those fragrances that stops you mid-step. Prospero died in 1617, but his legacy is the kind that keeps traveling: through books, through plant names, through every gardener who’s ever helped a fruit set. 1778 Ugo Foscolo was born. Ugo was an Italian poet who lived much of his life in exile and who, in England, found a kind of solace that wasn’t literary at all. It was a garden. Not a grand estate. Not a formal paradise. A small, lived-in garden — the kind you plant when you’re trying to survive your own thoughts. The kind you tend when home has become complicated, and the future feels uncertain. In a letter written from London, Ugo described growing plants for someone he cared about — invoking the sun and the rain and the spring, trying to coax flowers from stubborn things. And then he wrote a line that gardeners understand immediately: that if he had to choose between writing a beautiful poem and growing a beautiful jasmine, he would rather be a gardener. Not because poetry failed him, but because gardening is a form of hope you can touch. Because when you grow something, you are anchored in the present with an eye toward the future. You are cultivating hope. Maybe that’s what exile does to a person. It makes the smallest rooted thing feel like a promise — like freedom — like a tether when you are far from home. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days by Susan Wittig Albert, published in 2010. “A windstorm (no rain, sadly) blasted through the Hill Country this morning, dropping the temperature forty degrees in three hours. The first brave daffodil, unruffled, survived the wind. I won't have many garden flowers this year because of the flood damage last July, when it rained for nearly the full month without letup. Not many wildflowers, either: too much rain last summer, none at all since September— nothing measurable, anyway. Five months, dry as old bones. The April bluebonnets will be sparse. But there's a blessing in inhabiting a place for a long time. I am consoled with the knowledge that although there may be only a few flowers this spring, those few will be beautiful, and that when the rains come—next autumn or the autumn after—we'll have bluebonnets again. I know that the hummingbirds will arrive around the fifteenth of March, give or take a week, and that the monarchs will be sailing through our woods not long after, on their way north from Mexico. Scarlet paintbrush, blackfoot daisy, and purple monarda, all in their time. And eventually it will rain again. Someday.” That last word — someday — is gardening in one breath. Not denial. Not certainty. Just lived. A gardener’s faith in the cyclical nature of things. Book Recommendation This week has been novels week — a week-long celebration of fiction books to celebrate cozy garden stories by the fire. Today’s book is a cozy mystery with real horticultural bones in it — the kind that makes you want to pour a cup of tea and look up old garden plans afterward. In The Lost Gardens, we meet Lawrence Kingston, a retired botany professor who knows plants the way some people know faces — by instinct, by detail, by memory. When a Californian woman named Jamie Gibson inherits an old estate in the Cotswolds — Wickersham Priory — she doesn’t just inherit a crumbling house. She inherits a garden that has slipped out of time. Paths lost under growth. Borders gone feral. Structures erased by neglect. Jamie hires Lawrence to help restore it. And restoration, as gardeners know, is never just weeding. It’s an excavation. As they begin pulling back layers of the garden, they uncover old secrets — a hidden chapel, a well, and evidence that the past on this estate is not finished speaking. This is the kind of book that understands how gardens keep records. Not in ink, but in hedges, in walls, in what persists, in what disappears. If you like your mysteries gentle but intelligent, with plant knowledge woven into the plot like twine, The Lost Gardens is a very satisfying read. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1783 Lancelot “Capability” Brown died. His nickname was “Capability,” as in: this place has capability. Capability had a gift for walking an estate and seeing what it could become — not in clipped hedges and rigid geometry, but in rolling lawns, curving water, tree clumps placed like brushstrokes, and long views that looked effortless even when they required immense labor. At Hampton Court Palace, while Brown was in charge of the gardens, a little vine was planted. 1768 The year was 1768. It was really just a cutting at first — a gardener’s gamble, a living investment. And today, that vine is still there. Now known as the Great Vine, it still produces grapes. It’s still doing what it was asked to do two and a half centuries ago: grow, climb, bear sweetness. When we talk about legacy in gardening, it doesn’t always have to be dramatic. Sometimes it’s a plant that outlives you. A vine that keeps showing up every year with its stubborn green answer. That’s the part that delights us. Because even the biggest names in garden history — even the ones like Capability who moved lakes and hillsides — believed in the simple power of planting something and trusting time to finish the work. Final Thoughts Today, we heard from people who leaned in: a botanist carrying pollen by hand, a poet choosing jasmine over fame, a writer who knows the comfort of seasons returning, and a landscape-maker whose work still ripples through living plants. Gardening is attention made visible. And sometimes it’s an actual intervention — not to control the world, but to make its capabilities real. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39763285

February 5, 2026 John Carne Bidwill, Samuel Alexander Stewart, Richardson Wright, The Forbidden Garden by Ellen Herrick, and Blackmore & Langdon 02/05/2026

February 5, 2026 John Carne Bidwill, Samuel Alexander Stewart, Richardson Wright, The Forbidden Garden by Ellen Herrick, and Blackmore & Langdon Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Some lives move quickly through the world. Others move carefully through it. They walk. They notice. They return with their pockets full of things most people pass by. Today’s stories belong to people who learned the garden not by standing back, but by stepping in — sometimes farther than was wise, sometimes longer than was comfortable, and often without knowing whether anyone would ever notice. Today’s Garden History 1815 John Carne Bidwill was born in Exeter, England. John was restless early. By seventeen, he was crossing oceans. By his twenties, he was already moving away from settled places — drawn inland, toward landscapes not yet botanically explored. In February of 1839, John arrived at the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. He took in the harbors and the towns and decided almost immediately they were not enough. He wanted the interior. So he arranged passage on small vessels, gathered Māori guides and bearers, and set off through river valleys, forested hills, and volcanic terrain that shifted beneath his feet. John kept careful notes. He watched how vegetation changed with elevation and exposure. He collected plants — especially alpine species — things few Europeans had seen, let alone gathered. At Rotorua, he met the Reverend Thomas Chapman, who had just arrived from Taupō — the first European known to do so. It was a fortunate meeting. Chapman helped him press on. They crossed Lake Taupō by canoe. They climbed toward the mountains. And eventually, John faced Ngāuruhoe, the steep volcanic cone of Tongariro. He wrote that the climb was exhausting. That, without the idea of standing where no European had stood before, he would have turned back. From high on the slopes, John was rewarded. He saw the Blue Lake on Tongariro — a detail visible only from above. John returned with plants. He sent specimens to London — to John Lindley, and to William Hooker at Kew. Many waited years to be named. Some were credited to others. John complained briefly. But then he kept working. He brought seeds and seedlings of the bunya-bunya pine to England — a tree that would later bear his name: Araucaria bidwillii. He returned to Australia and was briefly appointed Director of the Sydney Botanic Gardens. But John was not a bureaucrat. While the governor expressed regret, John expressed none. Instead, he asked for work that would take him back outdoors. He became Commissioner of Crown Lands at Wide Bay, and wrote that he was being paid well for “doing what was only a pleasure.” Sadly, that happiness did not last. In 1853, while surveying a road between Wide Bay and Moreton Bay, John became separated from his party. He was lost in the bush for eight days, cutting through scrub with a pocket hook. He made it home — but his body never recovered. John Carne Bidwill died on March 16, 1853, at just thirty-eight years old. What remains are the plants — the bunya-bunya, alpine species that carry his name, and records still cited at Kew. 1826 Samuel Alexander Stewart was born in Philadelphia. Samuel’s formal schooling ended early. His mother died young. By eleven, Samuel was working — first as an errand boy, later alongside his father in a distillery, and eventually in the family’s trunk-making shop in Belfast. Books and learning came at night. What Samuel had early on was a love of walking. His sister once tossed his cap out the window so he could slip away for long walks with their father, none the wiser. Despite that love of the outdoors, Samuel didn’t formally discover botany until midlife. But when he did, he pursued it with gusto. Saturday field trips with the science lecturer, Ralph Tate. Systematic observation. Careful naming. Precise locality notes. Samuel helped found the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club. Over time, people began sending him specimens. They asked him to verify records. They trusted his observations without question. Samuel insisted that the location of a plant mattered more than its name — because names could be corrected later, but places, if not recorded, were lost forever. His greatest honor came when he was elected to the Linnean Society. It meant everything to him. In 1910, after a lifetime of walking hills and moors, Samuel was crossing a street in Belfast. He slipped trying to avoid a passing dray, was struck by the horse, and died a few hours later. Thankfully, his work remains — a flora still respected for its accuracy, with records of place that still hold. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from The Gardener’s Bed Book by Richardson Wright, published in 1929. For this day, February fifth, Richardson wrote: “We used to think that one was initiated into gardening by reading seed catalogues. That belief was based merely on a profound ignorance. The last and final rite, the trying baptism, the greatest of all prolegomenon, is to ‘get’ poison ivy. Some people are immune to this monstrous weed, and they laugh their weaker brothers to scorn. Country boys, they say, can even chew the leaves with impunity. But the rest of us must pass through the fire. Doctors seem to disagree on cures for it — some suggest washing with green soap and then bathing the welts with freshly-made spirits of nitre; others paint the welts with iodine; still others use the ordinary photographer’s hypo solution. As a precaution, whenever we have been handling the pestiferous stuff, we run indoors and scrub hands and face vigorously with very hot common kitchen-sink soap-suds.” Richardson’s book reads like a gardener’s diary — a time capsule from nearly a century ago. Book Recommendation This week is novels week — a celebration of cozy, garden-rooted fiction best read by the fire. At the center of The Forbidden Garden is a walled garden on an English estate — long neglected, long resisted. Generations tried to restore it and failed. Sorrel Sparrow arrives not as a decorator, but as a gardener who listens. She reads soil and structure. She senses history — heartbreak, betrayal, ambition — woven into hedges and stone. This is a story for gardeners who know that some places don’t simply want to be fixed — they want to be understood. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1868 Charles Frederick Langdon was born in Somerset, England. He grew up on an estate, the son of a woodsman, surrounded by trees and long views. He trained as a gardener, and with the encouragement — and funding — of his employer, began breeding plants seriously. Not far away, another life was unfolding. James Barret Blackmore, trained as an engineer, built a greenhouse at the bottom of his garden in Bath and filled it with begonias. The two men met at the Bath Flower Show. Both exhibited. Both won prizes. Recognition and mutual admiration did the rest. Their friendship became a true partnership when James bought land to start a nursery. Blackmore & Langdon became a name that came to stand for quality. As the business grew, their families melded, with marriages uniting their households. In the early days, plants traveled by horse and rail. Staff slept in empty vans once the plants were unloaded. During the war, Land Girls took over the work. Greenhouses were damaged. A field of peonies was lost to bombing. But the begonias survived. And so did the delphiniums — their signature flowers. Four generations later, the nursery still sends plants around the world — living things carrying a century of care. Final Thoughts Today’s stories remind us that some lives are shaped and made extraordinary by deep attention to the natural world. As gardeners, we are all the better for it. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39763240

February 4, 2026 Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Charles Schaffer, Alfred Austin, The Victory Garden by Rhys Bowen, and Henri Dutrochet 02/04/2026

February 4, 2026 Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Charles Schaffer, Alfred Austin, The Victory Garden by Rhys Bowen, and Henri Dutrochet Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes There are seasons when the garden doesn’t reward us right away. You do the work. You keep going. And the bloom comes later. Sometimes much later. Today’s stories belong to that delayed kind of flowering — lives and labors that didn’t announce themselves, but waited quietly, until someone was ready to notice. Today’s Garden History 1821 Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was born. Frederick entered the world in Boston, into comfort and education. But the life he chose was narrower — and deeper. He studied at Harvard, trained in law, and then stepped away from it. The work didn’t suit him. What did, instead, were long walks, careful reading, and the patient observation of the natural world. By his mid-twenties, Frederick had moved to Greenfield, Massachusetts — to river valleys, wooded hills, and a quieter rhythm of days. He knew the great literary figures of his time. He corresponded with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He crossed the Atlantic and visited Alfred, Lord Tennyson at his home. And yet, Frederick remained almost unseen. He published just one book of poems in his lifetime. It was politely received and quickly forgotten. But Frederick kept writing. His gift was not volume. It was attention to detail. He noticed the veins of leaves, the posture of stems, the small, exact language of plants. Threaded through that precision was loss — the early death of his wife, and a solitude that deepened rather than hardened him. Here’s a glimpse of how he wrote, not grandly, but closely: For Nature daily through her grand design Breathes contradiction where she seems most clear, For I have held of her the gift to hear And felt indeed endowed of sense divine When I have found by guarded insight fine, Cold April flowers in the green end of June, And thought myself possessed of Nature's ear When by the lonely mill-brook into mine, Seated on slab or trunk asunder sawn, The night-hawk blew his horn at summer noon; And in the rainy midnight I have heard The ground sparrow's long twitter from the pine, And the catbird's silver song, the wakeful bird That to the lighted window sings for dawn. It’s a line that listens. It trusts small noticing to carry meaning. Much of Frederick’s finest work — especially his sonnets — would not be read with care until decades after his death. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was not a poet of his moment. He was a poet who waited for his season. 1838 Charles Schaffer was born. Charles trained as a physician in Philadelphia and served in military hospitals during the Civil War years. But alongside medicine, he kept another practice — the slow, devoted study of plants. Each summer, he traveled farther west until the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirk Mountains began to draw him back again and again. He collected specimens, photographed them, and learned the alpine flora the way gardeners always do — by returning. Later, Charles married Mary Townsend Sharples — twenty-three years his junior — and she became his companion in the field, painting and photographing the flowers he studied. When Charles died in 1903, their work didn’t end. Mary carried it forward. Years later, their shared labor became a book — Alpine Flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains — published with Mary’s illustrations, and text completed by a fellow botanist who understood what Charles had been building. Proof that sometimes a garden is planted by one pair of hands, and tended by another. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from the English poet Alfred Austin, who once wrote: “Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.” It’s a thought that fits February. This is the month of narrowing — short lists, careful choices, quiet decisions. But gardens, like lives, often flourish best when something is left unplanned. A corner left open. Room for what arrives later and stays longer than expected. Book Recommendation This week is novels week — a celebration of fiction and cozy garden stories best read by the fire. The Victory Garden is set in England during World War One and follows a young woman who becomes a land girl, tending the gardens of a country estate after loss reshapes her life. This is a deeply comforting book for gardeners. Not because it’s simple — it isn’t — but because it understands how gardens hold memory. Bowen weaves wartime history, herbal lore, estate gardens, and buried journals into a story where planting becomes a way of listening to the past. The garden isn’t decorative here. It’s working ground — a place where grief is handled gently, one task at a time. It’s the kind of novel that pairs well with a winter afternoon, a cup of tea, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that tending something, even in hard times, still matters. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1847 Henri Dutrochet died. Henri began his career as a physician, but his life’s work turned toward plants and toward what cannot be seen at first glance. He studied how sap rises. How cells take in water. How a leaf uses its green pigment — chlorophyll — to do the quiet work that sustains the whole plant. Henri gave us the word osmosis — a movement so steady and subtle it looks like stillness. He also helped explain geotropism — the way plants respond to gravity. Roots follow gravity and turn downward. Stems fight gravity and lift upward. Each part knowing where it belongs, without instruction, without urgency. Stillness, and movement we cannot see. That’s the February lesson. Even now — especially now — the important work is happening out of sight. In roots. In buds. In seeds waiting for their turn. Final Thoughts As we close the show today, remember: some things don’t announce themselves when they begin. They take their time. They wait for the right conditions. The garden understands this. And quietly, in February, it keeps going. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39763225

February 3, 2026 Gertrude Stein, Hilda Murrell, Rumi, The In the Garden Trilogy by Nora Roberts, and Adele Lewis Grant 02/03/2026

February 3, 2026 Gertrude Stein, Hilda Murrell, Rumi, The In the Garden Trilogy by Nora Roberts, and Adele Lewis Grant Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes February is a month that keeps its secrets close. The garden looks quiet now. Beds lie flat. Specimens above ground chilled into behaving themselves. But nothing here is finished. Everything is waiting. Gardens are good at mysteries — with seeds hidden on purpose, roots busy underground, and plans and plants that don’t announce themselves. Today’s Garden History 1874 Gertrude Stein was born. She’s remembered for her language — for repetition, for rhythm, for meaning that circles back on itself. “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” A curious phrase, suggesting that something is simply what it is. But behind those words was a life shaped by gardens. Later in her life, Gertrude and Alice B. Toklas spent their summers at a house in the village of Bilignin, France. The garden there was formal. Practical. Demanding. And it was Alice who did the work. In her journals, Alice writes about learning the land slowly. Losing crops to frost. Arguing with farmers. Refusing their advice — at first — and then, eventually, learning why they were right. Experience, she wrote, is never had at a bargain price. There’s a moment where she describes clearing a neglected corner of the vegetable garden. She pokes the soil with a stick. The ground ripples. A snake’s nest. That’s February — the sense that something alive is hiding beneath the disorder, waiting, undisturbed, until someone looks closely enough. Gertrude once wrote: “Grass is always the most elegant… more elegant than rocks and trees.” Grass. Common. Persistent. Overlooked. In her hands, it becomes a declaration — that what seems simplest in the garden may be what holds the most meaning. 1906 Hilda Murrell was born. She was a rose grower in Shropshire, England. A designer of gardens. A scholar of old roses. A woman who trusted what careful observation could reveal. Late in life, Hilda turned her attention to environmental dangers — particularly nuclear power and radioactive waste. She researched patiently. She wrote plainly. She prepared to speak as an ordinary citizen. 1984 In 1984, just days before she was scheduled to present her findings at a public inquiry, she was abducted and murdered. The case has never settled easily. Convictions were made. Questions remained. Gardens understand this kind of uncertainty. A perennial that never returns. A harvest lost without explanation. Something is gone that leaves no tidy ending. We may never fully know what happened to Hilda. But she remains — in the rose that carries her name, and in the steady regard of those who remember her work and her devotion to the living world. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from Rumi: “And don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet — but the roots are down there, riotous.” Gardeners can learn a lot from Rumi, a fellow lover of the natural world. Quiet does not mean empty. Dormant does not mean done. Nature’s mysteries are often wrapped in conflicting truths. February returns us to a question first learned in January: trust what is hidden, and wait without needing proof. Book Recommendation This week is novels week — a celebration of cozy, garden-rooted fiction best read by the fire. Today’s recommendation is actually three books: Blue Dahlia, Black Rose, and Red Lily. The trilogy unfolds on an old estate nursery in Tennessee. There are greenhouses. Propagation benches. Generations of women who have learned to work the land together. And there is a ghost — because gardens remember what buildings alone cannot hold. These books offer stories of love and loss, inheritance and repair — of gardens, and of gardeners. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1932 It was on this day in 1932 that a Los Angeles newspaper shared a small notice about a lecture that nearly didn’t happen. It begins: “Nature lovers who were forced to miss the conservation program in November — because, if not lightning, then at least raging torrents of ‘heavy dew’ — will have another chance…” Adele Lewis Grant was coming to speak. Adele enhanced her talks by bringing specimens with her — bird skins and plant material gathered from years of study. It feels like a modest scene: a public meeting room, a small audience, and a woman willing to show up despite the weather and inconvenience. Not every moment of influence announces itself. Some arrive quietly, like a lecture rescheduled, and leave lasting roots. Adele taught at Cornell, USC, and UCLA. She studied monkeyflowers, marine life, and birds. She moved easily between disciplines, between fieldwork and teaching. She helped build a fellowship for women in science — one that still carries her name. Final Thoughts February gardens ask us to live with what we don’t yet know. To trust what’s happening out of sight. To accept that some answers arrive slowly — and some never fully at all. Still, the work continues — underground, unseen, certain in its own time, even in the shortest month of the year. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39763195

February 2, 2026 Franz Ludwig Späth, Elizabeth Pitts Lamboll, William Rose Benét, Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, and Charlie Chaplin 02/02/2026

February 2, 2026 Franz Ludwig Späth, Elizabeth Pitts Lamboll, William Rose Benét, Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, and Charlie Chaplin Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes February second is Candlemas Day — an old turning point in winter, heavy with weather lore. “If Candlemas Day be fair and bright, winter will have another flight.” In other words, don’t be fooled by a little light. The season still has something to say. Today’s stories live right there — between what has endured, and what is just beginning to stir. Today’s Garden History 1913 Franz Ludwig Späth died in Berlin. The Späth family had been cultivating trees since 1720 — six generations of gardeners, each enlarging the work of the last. When Franz took over the nursery in 1863, at just twenty-five years old, he expanded it a hundredfold. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was the largest nursery in the world — more than one hundred hectares of trees, shrubs, and trial plantings. The work became so defining that the surrounding Berlin district took its name from it: Baumschulenweg — literally, nursery way. Then, in 1879, Franz did something lasting. He transformed the grounds around his stately, vine-covered home into an arboretum — not arranged by strict science or geography, but by beauty, effect, and possibility. It was a working landscape. A place to test trees. To watch them age. To see what endured. The nursery business did not survive the Second World War. But the trees did. Today, the property lives on as the Späth Arboretum, stewarded by Humboldt University in Berlin — a public garden, a teaching collection, and a refuge of old trees in one of the world’s busiest cities. Some of those trees are champion specimens — planted in Franz’s lifetime, now among the finest of their kind. They have outlived empires, economies, and generations of the Späth family. It’s the kind of endurance that belongs to winter. 1725 Elizabeth Pitts Lamboll was born in Norfolk, England. Elizabeth’s garden life would unfold far from home. By the mid-eighteenth century, she was living in Charles Town — Charleston, South Carolina — a place of salt air, strong sun, and astonishing botanical possibility. Elizabeth became the third wife of Judge Thomas Lamboll. Together, they shared a deep interest in horticulture. At their home on lower King Street, Elizabeth oversaw a garden shaped by European sensibilities — designed for both use and pleasure. It was not small. Beside the house, flowers, vegetables, and kitchen beds spread in a broad green swath, stretching southward toward the Ashley River. At their plantation on James Island, they cultivated an orange grove. But what makes Elizabeth’s story endure is not scale. It is generosity. Elizabeth gave seeds freely. She shared rootstock. She passed along cultivation methods and observations with fellow gardeners and with the leading botanists of her time. She corresponded with Peter Collinson of the Royal Society in London, and with John Bartram of Philadelphia, the most important naturalist in the American colonies. John visited her garden more than once. And in one letter, Collinson gently scolded him for how he and Mrs. Lamboll “rambled on in the intense heat of a midday sun,” which means they lost track of time while talking about plants. Seeds left Elizabeth’s Charleston garden in small paper packets — traveling north, crossing oceans. And when her daughter Mary later inherited the family home and garden, Elizabeth’s influence continued. Gardens endure not just through plants, but through people willing to pass something on. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the American poet William Rose Benét, born on this day in 1886. Here is his poem, “Imagination.” Rich raptures, you say, our dreams assume, Slaking the heart’s immortal thirst? Only the old we reillume; But think—to have dreamed the flowers first! Think,—to have dreamed the first blue sea; Imaged every illustrious hue Of the earliest sunset’s tapestry; And the snow,—and the birds, when their songs were new! Think,—from the blue of highest heaven To have sown all the stars, to have whispered “Light!”— Hung a moon in a prismy even, Spun a world on its splendid flight! To have first conceived of boundless Space; To have thought so small as to garb the trees; All planet years in your mind’s embrace,— And the midge’s life, for all of these! And Man still boasts of his brain’s weak best In dream or invention; from first to last Blunders ’mid wonders barely guessed. And fondly believes that his thoughts are “vast”! Benét isn’t praising human brilliance. He’s putting it in its place. Wonder arrived first. We are still trying to catch up. And gardeners know this instinctively. Book Recommendation This week, we’re celebrating novels — stories rooted in gardens, kitchens, and small towns. Garden Spells is a work of gentle magical realism, set in North Carolina, centered on the Waverley sisters and their extraordinary garden. There are apples that hint at the future. Edible flowers that influence moods. And a garden that becomes a place of reckoning, return, and repair. It understands something gardeners know instinctively: that tending living things often changes the people doing the tending — whether they notice it or not. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1914 Charlie Chaplin made his first film appearance. Seventeen years later, he released City Lights — a silent love story between the Tramp, who cannot speak, and a blind woman who sells flowers on the street. In the early twentieth century, flowers still functioned as a language. Roses spoke of romance. Lilies suggested refinement. Orchids signaled wealth. The Tramp does not offer an orchid. He offers a carnation — a humble flower sold on street corners. In the Victorian language of flowers, carnations stood for affection, gratitude, and admiration. They were dependable. They lasted. Chaplin let the carnation speak for him. And in the end, it won over the flower girl who had already stolen his heart. Final Thoughts As we close today’s show, remember that February is not asking us to rush. It’s asking us to notice what lasts — old trees, shared knowledge, beauty that precedes us and still knows how to speak. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39763140

January 30, 2026 Elizabeth Gamble Wirt, Louise Beebe Wilder, H. Fred Dale, Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden by Emily Whaley, and Asa Gray 01/30/2026

January 30, 2026 Elizabeth Gamble Wirt, Louise Beebe Wilder, H. Fred Dale, Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden by Emily Whaley, and Asa Gray Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Late January doesn’t ask for spectacle. It asks for gratitude. We’ve made it through one of the hardest months of the year. This is a good moment to take a quiet inventory — the books we’ve returned to, the garden plans beginning to form, the plant names we can still recall, the gardeners we’ve connected with while our own gardens remain at rest. And it’s a fitting pause for stories about attention — the kind that lingers, the kind that remembers, the kind that shapes how we garden long after winter loosens its grip. Today’s Garden History 1784 Elizabeth Gamble Wirt was born. She would go on to write one of the most influential flower dictionaries in early American life — Flora’s Dictionary. When the book first appeared in 1829, it was published anonymously, credited only to “a Lady.” Inside, it wasn’t simply definitions. Each flower carried a sentiment — and then a poem or passage to give that meaning a human voice. For example, Acacia stood for friendship. Ranunculus meant, “I am dazzled by your charms.” The book taught readers how to say things with flowers — things that were difficult to say aloud. It was the sort of volume that rested on a parlor table, but it belonged just as much to a gardener’s imagination. Later editions named Elizabeth openly. The book was reprinted again and again, and by 1855, it became the first American flower dictionary to include colored plates. Elizabeth Wirt’s gift was making plants memorable — and making the meanings of plants feel like a pleasure rather than a task. 1878 Louise Beebe Wilder was born. Louise would become one of America’s most beloved garden writers. She wrote with a rare balance: romance, yes — but also clarity. She could be lyrical about fragrance and utterly honest about failure. She believed gardens were deeply personal — and that no one needed permission to make them that way. One of her lines says it best: “In his garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation.” What stays with me about Louise is her refusal to separate beauty from resilience. She gardened through joy and grief, through success and upheaval, and never pretended the garden was anything but entwined with life itself. In late January — when the garden is mostly structure — Louise reminds us that our imagination still has work to do. Puzzling out potential, rethinking spaces, and figuring out functionality — these are worthy winter labors for gardeners. Unearthed Words And now for today’s Unearthed Words — “My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plants’ point of view.” — Fred Dale, Toronto Star garden writer, and author of Fred Dale’s Garden Book, 1972. Fred was known for practical, observant gardening — the kind that comes from years in the garden. To see things from a plant’s point of view is to understand needs, limits, and timing. Gardening is a relationship, not a performance. And sometimes, it also means knowing when something isn’t working — and letting go. Book Recommendation It’s time to grow the Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden by Emily Whaley, in conversation with William Baldwin. Emily Whaley was a Charleston gardener with strong opinions and a deep love of experimentation. Her garden — a narrow city plot behind her historic home — became famous not because it was fixed, but because it was always evolving. She changed her mind. She revised. She pulled things out and tried again. After the book was published, even The New York Times took notice — writing about her garden rooms, its borrowed backdrops, and Emily’s habit of rethinking everything every few years. This is a wonderful January read because it demystifies gardening and inspires action. It’s practical. Unpretentious. Often very funny. Emily reminds us that good gardens are built by people willing to iterate — making improvement after improvement, pushing past setbacks, and continuing to seek new areas of growth and possibility. This is exactly why the old saying holds: gardeners dream bigger dreams than emperors. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1888 The American botanist Asa Gray died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Asa Gray helped shape American botany — but he also shaped how Americans thought about nature itself. In 1857, Charles Darwin confided in Asa through a private letter, sharing his developing ideas and asking him not to speak of them yet. Later, Asa offered one of the clearest metaphors for natural selection: “Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder…” Not the force — but the shaping. Unlike many of his peers, Asa also believed science and faith could coexist. He wrote: “Faith in an order, which is the basis of science, cannot reasonably be separated from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion.” Asa was comfortable with complexity — with studying the world closely and still allowing it to remain mysterious. Final Thoughts As we close the show today, consider what garden history still offers us: A book that taught flowers to speak. A garden writer who gave people permission to try, fail, and try again. A botanist who helped America learn a new way of understanding the living world. Late January can look empty if we only search for color. But it’s full of language, of legacy, and of lessons that reward the earnest. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39763320

January 29, 2026 William Jack, David Douglas, Henry David Thoreau, My Garden by Jacqueline van der Kloet, and Ebenezer Howard 01/29/2026

January 29, 2026 William Jack, David Douglas, Henry David Thoreau, My Garden by Jacqueline van der Kloet, and Ebenezer Howard Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Late January doesn’t bring much drama. No big turning point. No clear signal. Instead, it gives us time. Time to look closely at what’s already been shaped — by weather, by decisions, by people who came before us. And today holds stories about distance — how far some people went for plants, and how others tried to bring nature closer to where people live. Today’s Garden History 1795 William Jack was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. He came from a scholarly family and moved quickly through his education, earning his degree and medical training while still very young. At eighteen, he left Britain for India as part of the East India Company’s medical service. And somewhere along the way, botany took hold. While stationed in Calcutta, Jack met Stamford Raffles — the founder of Singapore and a passionate naturalist — and followed him to Sumatra to study the island’s natural history. For four years, Jack collected, described, and documented plants in difficult tropical conditions. The cost was high. His health steadily declined. In 1822, he was placed aboard a ship at Bencoolen and sent toward the Cape of Good Hope in hopes that the sea voyage might restore him. He died the next day — from tuberculosis complicated by malaria. William Jack was twenty-seven years old. His work did not vanish with him. His name lives on in plant taxonomy — including the genus Jackia — one of the quiet ways botany remembers its own. 1834 David Douglas reached the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaiʻi. Douglas is easiest to remember by the tree that bears his name — the Douglas fir. But his life was far larger than a single species. He crossed oceans. Traveled thousands of miles on foot. Climbed mountains. Collected relentlessly. Just weeks after that summit, Douglas would be dead. He had arrived at the northern tip of Hawaiʻi with his faithful traveling companion — his small Scottish terrier, Billy. One morning, as he often did, Douglas and Billy set out to explore after breakfast. By noon, his body — and an enraged bull — were found in one of the deep pits used to trap feral cattle. Billy was discovered above the pit, sitting beside his master’s pack. Whether Douglas fell accidentally or was pushed has never been resolved. What we do know is that he identified and introduced more than two hundred plant species to European science — more than any other botanist of his time, despite having no formal training. A memorial in Honolulu reads: “Here lies Master David Douglas — an indefatigable traveler. He was sent out by the Royal Horticultural Society of London and gave his life for science.” Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau, writing on this day in 1856. He writes of Miss Minott: “Miss Minott has been obliged to have some of her locusts about the house cut down. She remembers when the whole top of the elm north of the road close to Dr. Heywood’s broke off — when she was a little girl. It must have been there before eighteen hundred.” What Thoreau is noting here is the particular kind of grief that follows the loss of a tree. Remember, the year was 1856, and Thoreau points out that Miss Minott’s loss of her beautiful locusts had called to mind an earlier loss, more than fifty-six years before. She had been a child when a great elm fell. She remembered it still. In the days after trees leave us, our eyes often refuse to accept the loss of their form against the sky. You can still see their shape in the void. Still expect their shadow on the ground. And then one day, you look in the place where it stood and you see nothing. You accept they are gone. The tree’s ghost finally slips from your mind’s eye. That’s the final cut. Book Recommendation It’s time to grow the Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: My Garden by Jacqueline van der Kloet, published in 2025. Jacqueline is a Dutch garden designer known for her naturalistic style and her extraordinary use of bulbs — layered so they feel like light moving through the year. This book unfolds month by month. Not as a transformation story, but as a record of continuity. She shows the same views again and again, so you can watch the garden change with the seasons. Late January is when we start imagining. And this book is a good companion for that — because it doesn’t push you to do more. It teaches you to look longer. To notice what improves when you stay with it. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1850 Ebenezer Howard was born — the founder of the Garden City movement. Howard believed people shouldn’t have to choose between opportunity and nature. He wrote: “There are not only two alternatives — town life and country life — but a third alternative, in which the advantages of both may be secured in perfect combination.” That idea still matters. And it doesn’t require grand plans. It can begin with trees in front yards, containers on balconies, plantings on rooftops, raised beds at schools and churches, community gardens — or even small bouquets tucked into mailboxes. Nature belongs where people live. Final Thoughts As we close the show today, I keep thinking about legacy in our gardens. William Jack didn’t live long enough to see the reach of his work. David Douglas never knew how enduring his name would become. And Thoreau reminds us that trees outlast our attention — until they don’t. This is a good moment to plan for longevity. To think ahead. To plant trees and gardens where you can. To build resilience into the landscapes you’re shaping now. And to build your own resilience as a gardener. When it comes to leaving a legacy, persistence matters. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39763060

January 28, 2026 Leslie Young Correthers, Catherine Hauberg Sweeney, Dorothy Wordsworth, A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto's Gardens by Fergus Garrett, and Winter Garden Courage 01/28/2026

January 28, 2026 Leslie Young Correthers, Catherine Hauberg Sweeney, Dorothy Wordsworth, A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto's Gardens by Fergus Garrett, and Winter Garden Courage Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Late January can feel like a long-held breath. Not dramatic. Just persistent. The garden is still. But it isn’t idle. It’s watching the light. Measuring the cold. Noticing — quietly — the most minute shifts in temperature and day length. And sometimes, winter leaves us a story that feels almost unbelievable. On this day in 1887, at the Coleman ranch near Fort Keogh (KEY-oh), Montana, snowflakes were reported so large they were described as “bigger than milk pans.” Some were said to measure nearly fifteen inches across and eight inches thick. A mail carrier, caught in the storm, later confirmed what he saw. Whether that was careful measurement or frontier astonishment, the image holds. Winter, briefly, made something ordinary feel impossible. And that sense of scale shifting, of attention sharpening — carries through today’s stories. Today’s Garden History 1884 Leslie Young Correthers (kuh-RETH-ers) was born in Springfield, Illinois. His friends called him Reggie. And if his name isn’t familiar, that’s part of the story. Some writers don’t disappear because they lack talent. They disappear because their work was small — and the world has a way of misplacing small things. Reggie wrote tiny books of garden poems. Pocket-sized volumes — the kind you could hold like a seed packet or slip into a coat pocket. Their titles read like plant labels tied gently to stems: These Shady Friends. These Blooming Friends: A Little Book of Garden Scandal. These Blooming Hedgerows: A Little Book of Wayside Gossip. More Blooming Friends. These Blooming Visitors. These Garden Minstrels. These Blooming Gypsies. These Blooming Rascals: A Little Gossip about Troublesome Plants. These Blooming Debutantes. These Blooming Herbs: A Book of Aromatic Gossip. Over his lifetime, Reggie cultivated a small bouquet of these books — each one a careful arrangement. Reggie didn’t just describe plants. He noticed them. And gardeners always know the difference. In one poem, lemon verbena becomes an evening ritual — its scent arriving at the close of day, laid out like something precious on silver and glass. In another, foxglove stands quietly, eyes lowered — and then the poem turns, and you glimpse her mischief. Even monkshood — dark, hooded, poisonous — is allowed to be fully itself. Beautiful. Dangerous. Not pretending otherwise. There’s something bracing in that honesty. In late January, we’re not asking the garden to entertain us. We’re asking it to tell the truth. And Reggie’s gift was writing the garden the way gardeners know it — full of charm, yes, but also full of secrets. 1995 Catherine Hauberg Sweeney (HOH-berg SWEE-nee) died at the age of eighty. She has been called a botanical fairy godmother — and she is remembered as the woman who saved The Kampong (kam-PONG) — the historic tropical garden in Coconut Grove, Florida. The Kampong had been created by plant explorer David Fairchild (FAIR-child) and his wife Marian Bell Fairchild — daughter of Alexander Graham Bell — as a living collection of tropical plants gathered from across the world. After the Fairchild era ended, the garden’s future was uncertain. It could have been subdivided. Developed. Lost. Instead, Kay and her husband purchased the property in 1963 and quietly held it together. Their generosity kept it safe. Kay’s vision helped it mature. She understood what The Kampong needed. Not reinvention. Not spectacle. Time. To grow in place. To become an anchor for the study of tropical plants. In 1984, she donated The Kampong to what is now the National Tropical Botanical Garden — ensuring it would remain a place for study, for visiting scientists, for students, for living plants to keep teaching. Kay once called herself “just a lady gardener.” But that kind of understatement often marks the people doing the most lasting work. It’s easy to admire beauty. Harder to protect it. Harder still to provide care year after year without applause. Catherine’s legacy isn’t a monument. It’s a place — The Kampong — still growing, still gathering people, still doing good work. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth (WORDZ-worth), who on this day, January 28, in 1802, opened her journal and recorded a single, quiet passage: “William raked a few stones off the garden. [It was] his first garden labor [of the] year.” That’s all. No declaration of spring. No certainty. Just the first small act of readiness. And if you garden, you recognize this moment. The return to the garden after a long pause. The day your hands do something — anything — that admits the season has started to turn. Book Recommendation It’s time to grow the Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: A Year in the Life of Beth Chatto’s Gardens by Fergus Garrett (FER-gus GARE-it), with photographs by Rachel Warne (WORN). Beth Chatto (CHAT-oh) was a plantswoman, writer, and gardener who built her famous Essex garden on difficult, drought-prone land — and proved that close observation could replace force, fertilizer, and fantasy. This is not a book of transformations. It’s a book of continuities. One garden. One piece of land. Observed honestly through an entire year. Clear winter structure. Early bulbs. The long hum of summer. Seedheads. Decline. Return. Beth’s philosophy — right plant, right place — is on full display. Late January is often a planning season. But this book doesn’t rush you toward lists. It invites you to watch first. And that’s often where good gardening begins. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. It was on this day in 2000 that The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story urging gardeners to be bolder. Not louder. Not trend-driven. Bolder in what they notice. To leave room for one unfamiliar plant. One unexpected texture. One choice that doesn’t come with instructions. January is a perfect time for that kind of courage. Seed catalogs are open. Plans are flexible. Old habits are loosening. Changing one small thing — a plant choice, a bed shape, a corner you finally let go of — can breathe freshness into spaces that have been quiet for a long time. Sometimes the boldest thing is simply making space for what you haven’t learned yet. Final Thoughts As we close the show today, take a moment to harken back to those enormous snowflakes that fell in Montana on this day over a century ago. Whether measurement or myth, the story leaves us with something true: Winter can make the ordinary feel enormous. A flake. A flower. A new way to see your garden. Tend something you love today. Even if it’s small. Even if no one sees it. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember — for a happy, healthy life… garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762915

January 27, 2026 Giuseppe Verdi, Felix Gillet, Jean Kilby Rorison, Cultivating Sacred Space by Elizabeth Murray, and Rafflesia 01/27/2026

January 27, 2026 Giuseppe Verdi, Felix Gillet, Jean Kilby Rorison, Cultivating Sacred Space by Elizabeth Murray, and Rafflesia Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Late January has its own kind of quiet. Not the hush of fresh snow, but the steady, unshowy silence of things holding their shape. In the garden, this is a month of endurance. Roots working without applause. Branches imperceptibly changing. The outdoor world takes in the smallest shifts in light and temperature, preparing to awaken and grow. Today’s stories carry that feeling forward: a composer who needed the country to write, a nurseryman who made abundance from stripped ground, and a flower so strange that it took science nearly two centuries to decide where it belonged. Today’s Garden History 1901 Giuseppe Verdi died. Verdi is remembered for opera houses — for thunder and tenderness, for music that fills a room long after the last note has gone. But he did not live his life in velvet seats and gaslit foyers. He chose his beloved countryside. After success came early, Verdi returned again and again to the land near his birthplace, settling at Villa Sant’Agata — a working estate, not a retreat. There, he became a farmer. He supervised orchards and fields. He planted trees. He worried over the weather and the water. He wrote letters about crops with the same seriousness he brought to composition. He once said he did all his writing in the country — that there, somehow, everything arrived at once, and he was more contented. At the villa, he woke at dawn and walked his land like a daily litany, checking fields, minding irrigation, lavishing attention on his horses. Some mornings included a small sailboat on the water. Then back to the piano — kept close, in his bedroom — and back again to the garden, the rhythm interrupted only by black coffee and the occasional visitor in the evening. Someone once marveled that he could practice agriculture and composition with equal intensity. Verdi’s answer was simple: one restored him for the other. In his operas, nature is never decoration. It is moral ground. In La Traviata, the camellia becomes a fragile marker of time — cultivated beauty already beginning to fade, a bloom that must be read before it is gone. Forests shelter the outcast. Gardens suggest an order that can collapse. Storms arrive without permission. Human lives unfold inside these landscapes, never above them. Verdi also moved through public life — civic roles, patriotism, the complicated work of nationhood — but he never disowned his farming origins. If anything, he cherished them. When he died in Milan, the city turned his private wish for simplicity into public grief. Crowds gathered. Bulletins were posted hourly. The procession felt like the passing of a head of state. And today, in gardens, Verdi is remembered another way; in the tulip that bears his name. Tulip ‘Giuseppe Verdi,’ a Kaufmanniana tulip sometimes called a waterlily tulip, opens wide in the sun and closes again at evening, as if keeping its own small hours. Low to the ground. Early to bloom. Yellow lit with crimson markings. Foliage that looks lightly brushed or spotted — a compact flame of spring arriving before the season thinks it is ready. 1908 Felix Gillet died in Nevada City, California. Felix arrived in America in the 1850s — French-born, sea-traveled, a man who began with a barbershop and ended with a nursery that helped shape the West. In 1871, he established Barren Hill Nursery, a name that admitted what the land had become: barren, scraped down, unforgiving. The ground had been stripped to bedrock by hydraulic mining. No softness. No easy fertility. And still, Felix planted. He imported scion wood and young trees — walnuts, filberts, chestnuts, figs, prunes — and then he watched, tested, and trialed. Neighbors were astonished by how he irrigated, carrying water in bucket by bucket. Not romantic. Just devoted. His nursery stock traveled everywhere — into the Santa Clara Valley, into Oregon’s Willamette Valley, into farms and homesteads that would feed generations. His introductions and selections still echo through agriculture today, in walnuts and hazelnuts, in grapes and prunes, in orchards that keep bearing long after their planters are gone. Felix wrote constantly as well. His catalogs were filled with detail, questions answered, practical knowledge offered plainly, as if his work belonged to everyone. In Nevada City, traces remain: street names, old stone gates, plaques, and fruit trees — fruit trees now more than a century old — still doing what they were planted to do. Unearthed Words 1941 Poet Jean Kilby Rorison died in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Her family and friends called her Jennie. In her poem “Flower Bells,” she wrote: Spring will bring her floral bells She’ll set them all ding-donging, The erythronium on the hills, The gaily dancing daffodils, The wild blue hyacinth that fills All English hearts with longing. Spring in my garden by the sea Does not shilly-shally. For soon will come the blossoming time The sweet o’ the year, the golden prime… This is the kind of verse January can bear. Not because it is spring, but because it remembers. Because it insists the bell will ring again. Book Recommendation This is a quiet, unusual garden book — less about what to plant and more about what a garden can hold. Elizabeth Murray approaches the garden as a place of private meaning: a threshold, a sanctuary, a living room without walls. She looks outward to traditions that treat gardens as contemplative spaces, to pilgrimage gardens like Giverny, where planting becomes atmosphere, and to the moss gardens of Kyoto, where time feels slowed on purpose. But the heart of the book is practical in its own way. It asks what creates a sacred feeling in a space. Is it an enclosure — a hedge, a wall, a stand of shrubs that makes a garden feel held? Is it a path — the gentle insistence of moving forward, even in a small yard? Is it a single object repeated with care — a bowl that catches rain, a bench placed where light lands, a tree planted for someone who is gone? In late January, when planning begins to outpace planting, this book offers a different kind of design question: not what will impress, but what will console, what will steady, what will remain meaningful even when nothing is in bloom. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 2007 The Albuquerque Journal ran a story about a plant that had spent nearly two centuries refusing to fit neatly anywhere in classification. The headline read: “‘Bizarro’ Plant Finds Spot on Family Tree.” The plant was Rafflesia — a flower without stems, without leaves, and without proper roots. Its bloom smells like something dead and grows startlingly large. Since its discovery, Rafflesia baffled classification. It did not resemble its supposed relatives. It barely resembled a plant at all. And then, with DNA-based research, scientists finally placed it — not among the grand, showy families where imagination might send it, but into an order with thousands of species, and, most surprisingly, near lineages known for small flowers. It was the kind of result no one would have bet on. And that is the tenderness in it somehow. Because even this oddity — this outsider flower, this rule-breaker — still has a place in the family tree. Not because it is large or dramatic or extraordinary, but because it belongs. Nature does not require resemblance in order to offer kinship. Somewhere, deep in the living world, there is room — even for the bizarro bloom. Final Thoughts Late January reminds us that the work we repeat is often the work that lasts. Some things grow slowly. Some only show their value after we are gone. There is room in the garden for many ways of growing, even the ones that take time to be understood. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762880

January 26, 2026 Alister Clark, J. Henry Chesterton, Eloise Ray, Take Chelsea Home by Chris Young, and Jacqueline du Pré 01/26/2026

January 26, 2026 Alister Clark, J. Henry Chesterton, Eloise Ray, Take Chelsea Home by Chris Young, and Jacqueline du Pré Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes January has a way of making everything feel more honest. The garden is not performing. It is resting. This is the month of silhouettes — hedges reduced to outline, paths only faintly visible beneath the snow, branches writing their thin handwriting against the sky. It is a fitting day for stories like these: of people and gardens shaped by patience, of beauty made to endure, and of the quiet satisfaction that comes from bringing something living safely home. Today’s Garden History 1864 Alister Clark was born in Brighton, Victoria. Australia would come to know him as one of its most influential rose breeders, but Alister Clark’s story begins with land and with loss. His father, Walter Clark, built a homestead called Glenara, with gardens set high above Deep Creek near the township of Bulla. It was the kind of property that seemed to declare permanence. But Alister’s mother died when he was just one year old. And in 1873, his father was violently killed. Alister, still young, was sent away — back to Scotland — and raised by relatives, separated from the country that would later become the center of his life. He followed the expected path: Cambridge, a law degree, a formal education meant to steady him. But when Alister married a wealthy New Zealand heiress, he returned to Australia and bought Glenara back from his father’s estate. The place became not just an ancestral property, but a devotion. Alister lived the life of a gentleman of his era. He was a huntsman, a polo player, a racehorse owner, a golfer, and a photographer. But his most consuming passion was roses. He maintained a ten-hectare garden once described as “a place of great charm and beauty,” a phrase that somehow understates the seriousness of his work as a rosarian. A newspaper described Glenara in 1928 as an “old-world garden,” with spreading lawns and sheltering trees, and roses gradually taking over the orchard — encroaching on grapes and vegetables, as though beauty, once established, refuses to be contained. At first, Alister ordered roses from England. But imported roses often failed to meet expectations once climate and growing conditions had their say. So Alister began to breed. He wanted roses that could live honestly in Australian conditions — hot, dry summers, mild winters, drought that does not negotiate. The key to his work was Rosa gigantea, vigorous, heat-tolerant, and resilient. His first great success was ‘Jessie Clark,’ named for his niece. Then came others — names that still feel like people passing through a garden gate: Lorraine Lee, Nancy Hayward, Sunny South, Black Boy, Squatter’s Dream. Alister did not breed roses as trophies. He bred them to be companions. His roses were meant to climb, to ramble, to flower continuously, and to hold their own. Many were released for philanthropic purposes, passed on to societies and organizations for propagation and sale, as if the point of a new rose was not ownership, but circulation. After his death in 1949, many of his roses were lost. Labels fade. Gardens change hands. Names slip away. But decades later, people went looking. Some of Alister Clark’s roses were found again. Today, near Bulla, the Alister Clark Memorial Rose Garden holds the surviving collection, maintained by volunteers. A life’s work still blooming, because of one man’s devotion to creating living beauty that could endure. 1883 J. Henry Chesterton died on a riverbank in Colombia. Henry began as a valet traveling through South America, an unlikely start for a plant collector. But gardens have always made room for unlikely beginnings. Somewhere along his journey, Henry fell hard for orchids. Not a mild appreciation, but a hunger. After building an impressive collection, he wrote to Sir Harry Veitch in England with one urgent question: how do you pack living plants for a long voyage by sea? Help was arranged. Months later, Henry Chesterton arrived unannounced at the Chelsea nursery gates, carrying orchids so carefully tended they survived the journey. The Veitch nursery bought the entire collection, and Henry was sent back to South America — not as a valet, but as a plant hunter. His task was to find the “scarlet Odontoglossum,” an orchid long rumored, often found, and rarely delivered alive. Henry succeeded. The plant flowered in Chelsea in 1873 — a flower long whispered about, opening at last under glass, thousands of miles from where it grew. Plant hunting carried a cost. Henry Chesterton died in 1883, still a young man, after leaving his hotel sickbed too soon, believing he had recovered enough to travel. His obituary called him reckless. But sometimes reckless simply means unwilling to turn back from something you love. And Henry loved hunting orchids. Unearthed Words 1905 Landscape architect Eloise Ray was born. Speaking of the great private estates she helped design, and what it took to keep them alive, Eloise once remarked: “We would estimate the need for at least eight full-time gardeners for most of our estates.” Eight gardeners — a number that sounds almost mythic now. Later, she warned against choosing what looks easy — lawns, shortcuts, simplicity — without understanding what landscapes truly demand. It is very January wisdom: less romance, more structure, and a bare-bones respect for the invisible labor behind beauty. Book Recommendation This is a rare Chelsea book that does more than admire the spectacle — it translates it. Paths. Proportion. Planting combinations. Structure. Chris Young selects some of the most influential show gardens and uses them as benchmarks, not for imitation, but for practical inspiration in gardens big and small. In late January, when you are planning more than planting, this is the kind of book that turns Chelsea — often called the catwalk of garden design — into a garden you can actually make for yourself. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1945 Cellist Jacqueline du Pré was born. Her talent was immense, and illness cut her career short far too early. There is a rose named ‘Jacqueline du Pré’ in her honor. Soft white blooms brushed with blush, a strong fragrance, and flowers that open simply, revealing bright stamens like a note held in the air. Her namesake rose does not replace what was lost. It simply gives us a living way to remember — something that blooms, fades, returns, and for a moment, makes the air sweeter without asking for applause. Perhaps that is something the rosarian Alister Clark understood too — that the best roses are not meant to impress from a distance, but to stay with us, to add cheer, to help us remember, and to endure. Final Thoughts January leaves the garden in outline. And sometimes, most unexpectedly and most profoundly, that is when we see it most clearly. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762840

January 23, 2026 Peter Joseph Lenné, Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, Elizabeth Lawrence, The Unsung Season by Sydney Eddison, and Ken Nakazawa 01/23/2026

January 23, 2026 Peter Joseph Lenné, Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, Elizabeth Lawrence, The Unsung Season by Sydney Eddison, and Ken Nakazawa Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes January is a month that strips things back. The garden shows us structure instead of spectacle. Paths without flowers. Trees without leaves. Design without distraction. That makes today’s stories especially fitting, because they are about people who believed gardens should hold meaning, even when nothing is in bloom. Today’s Garden History 1866 Peter Joseph Lenné died at the age of seventy-six. Lenné was one of the most important landscape architects of the nineteenth century, though you will not find him quoted on mugs or calendars. He left behind something far more lasting than aphorisms. He left parks. Born into a family of working gardeners, Lenné learned early that gardens are not decorations. They are systems. He trained in Paris and Vienna, studied botany and architecture, and eventually became Director General of the Royal Prussian Parks in Potsdam and Berlin. What Lenné believed, and showed, was this: a garden should feel inevitable, as though it had always been there. He embraced the English landscape style — long sightlines, borrowed views, gentle transitions — and rejected rigid formality. Baroque gardens impressed. Lenné’s gardens rested the eye. As his career matured, so did his sense of responsibility. He believed green space mattered not only to kings but also to ordinary people. That parks were not luxuries. They were relieved. Places where the city could soften, where people could breathe. Today, many of the landscapes Lenné shaped — Sanssouci, Glienicke, and Babelsberg — are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. But perhaps his truest legacy is quieter: the idea that a garden can be a conversation between nature, design, and the human spirit. 1866 Gertrude Penfield Seiberling was born. She was blessed in many ways, but she never took her gifts for granted. One of the ways she kept herself grounded was by gardening. Gertrude grew up in Ohio and later married F. A. Seiberling, the founder of Goodyear. In Akron, Ohio, they created a home together known as Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens, a place shaped not only by architecture, but by intention. Gertrude was never simply the lady of a great house. She helped shape the gardens herself, walking them, imagining them, living into them season by season. In 1924, she founded the Akron Garden Club, helping to build a community around the shared pleasure of growing things. She was also a musician, a singer who once performed at the White House, and later in life, a painter who returned again and again to landscapes: streets edged by trees, buildings softened by green. Above the entrance to Stan Hywet is a motto carved in stone: Non Nobis Solum — Not for Us Alone. It feels like something a gardener would choose, because Gertrude understood that gardens are never only personal. They are gifts. They outlast grief. They hold joy and memory at the same time. Her family once described the Seiberlings as a clan — loud at holidays, together often, constantly bustling — a world of people who made their own warmth. Gertrude understood that gardens are not possessions. They are gifts. They gather people. They outlast us. She died in 1946 at Stan Hywet, surrounded by the beauty she helped bring into being. Unearthed Words 1945 Elizabeth Lawrence wrote a letter that opened in the heart of winter. Her salutation sets the scene simply: she was enjoying thin toast, wild strawberry jam, and tea by the fire in her studio. She wrote about food shared with friends, conversations that wander, and people quietly doing their work in the world. The letter moved gently, the way winter days do — nothing rushed, nothing forced. Then, just before she signed off, she added this wonderfully human line: “I must put the puppy to bed before he chews up all the files of Gardening Illustrated.” It is such a small moment, but it tells us everything. Even the most thoughtful garden writers lived among interruptions. That is winter gardening in a sentence: not grand plans, just warmth, memory, and something alive nearby doing exactly as it pleases. Book Recommendation This is a book written for gardeners who live where winter is real. Sydney Eddison writes about what happens when the garden goes quiet, and how gardeners adapt. Some strap on snowshoes to check beds. Others turn to winter crafts, seed sorting, or garden planning. Some bring the garden indoors. Others design landscapes meant to shine in the coldest months — bark, berries, structure, and light. What makes The Unsung Season special is its tone. It does not rush winter away. It does not treat it as a problem to solve. Instead, it honors winter as part of the gardening life — a season of observation, patience, and faith. It is a book that understands January. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1940 News of a garden lecture appeared in The San Bernardino County Sun. The speaker was Ken Nakazawa, a professor at the University of Southern California and a writer deeply attuned to cultural meaning. Nakazawa invited his audience into the philosophy of Japanese gardens, explaining that the perfect garden is composed of three elements: heaven, earth, and man. Nothing, he said, is accidental. Some stones are meant to be seen. Some are meant to be hidden. Some are meant to be used. He reminded listeners that gardens are not only meant to be seen, but to be heard: water moving, wind in trees, birds arriving like punctuation. What makes this moment especially tender is what came later in Nakazawa’s life. Within a year, he would be arrested and imprisoned following Pearl Harbor, swept up not because of anything he had done, but because of who he was. And yet, even in confinement, Nakazawa spoke of gardens and human psychology, of watching how people live together under strain. It is hard not to hear his garden philosophy differently, knowing that. That he believed meaning could exist in restraint. That some things must remain hidden. That harmony depends on how carefully we place ourselves in relation to others. In January, when gardens are mostly shape and silence, that feels like a lesson worth keeping. Final Thoughts January teaches us to notice structure — what remains when ornament falls away. Paths. Edges. The quiet work beneath the surface. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762380

January 22, 2026 Francis Bacon, Francis Guthrie, Winter Garden Design at Anglesey Abbey, People With Dirty Hands by Robin Chotzinoff, and Bill and Ben 01/22/2026

January 22, 2026 Francis Bacon, Francis Guthrie, Winter Garden Design at Anglesey Abbey, People With Dirty Hands by Robin Chotzinoff, and Bill and Ben Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes Before we step fully into today’s garden history, a brief note from the weather ledger: 1985 A deep cold wave swept through Florida, destroying nearly ninety percent of the state’s citrus crop. Years of growth, lost in a single night. It is a reminder gardeners understand well: abundance is always provisional. Today’s Garden History 1561 Francis Bacon was born. He gave us one of the most enduring garden essays ever written: Of Gardens. Bacon did not treat gardening as a pleasant aside. He called it “the purest of human pleasures” and “the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man.” He imagined the truly learned life as one that required more than books: a garden, a library, a laboratory, and a cabinet of curiosities — a place for wonder, objects, and close observation. Bacon had the kind of sensibility gardeners recognize instantly: learning is not just what you read. It is what you notice, what you tend, what you return to day after day. Bacon also understood something gardeners know instinctively: tending living things disciplines the mind. He wrote, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” So today, if winter has you feeling a little cramped indoors, Bacon is essentially giving you permission to treat green things like medicine. 1831 Francis Guthrie was born. He is remembered for asking a deceptively simple question in 1852 while coloring a map: what is the minimum number of colors needed so that no neighboring regions touch? That curious question became known as the Four Colour Problem, and it puzzled mathematicians for more than a century, until computers finally confirmed Guthrie’s solution in 1976. But Guthrie himself never saw the resolution. He published little. He moved to South Africa. He taught. He collected plants. He lectured on botany. He lived a life of attention rather than acclaim. Plants were later named in his honor — living things carrying forward the memory of a man who noticed patterns, boundaries, and relationships. Guthrie’s story begins the way so many garden insights do: with someone looking closely, noticing edges, adjacency, and pattern. The same habits gardeners practice every day. So today’s history gives us two companions: Bacon, who argued that green space restores the spirit, and Guthrie, who shows how careful looking can quietly reshape how we understand the world. Unearthed Words 2015 The Guardian shared winter garden design wisdom from David Jordan, the assistant head gardener at Anglesey Abbey. Jordan’s advice was simple and bracing: the winter garden succeeds not by excess, but by clarity. Start with a tree whose bark holds the light. Add a shrub that offers scent or color when little else does. Let the ground rest. At Anglesey, one of the most powerful sights is a stand of West Himalayan birches — pale trunks against dark earth, nothing competing, nothing hurried. Winter, like good design, rewards restraint. Book Recommendation Published in 1996, this book by Robin Chotzinoff is built from portraits of gardeners, gardens, and moments rather than instructions. Chotzinoff is a journalist by training, and the book quietly reveals why people keep gardening long after logic says they should stop. Chotzinoff writes: “Gardening is all there is, while you’re doing it.” And: “There are no child prodigy gardeners.” The book reinforces garden wisdom through a series of intimate profiles. One of the most memorable is Zelma, who spends her days at a picnic table beneath a grape arbor — shelling peas, writing letters, and refusing to move indoors as she ages. As Chotzinoff puts it: “The older she got, she said, the less she wanted to be inside.” People With Dirty Hands reminds us of something gardeners already know: you cannot rush a garden. You cannot dominate it. You must grow alongside it, season after season. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1953 British television aired the very first episode of Bill and Ben — The Flower Pot Men. The premise was simple, almost impossibly so. There was a little house, and around the little house, a beautiful garden. While the gardener stepped away for his dinner, two terracotta flower pots at the bottom of the garden came quietly to life. Bill. And Ben. Between them grew their small companion, Little Weed — a smiling, nodding presence who never moved far, rooted firmly in place, watching everything. Bill and Ben did not roam. They whispered. They muddled through small mishaps. They blamed one another gently. And when footsteps returned, they slipped back into stillness just in time. What made Bill and Ben endure was not the story. It was the faith it placed in the garden. The idea that a garden has its own inner life. That when we turn our backs, something tender carries on. That flower pots might talk, weeds might listen, and nothing truly important needs to hurry. For many children, this was an early lesson: gardens are not decorations. They are inhabited. They are places where patience matters, where small lives are worthy of attention, where even a weed has a voice and a place. And perhaps that is why the closing line always lingered: “And I think the little house knew something about it — don’t you?” Gardens still know things we do not. They keep watch. They wait. They remember us when we forget ourselves. That quiet assurance — that something gentle is continuing, just out of sight — may be the sweetest gift a garden gives. Final Thoughts As we move through January — spare, cold, and honest — it helps to remember this: Not everyone changes the world loudly. Some do it by paying attention. By getting their hands dirty. By noticing what belongs, and what does not. Gardens understand this instinctively. They make room. They allow small things to grow where they will, even weeds. Especially weeds. Like Little Weed, quietly watching from between the pots, the winter garden keeps its counsel. The garden notices us, even when we forget to notice it. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762355

January 21, 2026 Charles Edward Faxon, William Roy Genders, Christian Dior, A Year of Garden-Inspired Living by Linda Vater, and Squirrel Appreciation Day 01/21/2026

January 21, 2026 Charles Edward Faxon, William Roy Genders, Christian Dior, A Year of Garden-Inspired Living by Linda Vater, and Squirrel Appreciation Day Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes This is the season when gardeners live a little more in the imagination. We watch winter light move across bare branches, notice the architecture of trees, and make plans we can’t quite act on yet. So today feels right for honoring people who worked quietly — not as household names, but as steady hands who loved the natural world and served it with patience, consistency, and craft. Today’s Garden History 1846 Charles Edward Faxon was born in Massachusetts. If you’ve ever fallen in love with a botanical book because of its illustrations, there’s a good chance you already understand Faxon’s gift. He trained as a civil engineer, but plants pulled him in. He taught botany and eventually joined the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, where he helped develop the herbarium and library. Faxon’s lasting legacy is drawing. He possessed a rare combination: an artist’s eye, a botanist’s discipline, and the patience to sit with a specimen until its truth came through. Leaves. Flowers. Fruit. Seed. The parts that matter when you’re trying to really know a tree. He illustrated major works with Charles Sprague Sargent, including the great American tree books that helped people recognize their own forests. Hundreds and hundreds of drawings — not decorative, but instructive. The kind of art that teaches you how to see. Faxon never chased the spotlight. He served the work, the collection, the record. If you’ve ever pressed a leaf into a book, carefully labeled a seed packet, or taken a photo just so you’d remember what something looked like — you’re part of that same tradition. 1913 William Roy Genders was born. Genders lived more than one life. As a young man, he played first-class cricket after the war. Alongside that, he wrote extensively about gardening. His book titles alone tell you who he was writing for: Soft Fruit, The Epicure’s Garden, works on mushrooms, scent, old-fashioned flowers, and practical plants for everyday use. He wrote from experience, not from a pedestal. And there’s a small, telling detail tucked into one of his books, The Scented Wild Flowers of Britain. It’s dedicated simply, “To the memory of my parents.” That’s a gardener’s dedication. A lineage acknowledgment. A quiet recognition that what we love is often inherited. Faxon drew plants so people could recognize them. Genders described plants so people could live with them. Two different kinds of devotion. Same root. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from Christian Dior: “After women, flowers are the most divine creations.” Whatever you think of fashion, that sentence is pure gardener. Because if you’ve ever stood in a winter garden and remembered the roses — or opened a seed catalog like it was a devotional — you know exactly what he meant. Book Recommendation This is a book for gardeners who want to live seasonally even when the garden itself is quiet. A Year of Garden-Inspired Living offers ideas for carrying the feeling of the garden into daily life — through the whole year. It’s less about productivity and more about presence: how to notice, arrange, celebrate, and mark time when there’s nothing to harvest and nowhere to dig. It’s the kind of winter reading that doesn’t make you feel behind. It makes you feel accompanied. Botanic Spark January 21st is Squirrel Appreciation Day. If you want to think of squirrels as fellow gardeners, you can. They plant trees one forgotten nut at a time. So it feels right to end with Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Squirrel.” Whisky Frisky, Hippity hop, Up he goes To the tree top! Whirly, twirly, Round and round Down he scampers To the ground. Furly, curly, What a tail! Tall as a feather Broad as a sail Emily understood something simple — and so do squirrels. Not everything that looks promising is worth the effort. A nut can be hollow. What matters is what’s inside. Emily ends her poem this way: Experiment to me Is every one I meet. If it contain a kernel? The figure of a nut Presents upon a tree, Equally plausibly; But meat within is requisite, To squirrels and to me. Squirrels test. They choose. And they move on if there’s nothing there. It’s a quiet lesson the garden keeps offering us again and again: be discerning. Tend what sustains you. Final Thoughts Wherever you are, whatever season you’re in, may you find something today worth tending. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762325

January 20, 2026 Henry Danvers, Thomas Serle Jerrold, Eliot Wadsworth II, The Winter Garden by Richard Rosenfeld, and Napoleon Bonaparte 01/20/2026

January 20, 2026 Henry Danvers, Thomas Serle Jerrold, Eliot Wadsworth II, The Winter Garden by Richard Rosenfeld, and Napoleon Bonaparte Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes In the garden, January is a month of plans more than action. Seed catalogs pile up. Lists are made. Dreams are revised. So it’s a fitting day to remember the people who made gardens possible — not always by planting them, but by supporting, studying, and sometimes stubbornly defending them. Some legacies grow slowly. Some arrive as books. Some are simply the decision to protect a piece of ground so others can learn from it. Today’s Garden History 1644 Henry Danvers, the 1st Earl of Danby, died. Danvers is remembered by gardeners not for the plants he grew, but for the garden he made possible. In 1621, he founded what would become the Oxford Botanic Garden — the oldest botanic garden in Britain. At the time, the land he donated lay opposite Magdalen College and had once served as a Jewish burial ground. Danvers conveyed five acres to the University of Oxford “for the encouragement of the study of physic and botany.” It was an act of vision rather than speed. The garden wasn’t fully planted until the 1640s, and Danvers did not live to see it flourish. But he ensured its future — having the ground raised, enclosed by high stone walls, and endowed through his will so it could be maintained long after his death. Gardeners understand this kind of legacy. Not every garden is planted for the present. Some are planted for people we will never meet. The gateway of the Oxford Botanic Garden still bears an inscription dedicating the space to the glory of God, the honor of the king, and the use of the academy and the republic — a reminder that gardens have long stood at the intersection of science, belief, and public good. 1907 Thomas Serle Jerrold died. Jerrold was trained as a gardener at Chatsworth, under Sir Joseph Paxton — the same Paxton who would later design the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. During Jerrold’s apprenticeship, Paxton was sketching ideas that would change architecture, while teaching young gardeners how to grow things well. Jerrold went on to become a writer who believed gardens should be practical as well as beautiful. His books carried titles that gardeners immediately understood: The Garden That Paid the Rent, Our Kitchen Garden, and Household Horticulture. He spent years living in Canada, returned to England late in life, and left behind not only books, but a philosophy — that gardens are meant to sustain households, not just impress visitors. Unearthed Words 1985 Eliot Wadsworth II of White Flower Farm offered one of those lines gardeners tend to repeat forever. “My appetite for new plants is like most people’s appetite for macadamia nuts.” Every gardener understands this. You don’t need another plant. But somehow, you always have room for just one more. Book Recommendation The Winter Garden is a thoughtful, seasonal book that invites gardeners to slow down and notice what winter reveals: structure, light, patience, and the quieter forms of beauty that don’t announce themselves in bloom. It’s a perfect January companion — a reminder that winter isn’t an interruption, but part of the cycle. When flowers are gone, the garden shows its bones: the lines of paths, the rhythm of trunks and branches, the way low sun changes everything. The book meets you there, in that pared-back landscape, and makes you feel less like you’re “waiting” and more like you’re watching. For gardeners who keep walking outside even in cold weather, it’s the kind of book that sharpens attention. It helps you notice what’s still happening — what’s holding, what’s resting, what’s quietly preparing — and it leaves you with a steadier, calmer sense that the garden is still very much alive. Botanic Spark 1820 Napoleon Bonaparte, exiled on the island of Saint Helena, was reported to have taken up gardening. It makes sense. Confined, restless, and stripped of power, he turned to the small control a garden allows — arranging paths, directing plantings, taking an interest in what grew and where. Gardening gave him something immediate and living to tend. But the story doesn’t end peacefully. That same day, Napoleon reportedly shot Count Bertrand’s goat after the animal wandered into the garden and ate his plants. Even in exile, even in reflection, Napoleon remained… Napoleon. The episode is funny, yes — but it’s also revealing. Gardens ask for patience. They ask for restraint. And not everyone, even great historical figures, is equally suited to those lessons. Final Thoughts Wherever you are, whatever you’re planning, may you find something today worth tending. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762295

January 19, 2026 Alice Eastwood, G. Ledyard Stebbins, Janus and the Snowdrop, The New Romantic Garden by Jo Thompson, and Harris Olson 01/19/2026

January 19, 2026 Alice Eastwood, G. Ledyard Stebbins, Janus and the Snowdrop, The New Romantic Garden by Jo Thompson, and Harris Olson Subscribe | | | | Support The Daily Gardener Connect for FREE! | Today’s Show Notes January is a quieter season in the garden. The beds are resting. The work is mostly invisible. This is the time of year when gardeners turn to stories — to the people who noticed plants closely, saved what mattered, and carried knowledge forward, even when it would have been easier to let it go. Today is full of those stories. Today’s Garden History 1859 Alice Eastwood was born. Alice Eastwood would become one of the most important botanists in American history — not because she sought attention, but because she understood how easily plant knowledge can be lost if no one tends it. Her early life was unsettled. After her mother died, Alice and her sister were placed in a convent while her father moved west. What steadied her was learning — and later, walking. When Alice began studying plants seriously, she did so the way many gardeners do: by going where plants grow naturally and paying attention. In Colorado, she climbed into the Rocky Mountains, collecting alpine plants and learning which species thrived in exposure and which needed protection. Her careful work brought her to California, where she met Katherine Brandegee, curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences. Together with her husband, Townshend Brandegee, Katherine edited a journal called Zoe, named for the Greek word meaning life. Zoe was a working journal, not a polished one. It gave field botanists a place to publish discoveries about western plants at a time when much of that flora was still being named and understood. New species. Corrections. Observations. This was where the real work appeared. Alice Eastwood did not just write for Zoe. She helped sustain it. 1893 When the Brandegees retired, Alice became curator of botany at the Academy, a position she would hold for more than fifty years. Then came the 1906 earthquake. The Academy burned. Cabinets collapsed. Thousands of specimens were nearly lost. Alice climbed the damaged stairways herself, rescuing what she could — and then rebuilt the herbarium almost from scratch, traveling tirelessly to restore what had been destroyed. Gardeners understand that instinct. When something precious is lost, you do not abandon the garden. You begin again. 2000 The botanist G. Ledyard Stebbins died at the age of ninety-four. Stebbins helped explain something gardeners observe every season: that plants change gradually, shaped by environment, variation, and time. His work gave botanists a way to understand plant evolution not just as theory, but as something visible in fields, hillsides, and gardens themselves. He once said he simply pointed out what plants had been showing us all along. Unearthed Words In today’s Unearthed Words, we explore the etymology of the word January, which takes its name from Janus, the Roman guardian of thresholds — the figure who looks both backward and forward at once. It is a fitting image for the garden at this time of year. January’s birth flower is the snowdrop, one of the first blooms to appear while winter still holds firm. In folklore, the soft green markings on its inner petals are said to be a promise — a sign that warmth will return. Here is a snowdrop verse to hold onto: “The snowdrop, in purest white array, First rears her head on Candlemas Day.” The gardening year does not begin with abundance. It begins with courage. Book Recommendation If you are gardening mostly by imagination right now, this is a winter-perfect recommendation. The New Romantic Garden celebrates gardens shaped by feeling as much as function. These are gardens built for atmosphere, reflection, and beauty — places where restraint matters as much as abundance. It is a book to read slowly, perhaps by the fire, letting it influence how you think about gardens long before you step back into the soil. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 2001 The Detroit Free Press shared the story of Harris Olson, a man whose personal mission was to turn everyone he met into a gardener — preferably, a daylily gardener. With his warm smile and battered gray truck, license plate reading “Mr. Daylily,” Harris was widely known in the Detroit area for his volunteer work and his plant breeding. He hybridized daylilies and peonies, naming varieties for the people he loved. For forty-five years, he served as volunteer head gardener at the Congregational Church of Birmingham. Under his direction, the nine-acre grounds became an arboretum-like landscape filled with peonies, daylilies, roses, hostas, and other perennials. Even when his health declined, Harris refused to stop gardening. When he could no longer weed himself, he sat in a lawn chair while others worked the beds, offering commentary and encouragement. “Life isn’t worth living unless you can pull a weed,” he liked to say. Gardeners like Harris remind us that tending plants is often just an excuse to tend people — generously, patiently, and for as long as we are able. Final Thoughts Wherever you are, whatever season you are in, may you find something today worth tending. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day. /episode/index/show/thedailygardener/id/39762150