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The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community
Today's Show Notes
Hi there, and welcome to The Daily Gardener — a daily almanac of garden history, literature, and small botanical joys. I'm Jennifer Ebeling, and today is February 20.
Every garden carries a quiet tension: wildness and order. What grows where it pleases, and what we ask to grow where we can reach it.
Today's stories belong to people who lived inside that tension — collecting, classifying, shaping, preserving. Trying to understand the living world without draining it of wonder.
Today's Garden History
1742 Joseph Dombey (JOH-zef dom-BAY) was born.
Joseph lived in the Age of Enlightenment — that hungry era when Europe wanted the world's plants named, measured, and brought home.
Beginning in 1778, he traveled through Peru and Chile, collecting what no European garden yet held: pressed specimens, notes, and seeds. A botanical life gathered into paper and ink.
Joseph also had a nose for plants with promise. One of them was lemon verbena — Aloysia citrodora (uh-LOY-zee-uh sit-roh-DOR-uh).
Here's the part gardeners love. When Joseph returned to Europe, his living collection was seized by customs and left to languish. Most of it died.
But one lemon verbena survived. Just one.
When it was finally returned to him, Joseph gently kept it alive. That single plant became a beginning — the mother plant of the lemon verbena that would move through European gardens and eventually into ours.
Joseph's work stirred admiration and resentment. His collections sparked diplomatic disputes — the kind of tension that gathers around anything valuable. And yet he was also remembered for kindness. During outbreaks of illness in Chile, he treated the sick without charge.
A botanist who didn't only collect life — he tried to preserve it.
In 1793, Joseph set out on his final voyage. This time, not for plants, but for science itself.
He was tasked with delivering two prototypes of a new French measuring system to Thomas Jefferson in America: a copper rod, exactly one meter long, and a copper cylinder weighing one kilogram.
The future of measurement, packed into metal.
But Joseph never arrived.
A storm blew his ship south into the Caribbean. Privateers boarded it. Joseph was taken prisoner and confined on the volcanic island of Montserrat (MON-ser-RAT), southwest of Antigua.
He died there a month later, at the age of fifty-two.
Today, that copper kilogram rests at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.
And the lemony fragrance of verbena still lingers on gardeners' fingertips — a quiet inheritance of survival.
1868 John Christopher Willis (jon KRIS-tuh-fer WIL-iss) was born.
John served as director of two major botanic gardens.
But early in his career, while working in Ceylon in 1905, he suffered an injury to his optic nerve that ended his botanical exploration.
Good vision is essential for fieldwork. Jungles are dim, dense places. Plants demand close, careful seeing.
John's work moved indoors — to desks, to books, to data.
From Rio de Janeiro to Cambridge, and eventually to Montreux, Switzerland, where he entered semi-retirement.
Ironically, it was the loss of his physical sight that sharpened his intellectual vision.
By studying vast collections of records instead of individual plants, John began to see patterns.
He asked: How do plants spread? Why do some remain local, while others seem to be everywhere?
His "age and area" idea was simple. The longer a species has existed, the more time it has had to move, and the farther it may have traveled.
Botanists debated him. They pushed back.
But gardeners still recognize the truth beneath it: every familiar plant carries a history of movement. A journey. A slow expansion — seed by seed, root by root.
John's most enduring legacy came not from theory, but from usefulness.
His Manual and Dictionary of the Flowering Plants and Ferns became a constant companion on desks and shelves.
Not a book for showing off. A book for looking things up. For getting unstuck. For turning confusion into clarity.
Today, John is remembered in the plant genus Willisia — a group of rare, aquatic plants so unusual they resemble mosses or lichens more than flowering plants.
Joseph carried the wild home. John tried to understand how the wild travels.
Different lives. Same impulse.
To make the living world legible — without making it smaller.
Unearthed Words
1902 Ansel Adams (AN-sul AD-umz) was born.
In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from Ansel Adams. He wrote:
"The whole world is, to me, very much alive — all the little growing things… I can't look at a swell bit of grass and earth without feeling the essential life — the things going on — within them."
Ansel found sanctuary in nature.
And there is a small garden moment woven quietly into his life story.
When he was four years old, Ansel was playing in his family's San Francisco garden when the great earthquake struck.
As he ran toward the house, an aftershock threw him against a low brick wall.
He broke his nose. It was never repaired.
For the rest of his life, Ansel called it his "earthquake nose."
The injury pushed him away from crowds and closer to landscapes. Toward places that did not judge. Toward the steady patience of the natural world.
Nature, once again, as refuge.
Book Recommendation
Pioneers of American Landscape Design by Charles A. Birnbaum and Robin Karson
It's time to grow the Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Pioneers of American Landscape Design by Charles A. Birnbaum and Robin Karson.
This book profiles the designers who shaped how America thinks about landscape — not just as decoration, but as structure, intention, and public good.
It introduces the people behind parks, estates, campuses, and civic spaces still walked today.
Reading it, a gardener begins to notice choices: why paths curve, why views open, why some places feel calm without our knowing why.
It's a book that gives names to things we already sense — and helps us see gardens as cultural memory, set into land.
Botanic Spark
1884 Robert Wheelwright (ROB-ert WHEEL-right) was born.
And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
Robert helped shape landscape architecture into the modern profession we recognize today.
He believed gardens could be designed like rooms — with entrances, pauses, and intention.
Brick paths. Clipped edges. Open greens. Sheltered corners.
A kind of order that felt human rather than rigid.
He was a master of historic landscape restoration and a strong defender of public space, including efforts to protect Central Park.
One of his most lasting projects became personal.
When Goodstay Gardens in Delaware was gifted to Ellen du Pont Coleman Meeds by her father, she hired Robert to restore the Tudor garden, organized into six outdoor rooms.
They worked side by side for seventeen years.
In 1937, they married.
Goodstay became their shared home for more than three decades.
After Ellen's death, the garden was given to the University of Delaware, where it is still used for teaching today.
A gifted space. A garden that began as a commission and became a shared life — and a lasting legacy.
Design turning into devotion.
Robert once argued that landscape architecture was a fine art, meant to refresh and calm people worn down by modern life.
And a gardener hears that and thinks: Yes.
Final Thoughts
As we close the show today, remember: keep looking at your garden — its wild edges, and the places shaped for rest.
Patterns are always expanding. There is always more to learn.
For both the garden and the gardener, sometimes it's simply about having the time to grow.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
