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Today's Show Notes

Mother's Day is this Sunday.

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

It happens every year.

The intention is beautiful.

The plant is not what you'd choose.

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

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

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

One that's a vine or a creeper.

And one that's spiky.

Or I'd tell them, just buy herbs.

You can never go wrong with herbs.

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

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

Or this year, I only want blue flowers.

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

No gaudy surprises.

Just plants I actually loved.

And here's the thing.

It taught my kids to see plants through my lens.

It made the whole experience something we shared.

Instead of something I had to pretend about.

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

Be specific.

Say, get me something green.

Something that doesn't flower.

Like lady's mantle.

Or something aromatic.

Like lavender or thyme.

Givers want to get it right.

They just need us to say what right looks like.

Today's Garden History

1698 Henry Baker was born.

The English naturalist never planned to become a scientist.

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

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

And stayed for nine years.

What kept him was a child.

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

Henry became fascinated.

Not with her limitation.

But with the possibility of reaching her.

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

To read lips.

And to move through the hearing world.

Then he taught her two younger siblings.

It worked so well that word spread.

And the work became his career.

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

Charging high fees.

And guarding his methods behind legal bonds.

Every family sworn to secrecy.

It made him wealthy.

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

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

For a new challenge.

And everything changed again.

In 1742, Henry wrote The Microscope Made Easy.

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

But he didn't write it for professors.

Henry wrote it for the curious.

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

A way of seeing into another world.

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

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

And grow back whole.

Suddenly, everything seemed new under the lens.

And so everything was up for grabs.

That is why Henry also examined pollen.

Crystals.

And the invisible architecture of seeds.

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

Plants that crossed borders because Henry built relationships around them.

For his work, Henry won the Copley Medal.

He also helped found the Society of Arts.

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

The Bakerian Lecture.

Still delivered every year.

Henry once wrote:

"The works of nature are the only source of true knowledge."

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

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

I reflect on Henry whenever life gets too big.

I imagine him at his microscope.

Using his sixth sense to really look at things.

A grain of pollen.

A drop of water.

Tiny things that held the whole universe.

And against the whole universe, our troubles seem small.

Henry Baker knew that.

1842 Emil Christian Hansen was born.

The Danish botanist grew up very poor.

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

And his mother was a laundress.

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

Later, in his twenties, Emil finished high school.

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

Who showed him the world under a microscope.

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

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

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

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

In the 1800s, brewing beer was a gamble.

Entire batches would go bitter or oily without warning.

They called it "beer sickness."

And nobody could explain it.

Emil looked at the yeast under a microscope.

And saw the problem immediately.

It wasn't one organism.

It was a crowd.

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

Wild yeasts.

Uninvited.

Invisible.

Contaminating every batch.

Emil found a single cell.

Just one perfect cell.

And he isolated it.

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

And let it multiply.

One became two.

Two became millions.

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

No weeds.

No contamination.

Just pure.

Emil called it Saccharomyces carlsbergensis.

Named for the brewery that gave him a chance.

It was 1883.

And Emil and Carlsberg did not patent it.

They gave it away.

Free.

To every brewer in the world.

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

And simply handed it out over the fence.

Unearthed Words

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

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

Along the Seine in Normandy.

He was known as the Hermit of Croisset.

Gustave was a large, booming man.

With a walrus mustache.

And a temperament that swung between thunder and silence.

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

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

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

The same trees.

The same worn stones.

And every morning he went back.

Because it was interesting.

And because he kept showing up.

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

Book Recommendation

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moss.

Stone.

Water.

And deliberate emptiness.

Every rock placement carries intention.

And every clipped branch is restraint made visible.

The garden becomes a vessel for silence.

And for memory.

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

Sometimes they are containers for sorrow.

And sometimes they are the place where healing begins.

Botanic Spark

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

2012 Maurice Sendak died.

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

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

He walked his dogs.

And gardened.

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

And said it was "a blessing to grow old."

He was in love with life.

All of it.

And that love had started early.

Maurice grew up in Brooklyn.

The son of Polish Jewish immigrants.

Shadowed by stories of relatives lost in the Holocaust.

Mortality arrived early in his imagination.

So did trees.

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

A small boy is sent to bed without supper.

And the walls of his room "became the world all around."

Vines hung from the ceiling.

The floor softened into earth.

And a private loneliness grew leaves.

The transformation was not loud.

It happened slowly.

A room thickening with green.

A child's anger given teeth and claws.

And a kingdom to rule.

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

They need somewhere to let those feelings loose.

In the studio, he drew trees with quiet devotion.

Cross-hatched trunks.

Heavy canopies.

Branches that feel older than the page.

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

Leaves were widening.

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

Give them a color.

And a direction.

Something green and aromatic.

Or something that climbs.

It's not about control.

It's about invitation.

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

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

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

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Today's Show Notes

And here's something a little different to carry into the garden today.

A riddle from the nineteenth century:

"My first we all possess; my second we all should gain; my whole you'll surely guess: 'tis one of Flora's train."

The answer?

Heart's-ease.

Heart's-ease is an old name for the wild pansy.

A flower that was said to ease an aching heart.

And if you think about it, that's not so far from the truth.

Most of us don't go to the garden because everything is fine.

We go because something needs settling.

And somehow, kneeling in the dirt, hands in the soil, the ache gets a little quieter.

The old herbalists may not have had the science.

But they had the instinct exactly right.

Today's Garden History

1700 Gerard van Swieten was born.

The Dutch physician and botanist was orphaned at twelve.

As a young man in Leiden, Gerard found Herman Boerhaave, the most famous medical teacher in Europe.

He quickly became his finest student.

And for thirty years, Gerard wrote down everything his teacher said.

Five volumes.

Every word preserved.

As if losing even one was something he couldn't bear.

When a professorship opened at Leiden, Gerard was passed over.

Not for lack of brilliance.

But because he was Catholic in a Protestant country.

By then, he had a wife and children of his own.

The day Empress Maria Theresa invited him to Vienna, Gerard almost refused.

Because he feared trading his freedom for what he called a "slavish existence" at court.

And that is why Gerard would not go until the Empress promised, in writing, that his wife and children would be provided for if anything happened to him.

The path forward was clear once he knew his children would never face the hard-scrabble life he had faced as an orphan at twelve.

In Vienna, Gerard got to work almost immediately.

He tore out the old medical faculty and replaced it with bedside teaching and clinical observation.

In a move of sweeping generosity, Gerard opened the Imperial Library to the public.

And in 1754, Gerard founded a botanical garden at the university.

Not for beauty.

But for medicine.

Every plant was named.

Every specimen was classified.

And every medical student was required to learn botany before they could practice.

Because Gerard knew that healing starts with plants that were alive and growing.

The following year, the Empress sent him east to investigate reports of vampire attacks in the provinces.

Gerard arrived with a notebook and cold logic.

After he examined the so-called evidence, he explained it all away as simply natural decomposition, fermentation, and the chemistry of buried bodies.

After his visit, Gerard called the panic a "barbarism of ignorance," and in response, Maria Theresa banned vampire rituals across the empire.

Gerard died in Vienna in 1772.

He was seventy-two.

He left behind a functional medicinal garden along with systems that did not disappear overnight.

Today, the mahogany genus is named in Gerard van Swieten's honor.

Swietenia.

So every time you see mahogany, that is the botanical world's way of remembering the man who started out as a twelve-year-old orphan from Leiden and then spent his life making sure nothing was lost.

1870 Howard Evarts Weed was born.

The American landscape architect started out as a young entomologist in Mississippi, specializing in the insects that decimated plants.

Grain weevils.

Borers.

The small relentless things that farmers could not see until the damage was done.

But somewhere in those years of cataloging destruction, Howard got tired of focusing on damage.

Instead, he wanted to create and build something new and uplifting and alive.

And that is when Howard decided to pursue landscape architecture.

He specialized in creating beautiful cemeteries.

In 1912, Howard published Modern Park Cemeteries.

A book that was part design manual.

And part moral argument.

In it, he called rows of monuments and markers a "museum of bad taste."

Instead, he wanted the headstones gone and the lawns opened up.

He envisioned a place where trees, shrubs, and perennials were planted in vast sweeps of green so beautiful that, in Howard's own words, "the purpose of the place is forgotten."

In his futuristic view, Howard wanted the living to walk into a cemetery and feel a sense of peace.

Not dread.

Or morbidity.

That same year, Howard began raising irises.

They became the greatest joy of his life.

As his collection grew, he founded Weed's National Iris Gardens in Beaverton, Oregon.

And yes, that is his real last name.

The garden featured six acres of blooms that visitors described as a rainbow on a hilltop.

Instead of planting in careful little clusters, Howard planted thousands of iris just to find one new creation worthy of naming.

Popular irises like Azure Glow, Blue Skyscraper, and Beaverton.

These irises all offered huge, dramatic drifts of color that flooded the senses.

Howard died in Beaverton in 1946.

He was seventy-six.

His son Thurlow carried the garden on after he was gone.

Howard Weed spent the first half of his life trying to save plants from destruction.

And the second half proving that beauty could outlast it.

Six acres at a time.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from the English novelist and children's author Alison Uttley, born on this day in 1884.

Alison grew up on a farm in Derbyshire, where fields rose steeply and the seasons ruled the day.

As a young woman, Alison studied physics.

She trained to measure light and matter before she ever knew she would become a future writer of fairy tales, including the Little Grey Rabbit series.

After her husband's death, and through long seasons of sorrow, Alison returned again and again to the memory of her childhood farm and its gates, gardens, and windows.

The following passage comes from her semi-autobiographical novel The Country Child, published in 1931, where a young Susan Garland looks out upon her family garden:

"The parlour window looked out on the roses that nodded close by, and the garden with its wicket gate.

Sometimes the gate opened, and her mother went in for a bunch of carrots, a stick of celery, a spray of parsley, unaware of the still ghostlike face and the brown eyes gazing down at her.

Every window at the farm had its own peculiar magic for Susan.

Each was a peep-hole into some enchanted scene — none was homely or commonplace or dull."

Alison died in 1976 at the age of ninety-one.

And although her farm in Derbyshire was long gone, she never stopped writing her way back to it.

Book Recommendation

Flower House Mexico by Pili Fuentes

This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener.

And that means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature a journey through gardens beyond our borders, exploring how culture, climate, and history shape landscapes around the world.

Every January, floral designers from around the world gather in Mexico for Flower House Mexico.

A public art event and floral showhouse founded by Pili herself.

Each designer is given a room.

And they fill it with flowers.

Pili's book chronicles the work of more than twenty of these designers and their flower-room creations.

It is part floral-arranging guide.

Part look-book.

With detailed instruction on choosing flowers, extending bloom life, and using non-floral materials like ceramics, textiles, and candles to create atmosphere.

And woven throughout is the symbolism and importance of flowers in Mexican cultural and spiritual life.

The photography by Corbin Gurkin pulses with magenta, orange, indigo, and lime.

With bougainvillea against cobalt walls, courtyard fountains, and clay pots warming in the sun.

In one passage, Pili features the work of New York floral designer Ariella Chezar, who transformed a sterile apartment using thirteen thousand marigolds:

"Using a chicken wire armature and 13,000 marigolds, Ariella and her team constructed a massive serpent-like form that wove throughout the apartment.

The flowers started as a concentrated burst within the room and cascaded outward, spilling onto the floor and overtaking the once-bland hallway in an immersive tide of orange.

Many florists approach bold hues with caution and add only a single pop of color before retreating into neutrals.

Ariella, however, typically takes the opposite approach.

Ariella revels in saturation and allows tones to intensify and resonate."

Pili's book expands what a garden can look like and challenges the assumption that beauty means restraint.

In Mexico, flowers bring joy and grow loudly.

Botanic Spark

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

1954 Edward Augustus Bowles died.

The English plantsman was called Gussie by his friends and family.

He lived all eighty-nine years at Myddelton House in Enfield, England.

He did not roam the Himalayas.

He did not chase orchids through jungle mist.

He mostly stayed home.

As a young man, Gussie had intended to enter the Church.

But failing eyesight closed that door.

And he knelt in borders instead and found his devotion there.

His friend, the plant hunter Reginald Farrer, called him "Little Father Augustus," and the name fit.

By 1901, Gussie was growing more than a hundred species and varieties of Crocus in carefully tended beds.

In 1924, he published A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum for Gardeners.

Complete with his own watercolor illustrations.

Patient.

And exact.

Gussie treated a rare alpine species and a common daisy with the same courtly regard.

People called him the Crocus King.

Not because he collected them.

But because he knew them.

The way you know old friends.

At a garden party, you would not find Gussie at the center of the lawn.

He would be crouched at the margin.

Tweed rumpled.

Pockets bulging with a magnifying glass and a stray bulb he meant to plant.

Gussie kept a garden bed he referred to as the "Lunatic Asylum."

This was where he planted the twisted, the variegated, the imperfect.

Hazels that contorted.

Leaves that misbehaved.

He gave the outcasts a home.

Gussie never married and had no children.

But he opened his garden to local boys who needed steady hands and quiet work.

They became known as the Bowles' Boys.

Gussie taught them to sketch.

And to read the veins of a leaf as if it were scripture.

And in his later years, when his sight dimmed almost entirely, he could still identify his crocuses by scent and by taste.

When Gussie died in early May of 1954, the spring bulbs were already thinning.

Snowdrops—Galanthus—had long since bowed away.

And crocus petals were giving themselves back to green.

At Myddelton House, the beds Gussie shaped kept going without him.

The way a garden does when someone has loved it long enough.

Final Thoughts

Heart's-ease.

The little wild pansy that the old herbalists believed could settle what ached.

And maybe they were right.

Not because the flower has any special power.

But because the garden does.

You go out.

You kneel down.

You put your hands in the soil.

And something that was loud inside you gets a little quieter.

A little less worrisome.

And a little less painful.

That's heart's-ease.

And it has been growing in gardens for a very long time.

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

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Today's Show Notes

All things are difficult before they're easy.

And I think about that every May.

Because right now, the garden is all effort.

You're hauling bags of soil. You're staking things. You're tidying up. You're buying the plants and dreaming the dreams.

There is so much to do.

And nothing feels easy right now.

It's a lot of work.

And that's the right feeling for this part of the season.

The easy comes later.

Or I should say, easier.

It actually does get easier.

But you don't get there without this part—the watching, the waiting, the second-guessing, and the exhaustion.

So if your garden looks like a construction zone this morning, that's May.

And yes, it's not easy.

Today's Garden History

1742 Jean Senebier was born in Geneva, a city built on calm water and careful theology.

As a young man, Jean trained as a pastor, and by his early thirties, he became the chief librarian of the Republic of Geneva, where he settled into a quiet life of books and public duty.

Across the city, a wealthy naturalist named Charles Bonnet had spent years studying leaves submerged in water.

He noticed that they produced bubbles—tiny, silver, mysterious.

But he couldn't identify the gas.

When Charles's vision started to go, he needed someone with patience, with method, and with a librarian's obsession for detail.

So he created a competition on what he called "the art of observing."

When Jean entered and won the grand prize, Charles found his protégé and began mentoring him by giving Jean the question that would define his life:

What were those bubbles?

That quest for the answer meant Jean's days split in two.

In the mornings, he worked in the library—cataloging manuscripts and helping students find volumes in the stacks.

By midday, he was chasing light, moving glass jars filled with water and submerged leaves to windows and terraces, wherever the sun was strongest.

Then he watched and waited for bubbles to appear.

In his work, Jean became a botanical detective.

And the bubbles were clues that revealed everything he needed to know.

When Jean took away the carbon dioxide, the bubbles stopped.

When he doubled it, the bubbles doubled, too.

After three long decades of searching, Jean eventually found his answer.

And after all that time, it's fitting that one of Jean's most famous quotes is: "Observation and experiment are two sisters who help each other."

But he also knew the work was not easy.

It demanded both stamina and courage.

Jean once wrote to Bonnet with admiration for his mentorship, saying:

"It was in studying you that I learned how to read from nature, and to paint her, but in studying you I despaired forever of resembling you; [you have mastered] the art of seeing well."

The scientific truths Jean discovered are canon today.

Plants are not made of soil.

They're made of air and light.

Sunshine turned to life.

And while we exhale carbon dioxide, plants inhale it as food.

In turn, plants breathe out oxygen, and we inhale it to stay alive.

Plants and people.

We need each other to live.

In 1791, Jean wrote poetically about man's perfect symbiotic relationship with the natural world:

"I see my blood form in a spike of wheat... and wood in winter gives back the heat, fire and light it has stolen from the sun."

As for Jean, all that time staring into bright, sunlit water and squinting to count those tiny silver bubbles came with a price.

It cost him his vision.

Jean worried about the loss of sight for other naturalists and even warned them to take breaks when they worked to avoid eyestrain.

Speaking from his own experience, he advised:

"When the senses are fatigued, they become unfaithful."

In his old age, Jean didn't leave his desk.

But he needed help getting to it.

And from that post, he dictated his work to the assistants in the library.

That's how, essentially in the dark, Jean finished his five-volume masterpiece on plant life.

Jean died on the last day of October in 1809.

He was sixty-seven.

It is especially poignant now to go back to a time when Jean was in the middle of it all—counting tiny bubbles, trying to figure out what it all meant.

He wrote about the experience in a book called The Art of Observing.

In it, Jean wrote:

"[The observer] regards Nature as a book, in which it is necessary to attempt to read the characters with rigor without presuming to imagine what signification they ought ultimately to have."

I think about those words every time I am confused or unsure about what to do in the garden.

If nature is a book, then when I'm stuck, I just need to spend a little more time reading her.

1889 Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach died in Hamburg, Germany.

Heinrich was sixty-six years old.

From the time he was a little boy, Heinrich grew up in the Dresden Botanical Garden because his father, Heinrich Sr., was the garden's director.

As a boy, Heinrich learned to draw plants by hand.

He discovered how to see the architecture inside a petal and learned how to spy the story inside a dried specimen.

By his late thirties, Heinrich had followed in his father's footsteps and worked at the Botanical Gardens in Hamburg, where he was the expert plant hunters trusted to name orchids.

When crates of orchids arrived from all over the world, Heinrich felt like a boy again.

And when he wrote about orchids, his descriptions were vivid and relatable.

On the Mooreana, an extraordinary variety of L. Locusta Orchid, Heinrich described it this way:

"Green sepals, green petals, green lip, green callus, green ovary, green bract, green sheath, green peduncle, green bulbs, green leaves—just as green as a green grasshopper or the dress of some Viennese ladies."

Over twenty-five years, Heinrich named more orchids than almost anyone of his time and helped create the frenzy known as the Orchid Craze.

He named each orchid like he would his own child, often naming them to honor his friends who collected the plants and nearly died finding them.

He also named the plants after wealthy orchid lovers who built glass cathedrals to house them.

Still, sometimes he simply named them after one of their many stunning features.

Heinrich's closest ally was the great orchid collector Frederick Sander.

Frederick sent his best finds to Heinrich first.

And in return, Heinrich wrote such beautiful descriptions that he helped Frederick prosper by fueling the very craze that made them both famous.

When Heinrich learned that the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew had appointed a new orchid expert, he took it as a serious blow.

Robert Allen Rolfe was a self-taught former garden boy who had risen through the ranks.

While Heinrich had spent his entire life drawing, promoting, and naming orchids, it felt like a complete and utter dismissal.

When Heinrich died in 1889, he left his entire collection—over seventy thousand specimens—to the Natural History Museum in Vienna with one single condition.

The entire collection had to remain sealed from the world for twenty-five years.

In his will, he wrote:

"My herbarium and my botanical library, my instruments, collection of seeds, etc. accrue to the Imperial Hof Museum in Vienna, under the condition that the preserved orchids and drawings of orchids shall not be exhibited before twenty-five years from the date of my death have elapsed.

Until this time my collection shall be preserved in sealed cases.

In the event of the Vienna Institution declining to observe these conditions, the collection falls under the same conditions to the Botanical Garden at Upsala.

Should the last-mentioned institution decline the legacy, then to the Grayean Herbarium in Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

If declined by that institution, then to the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, but always under the same conditions, viz., of being sealed up for twenty-five years, in order that the inevitable destruction of the costly collection, resulting from the present craze for orchids, may be avoided."

This was the choice of a man who loved something too much to simply hand it over to people he felt weren't worthy.

But when the seals were finally broken at the Imperial Hof Museum in May of 1914, the orchid craze was over and the world was on the brink of war.

A botanist named Friedrich Kränzlin from the Natural History Museum was sent to catalog the collection and spent years trying to decode Heinrich's private shorthand.

Friedrich's biggest job was comparing Heinrich's records against twenty-five years of independent work, since botany had moved on after Heinrich died.

And that's how Friedrich's audit made orchid classification even better.

Heinrich's collection somehow survived both world wars.

And because the specimens were locked away for a quarter of a century, they are unusually well preserved compared to many other collections from the late 1800s.

Ultimately, when Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach locked that door, he ended up opening it wider than he ever intended.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the Belgian playwright and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck, who died on this day in 1949.

Maurice grew up in Ghent, a city of dark water and cold stone in northern Belgium.

As a young man, Maurice became one of the most celebrated playwrights in Europe and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.

Maurice once wrote: "Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?"

For Maurice, that question wasn't rhetorical.

It lived in everything he did.

And his deep appreciation for beauty and the natural world explains the joy and mystery Maurice found in a greenhouse.

For years, Maurice kept bees and studied flowers with the same devotion he once gave to plays.

In 1907, Maurice published a book called The Intelligence of Flowers.

He wrote:

"We shall see that the flower sets man a prodigious example of insubmission, courage, perseverance and ingenuity."

When Maurice looked at flowers, he didn't see something delicate.

He saw something that grew where it shouldn't be able to—pushed through soil, stone, drought, and shade, adapting constantly, bending, turning, reaching for light.

A flower never complains or gives up.

Maurice went on to say that if we applied just half of the same effort to the things that "crush us, such as pain, old age and death" the world would be a different place.

For much of his adult life, Maurice lived in a restored Norman abbey at Saint-Wandrille, where he wrote in silence every morning in a cold stone room and then spent his afternoons with his bees.

Of them, he wrote:

"Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue Work except in secrecy."

And:

"If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live."

Later in life, Maurice wrote a play called The Blue Bird.

In it, two children search for an ethereal blue bird and the source of all happiness.

Their travels take them far away.

But then, eventually, they find the bluebird in the most unexpected place—back at home.

Similarly, Maurice spent a lifetime searching for answers.

Yet he spent his final years at a villa above the Mediterranean, surrounded by lavender and salt-crusted cypress trees.

In the end, I think Maurice knew where the answers lived all along.

I sometimes find myself thinking about the bluebird and Maurice with his flowers and bees when I wonder if there's something else I should be doing with my life instead of spending so much time in the garden.

But I think, like Maurice, I already know the answer in my heart.

Book Recommendation

The Gardens of William Morris by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart, and John Simmons

It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Gardens of William Morris by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart, and John Simmons.

This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener.

That means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature a journey through gardens beyond our borders—exploring how culture, climate, and history shape landscapes around the world.

William Morris was a British designer, poet, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement.

He believed that beauty and usefulness were inseparable.

William once wrote:

"I know a little garden-close, set thick with lily and red rose, where I would wander if I might from dewy dawn to dewy night."

The authors open a window into the private gardens connected to William's life.

Red House.

Kelmscott Manor.

And the places where climbing roses, dense borders, and fruit trees were not merely decoration.

They were a green philosophy William could walk through and gather from.

The book includes over fifty examples of William's designs shown alongside the real plants that inspired them.

For William Morris, daily life always began in the garden.

Botanic Spark

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

1970 Ellen Schulz Quillin died in San Antonio, Texas.

The American botanist, author, and museum director was eighty-two years old.

Ellen grew up on a farm in Saginaw, Michigan, the daughter of German immigrants.

She lost her mother young and left Michigan at twenty-nine for a teaching job in Texas.

She never went back.

In San Antonio, Ellen became a high school science teacher who loved wildflowers so much that she wrote a field guide listing five hundred different species.

In the preface, Ellen described the Texas landscape this way:

"Texas is a land of flowers.

From the time the first warm breath of spring awakens sleeping buds in the south until the last purple aster is nipped by the frost in the north, the state is a vast garden of color and beauty."

As a young teacher, Ellen wanted her students to see that garden.

So Ellen helped organize a fundraiser, selling bluebonnets, until the class had raised five thousand dollars—enough to buy a natural history collection that became the foundation of the Witte Museum, which opened in 1926 with Ellen as its director.

Ellen ran that museum for thirty-four years.

In 1927, Ellen married Roy Quillin, an ornithologist who loved birds the way she loved wildflowers.

On weekends, they disappeared into the Texas brush together—Roy looking up, and Ellen looking down.

When the Depression hit, Ellen worked at the Witte for a dollar a year.

Her operating budget was almost nothing.

To keep the museum alive, Ellen cleverly built a Reptile Garden.

She paid ranchers a dime a pound for live rattlesnakes and charged visitors ten cents to see them.

And the garden paid for itself in one week.

Ellen wasn't just moved by nature.

She felt it was a divine connection.

Ellen once wrote:

"How often, in the early morning light, we pause in the out of doors, in the natural surroundings of our garden, and feel close to life, and to our Creator."

When she retired in 1960, the city of San Antonio honored Ellen with her own day.

She had proven herself a daughter of Texas.

Today, the Witte Museum is still standing.

And Ellen's original collection is still inside.

And yes, there are still live snakes to draw the crowds.

Final Thoughts

Things are always difficult before they're easy.

It's just part of the deal with May.

So here are some ideas on how to deal with it.

Work in the morning when it's cooler.

And maybe only work in one- or two-hour shifts.

Whatever's right for you.

Bring a fan outside and have it blow on you, because mosquitoes aren't good flyers.

Use sunscreen.

And drink plenty of water.

Putting together a strategy for how you work outside will keep you from burning out and burning up.

And both are important.

Because there's a whole season ahead of us before the garden goes back to sleep.

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

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Today's Show Notes

I ran across a little poem the other day by Thomas Edward Brown, who was born on the Isle of Man on this day in 1830.

This poem is what Thomas is remembered for.

It's called My Garden, and it opens with the line:

"A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!"

"God wot" is an old English way of saying "God knows."

So a garden is a lovesome thing.

God knows.

And what a claim.

Not that a garden is a useful thing, or a productive thing, or even a beautiful thing—although it is all of those.

But a lovesome thing.

A thing that draws love out of you and makes you more loving for having tended it.

And that feels right for May.

Because May is when the garden starts to love you back.

The seeds you trusted to the cold are up.

The perennials you weren't sure had survived are actually doing fine.

May is the month when the garden says to us, loud and clear:

I have received everything you gave me.

Look around.

So if you're stepping outside today, enjoy your lovesome garden and let it be the thing that softens you.

Today's Garden History

1854 Charles Wesley Powell was born.

Except, Charles was originally born Charles Leslie Pullen, in Richmond, Virginia.

His second act came later.

As a young man, Charles lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was well-regarded and connected.

His father was a Deputy Sheriff there, and his connections helped Charles become the city's secretary to the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners.

In that role, Charles collected money for the city and delivered it to the trustee.

But in 1890, a grand jury found Charles responsible for a shortage in the accounts.

Thousands of dollars.

Unaccounted for over several years.

Although Charles maintained his innocence, he could not explain where the money went.

That's how Charles ended up convicted of fraud.

And although at least nine more indictments waited for him, Charles didn't stay to face them.

Instead, Charles packed up his family and went south to New Orleans, where he lived with his wife Addie and their four girls for nearly a decade.

Along the way, Charles once told a reporter he had a little greenhouse there, and that he always was interested in flowers.

With the turn of the new century in 1900, Charles's life started to fall apart.

His father died in July in Houma, Louisiana, deep in the bayou, sixty miles southwest of New Orleans.

And then, just seven months later, his beloved wife Addie died from kidney failure at forty-two years old.

Six years later, in January 1907, he arrived in Panama as Charles Wesley Powell, during the earliest construction days of the Canal.

It was the perfect place to start again.

And I suspect he found the inspiration for his new name from John Wesley Powell—the man who ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, who went into unmapped territory and came back transformed and celebrated.

His fame peaked in the 1890s, the same decade when Charles left Memphis in shame.

When Charles first arrived in Panama, he worked first as a quinine dispenser for the Isthmian Canal Commission—getting established and learning the place.

By 1910, the canal was nearly finished.

Charles settled on the lower slopes of Cerro Ancón, the hill that overlooked Panama City, and built a garden at his house there.

Orchids growing in baskets suspended from a great mango tree on the patio.

Panama's habitat is perfect for orchids.

Not the showy corsage orchids.

The tiny ones.

The botanicals.

Flowers no bigger than a pinhead, clinging to bark with nothing but air and rain to keep them alive.

In the wild, most of these orchids bloom a hundred feet up in the canopy—visible to almost no one on the ground.

Charles brought them to eye level and became obsessed with them.

Charles once said he believed his orchids knew him.

"When I used to return from a trip into the jungle, I'd go into my garden and all the flowers would look tired and dejected.

Then I used to wander about, speaking to this plant and that one, removing a twig, feeling the stem.

And before I had been in the garden ten minutes I would notice a marked change in the plants, which seemed to spruce up and stiffen their wilted petals."

By 1915, Charles was sending orchid specimens to the top collectors and institutions in the world.

He taught himself taxonomy, and his personal collection grew to seven thousand plants.

By his sixties, Charles was crawling through jungle mud on his hands and knees, hacking through brush with a machete to reach specimens deep in the forest.

Charles loved to tell how, at sixty-six, he once shimmied out over a five-hundred-foot ravine on a half-dead branch to reach a single orchid.

And even when the branch cracked beneath him, he didn't let go of the plant.

Though six years later, he told a reporter in St. Louis he had scrambled back to earth like a scared chipmunk.

After Charles opened his garden to the public, visitors to Panama soon learned there was a garden they should seek out.

As soon as they passed through the vine-covered wire fence, they found themselves surrounded by thousands of flowering orchids—most species they would otherwise need to climb a tree or venture into the jungle to see.

The collection was so impressive that the German botanist Rudolf Schlechter based an entire ninety-five-page publication on the orchids Charles collected in Panama.

Soon, dozens of species were named for Charles Wesley Powell, all carrying the name powellii, the latinized version of his adopted last name.

Had he never made the change, the orchids would have been named Pullenii, for his original family name of Pullen.

But Charles had turned that page.

Near the end of his life, Charles's daughter Adelaide moved to Panama, where she too worked for the Canal Company.

But then, suddenly, she died.

She was just thirty-six years old.

When Adelaide was born, she was named for her mother, the wife Charles lost in New Orleans twenty-four years earlier.

That was the moment he decided to start again.

And he had.

But with the loss of his daughter, Charles felt his own time was slipping away.

And he needed to make sure his orchids would be cared for long after he was gone.

So he made arrangements to gift them all to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

The following year, in 1926, Charles Wesley Powell returned to the States to see his orchids arrive at their new home. Charles told the reporters:

"I am proud to be a part of Shaw's Garden."

"That slat covering on the orchid houses is remarkable.

They have had slat coverings in England for a long time, but none to compare with this.

The sun percolates through quarter-inch openings between the slats."

For two whole days, Charles walked the greenhouses at Shaw's Garden, absorbed in talking orchids with the horticulturist George Pring—barely stopping and barely sleeping.

Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tennessee, as people read about the man responsible for the finest orchid collection in the world, they had absolutely no clue they were reading about the man they knew as Charles Leslie Pullen, who had served fifteen days in the Shelby County workhouse thirty-five years earlier.

After the careful transfer of his orchids, Charles returned home to Panama.

To an empty garden.

He died the following year.

Charles was seventy-three years old and was buried at the Corozal American Cemetery in Panama, just like his daughter, Adelaide.

Today, most seasoned gardeners love orchids for their beauty and their long-lasting, symmetrical blooms.

But after learning about Charles and his life before Panama, I find myself thinking more and more about their role in his redemption—and how one hundred years after his life ended, we only remember the good part.

Charles Wesley Powell.

Orchid hunter.

1861 Thomas Hayton Mawson was born.

The British landscape architect grew up in Lancashire.

He was the second of four children.

At twelve, he left school to begin working.

When his father died four years later, a sixteen-year-old Thomas moved to London alone to better support his mother and younger brothers.

When he found work in nurseries and with landscape gardeners, he learned about soil and stone experientially and how to work alongside the people he worked with.

By his mid-twenties, Thomas had settled in the Lake District with his wife Anna Prentice, a trained nurse and the daughter of a surgeon.

There, Thomas opened a nursery and then a design practice.

Commission by commission, he began to reshape how England thought about the relationship between house and land.

For Thomas, a garden should wrap itself around the house.

The stone terrace should flow into the path.

The path should meet the hedge.

And the hedge should frame a view—a mountain, a gate, a statue—so that even a small garden feels like a journey.

Thomas was also a writer.

In 1900, he published The Art and Craft of Garden Making, a book that quickly became the guiding text for Edwardian landscape design.

It went through five editions.

As Thomas matured in his career, his work expanded beyond private estates.

He designed public parks, insisting that working people deserved the same green space the wealthy could afford.

He even won an international competition to design the gardens for the Peace Palace at The Hague.

Then came Parkinson's.

Thomas was diagnosed in 1923.

Slowly, he handed over the reins of his business to his eldest son Edward.

Anna, the nurse Thomas had married nearly forty years earlier, cared for him through the long, narrowing decade that followed.

But Thomas did not stop.

When he could no longer hold a pen, Thomas dictated his autobiography to Edward, summing up his fifty-year career as "most congenial."

In 1929, Thomas became the first president of the Landscape Institute, the professional body that still governs landscape architecture in Britain.

Four years later, Thomas died on a November day, with one final garden season behind him.

It was fitting that Thomas was buried in Bowness Cemetery, overlooking the Lake District landscapes that had launched his career.

And the parks Thomas designed still do exactly what he intended.

They give ordinary people something green.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear journal reflections from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, born on this day in 1813.

Søren loved to walk, and he believed it not only kept him healthy but also cured him of ailments and illnesses as they came along.

As Søren walked the streets of Copenhagen every day of his adult life, he connected to nature—to lilies, to birds, and to silence.

The therapeutic value of his daily habit was not lost on him.

Early in his journals, Søren wrote:

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.

Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.

I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it."

Søren also loved walking in fall the best.

He wrote:

"Here is why I so much prefer autumn to spring. In the autumn one looks at heaven. In the spring at the earth."

In his 1849 meditation The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Søren focused on his favorite flower, the lily.

Søren wrote:

"So it is also with the lily; it is silent and waits.

It does not impatiently ask, 'When will spring come?' because it knows that spring will come in due season, knows that it would be least useful to itself if it were allowed to determine the seasons of the year.

It does not ask, 'When will we get rain?' or 'When will we get sunshine?' or say, 'Now we have had too much rain,' or 'Now it is too hot.'

It does not ask in advance what kind of a summer it will be this year, how long or how short.

No, it is silent and waits—that is how simple it is."

Søren walked every day until his body would not let him anymore.

He died at forty-two.

And my thoughts immediately drift to Søren every time I almost talk myself out of a walk.

Book Recommendation

Napoleon's Garden Island by Donal P. McCracken

It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Napoleon's Garden Island by Donal P. McCracken.

This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener, and that means all of this week's Book Recommendations feature gardens from around the world.

In the book, we're taken to St. Helena, the remote Atlantic island where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled after Waterloo in 1815.

When Napoleon arrived on the night of October seventeenth, his first bed ashore was in the boarding house of the island's Company gardener, Henry Porteous.

The little house was crowded—cramped rooms meant to hold as many officers as possible.

Needless to say, the conqueror of Europe did not stay a second night.

Over the five years and ten months that followed, Napoleon settled at Longwood House.

There, he turned to gardening.

He planted trees.

Designed paths.

And reshaped the grounds into something of his own.

The book traces how confinement became cultivation.

A man stripped of empire and power, left with nothing but the soil beneath him.

In a rare moment of candor, Napoleon admitted to General Gaspard Gourgaud:

"The life that I live here on St. Helena, if I were not a captive, would suit me very well. I should like to live in the country.

I should like to see the soil improved by others, for I do not know enough about gardening to improve it myself.

That kind of thing is the noblest existence."

Through this book, we're given a gift.

A Napoleon most histories ignore.

A man with nowhere left to go, who turned to the garden and called gardening itself the noblest existence.

Botanic Spark

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

1998 Nicole Maxwell died.

The American ethnobotanist grew up in a strict Christian Science family in San Francisco.

Even as a young girl, she understood what it meant to follow the rules.

When Nicole broke her arm, her family refused medical treatment and took her to church to pray.

The pain was unbearable.

Nicole eventually found a doctor herself.

As a young adult, Nicole left the church and married, moving to France.

In Paris, she trained as a dancer and moved through drawing rooms where orchids stood in crystal vases and conversation rarely ventured beyond the weather.

Soon Nicole realized she had traded one rigid life for another.

Then, at forty, after a quiet reckoning with herself, Nicole packed her bags and traveled to the Amazon rainforest.

There she found her calling.

Nicole was not collecting plants for display.

She was studying how people healed with them.

During her time in the rainforest, Nicole spent long hours sitting with healers among the Witoto and the Jívaro.

Listening.

She learned that the forest was not wilderness in the romantic sense.

It was a dispensary.

Leaves cooled fever.

Bark stopped bleeding.

And sap closed wounds.

Once, while clearing brush, Nicole gashed her arm badly with a machete.

Her guide stepped into the forest and returned with dark red sap.

The guide gave some for her to drink and poured the rest into the wound.

The bleeding slowed.

And then stopped.

Within days, the cut healed without a scar.

That's why, as forests were cleared for cattle and timber, Nicole saw more than trees disappearing.

The Green Pharmacy, as Nicole called it, lived not only in plants but in the memory and daily life of the indigenous people.

In their language.

And in the apprenticeships between elders and children.

Burn an acre of forest, and what was lost was not just trees, but a lineage of knowing.

Nicole tried to preserve as much knowledge as she could.

She spent decades traveling by canoe, writing in worn notebooks, recording plant knowledge with care.

And when Nicole died on this day in 1998, the Amazon forest was fully leafed out.

Vines tightening their spirals.

Sap rising invisibly through trunks older than any city Nicole had known in the United States.

In the end, she'd become a daughter of the Amazon.

Today, Nicole's notebooks survive her.

They hold decades of plant names, remedies, and the voices of healers who trusted Nicole enough to share what they knew.

Final Thoughts

A garden is a lovesome thing.

God knows.

The garden is lovesome.

It is worth loving.

And just as walking has a power we don't fully understand, the garden does as well.

And in that way, it loves you back.

Especially right now in May.

As light is expanding.

And then into summer.

And those first warm, quiet days of fall.

So get out there.

And enjoy it.

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

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Today's Show Notes

Early May is a strange time in the garden.

Nothing announces itself.

A branch that was bare three days ago now has leaves the size of a squirrel's ear.

The groundcover that seemed nonexistent last week is suddenly there—not because anything dramatic happened, but because it kept going while you weren't with it.

That's how gardens work.

They don't wait for you. They don't perform.

They just keep going and growing.

And the ones who feel it most are the gardeners who keep showing up.

Morning after morning. Same path. Same bed. Same gate.

For no other reason than because they're there.

And it's always good to check.

Today's Garden History

1556 Luca Ghini died.

The Italian botanist spent most of his life doing something no one had done before.

He collected plants, pressed them flat, dried them between sheets of paper, and glued them down.

What Luca created is what we now call a herbarium—a collection of preserved plants mounted, labeled, and stored so they can be studied long after the season ends.

Before Luca, if a scientist wanted to study a plant away from the field, the best option was a drawing.

Luca's pressed specimens changed that.

For the first time, a botanist could hold the plant itself—dried and flattened, but real.

For centuries after Luca, botanists followed his lead, fanning out to collect specimens before the plants were gone.

Luca taught first in Bologna and later at Pisa.

He loved to teach by showing.

He brought his dried specimens into the lecture hall and passed them around so students could compare one leaf to another.

While Luca was at Pisa, he also founded one of the first university botanic gardens in the world.

The garden served his teaching—a living collection that could be studied alongside the herbarium Luca was always expanding.

Today, remarkably, none of Luca's original herbarium sheets survive.

But we know about them because his students carried the practice forward.

They pressed plants, labeled them, and stored them.

And the method spread—from botanist to botanist, generation after generation.

1893 Mary Sutherland was born.

The English botanist was born in London and studied at the University College of North Wales in Bangor.

When she graduated in 1916, Mary became the first woman in the world to earn a degree in forestry.

She was twenty-three.

But there was a war going on.

So Mary joined the Women's National Land Army, taking on the work of a forester—the work the men who had gone to war could no longer do.

After the war, Mary stayed in forestry.

But budget cuts kept finding her, and her gender did not help matters.

In 1923, after she lost her position in Britain, she moved to New Zealand.

There, the State Forest Service hired Mary as the first professional woman on their staff.

Still, the rules were different for Mary.

When male rangers went into the field, they always camped together.

But Mary was not allowed to follow suit.

The Service required her to stay in hotels.

And when the cost of that became inconvenient, they simply stopped sending Mary out.

That is how Mary became a grounded forester.

Not because she could not do the work—but because no one had planned on a woman doing the job.

Still, she continued.

And when another round of cuts came, Mary moved to the Dominion Museum in Wellington.

Her title there was clerk.

But the work she did was all botany-based.

Mary collected more than nine hundred plant specimens for the museum herbarium—pressing plants the same way Luca Ghini had done centuries earlier.

Mary attended the founding meeting of the New Zealand Institute of Foresters and later designed their official seal—a sprig of native rimu bearing ripe fruit.

Not the timber. Not the trunk.

But the fruit.

The part that carries the future forward.

In 1954, at sixty-one years old, Mary was still working in the field when she fell ill and died the following March.

Today, the Mary Sutherland Scholarship supports a young forestry student—someone just beginning the path Mary helped cut through the trees.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the English novelist and poet Charlotte Turner Smith, born on this day in 1749.

Charlotte's life was not gentle.

She married at fifteen to help resolve her father's debts.

By 1783, her husband was in debtor's prison, and Charlotte chose to go with him.

While she lived there in confinement, she began writing in earnest.

There, Charlotte produced the first of ten novels and the sonnets that would later influence Wordsworth and Coleridge.

And incredibly, she wrote her books while raising twelve children and enduring lawsuits, financial strain, and a grief that never quite lifted.

But Charlotte also knew plants—the hedgerows, moss, lichens, and the small, bright wildflowers of the English downs.

In her writing, she did not speak vaguely of blossoms.

She named them.

In her poem Reflections on Some Drawings of Plants, Charlotte turned to painting flowers because describing grief was harder.

She wrote:

"I can in groups these mimic flowers compose, These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew;

Catch the soft blush that warms the early Rose, Or the pale Iris cloud with veins of blue;

Copy the scallop'd leaves, and downy stems, And bid the pencil's varied shades arrest

Spring's humid buds, and Summer's musky gems: But, save the portrait on my bleeding breast, I have no semblance of that form adored..."

Charlotte could render every petal—but not the child she had just lost.

When Charlotte was fifty-seven, her husband died in debtor's prison.

The inheritance that might have saved her family remained trapped in the courts.

A few months later, Charlotte herself died.

Rheumatoid arthritis had taken nearly everything.

Near the end, the physical act of writing was nearly impossible.

Even so, her final poem, Beachy Head, was left unfinished.

Yet it includes sixty-four endnotes filled with the Latin names of wildflowers Charlotte loved all her life.

They are not loose ends.

They are the record of a woman who loved the natural world until the moment she could no longer hold a pen.

Book Recommendation

Ninfa by Charles Quest-Ritson

It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Ninfa by Charles Quest-Ritson.

This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener, a week devoted to gardens beyond our borders.

Places where culture, climate, and history shape the landscape.

In Ninfa, Charles tells the story of what is often called the most romantic garden in the world.

He spent twenty years studying the garden before writing his book.

Ninfa began as a ghost town—marshy ground, malaria, and crumbling towers.

Then the Caetani family began planting into the ruins.

Roses climbed broken walls. Wisteria spilled over arches. Streams ran where streets once stood.

Charles does not rush the story.

Instead, he explains the drainage, the politics, the planting choices, and the slow restoration that turned a ruined town into one of the world's most extraordinary gardens.

Botanic Spark

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

1929 Gertrude Clarke Nuttall died.

The British botanist and writer passed away at Ivy House on Holywell Hill in St. Albans, England.

She was sixty-one years old.

Gertrude was born in Leicester in 1867.

Because her father was a surgeon, she grew up in a household where the human body was something to be studied carefully.

And when she began her professional work, she brought that same devotion to the natural world.

In 1891, Gertrude became one of the first women in Britain to earn a bachelor's degree in botany from Bangor University.

Two years later, she married Dr. Charles Nuttall and turned her attention to nature writing.

In 1911, Gertrude published Wild Flowers as They Grow—seven complete volumes, all illustrated with some of the earliest color photographs of British plants.

Two years later, she published Trees and How They Grow.

This time, she focused on just twenty-four species—not as specimens to measure, but as lives to follow.

Of the elder, Gertrude wrote that its spirit was that of an old woman, and that "no forester in olden days would dare to cut it down or even lop off a branch without first asking her permission three times over."

And of the willow, Salix, she wrote:

"To the botanist, as well as to the poet, the Willow is a sad subject."

Gertrude knew trees.

She understood how their roots held the soil, how their branches moved in the wind, and how they appeared in spring after the first warmth of the year.

When Gertrude died on this day in 1929, the willows and the elder would have been in leaf.

Though no species bear her name, the name Nuttall appears across hundreds of botanical entries—but those honor the American naturalist Thomas Nuttall.

Gertrude's books are rare collectibles now.

And if you happen to find one, you just might discover a leaf or two still marking the pages.

Final Thoughts

May is a strange time in the garden.

Nothing is happening—and then suddenly everything is happening.

The days can give you a bit of whiplash.

But that is how gardens work in spring.

They do not wait for perfect weather.

They simply keep going and growing.

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

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Today's Show Notes

It's the last day of April.

And if you've been waiting for the right moment to tuck pansies into a pot or a border, this is it.

Pansies love a cool spring.

They want these exact mornings—bright but not hot, damp but not heavy.

Give them a little shade by afternoon, and they will bloom their hearts out for weeks.

The word pansy comes from the French pensée, meaning thought.

Bruce Springsteen once left pansies at the grave of Robert Ingersoll.

With this note:

"I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma."

A pansy.

As a thought.

An idea.

And the start of action.

Today's Garden History

1873 William Starling Sullivant died.

The American botanist passed away in Columbus, Ohio—the same city where he was born, the same place his father once surveyed when it was still frontier land.

William became the father of American bryology, the study of mosses.

While others chased orchids and towering conifers, William crouched, peered through lenses, and studied plants most people stepped over.

And what he found was an entire world.

He described nearly three hundred species of mosses and liverworts and wrote the bryophyte sections for Asa Gray's Manual of Botany, a foundational guide for plant identification.

Then came his masterpiece, Icones Muscorum, published in 1864—one hundred twenty-nine copper plates of North American mosses, drawn with scrupulous accuracy.

Every frond.

Every spore capsule.

His work still matters today.

But his life was not quiet.

His first wife, Jane, died just months after their wedding.

At twenty, he left his studies when his father died suddenly and stepped in to run the family business.

Years later, he met Eliza Griscom Wheeler.

She ignited his botanical work.

Collected alongside him.

Discovered species on her own.

The genus Sullivantia bears his name.

But it was Eliza who found those delicate, cliff-dwelling plants.

When Eliza died of cholera in 1850, William had a wreath of Sullivantia carved into her headstone.

And then he returned to his mosses.

To the tiny worlds of green that brought him solace.

If you have ever planted Sullivant's Milkweed—that smooth, rose-pink Asclepias that monarchs adore—that is for William.

And if you have grown Black-Eyed Susan called Goldsturm, tracing back to Rudbeckia fulgida variety sullivantii, that is him, too.

1827 David Douglas reached the summit of Athabasca Pass.

The Scottish botanist stood waist-deep in snow in the Canadian Rockies.

Carrying seeds, dried plants, and soaking journals.

His moccasins were rotting.

His eyesight already failing.

He was just twenty-eight.

On that same date, twenty-four years earlier, the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

A line drawn on paper.

And here was David.

Walking it.

Freezing.

Starving.

Collecting plants.

The Indigenous people he traveled among—the Chinook and the Kalapuya—called him the Grass Man.

They watched him wander, fixated on what others ignored.

In his journal that day, he wrote:

"The snow being very soft, and the weather warm, we were often waist-deep. The view from the top is most terrific. I was so much struck with the beauty of the scenery. I ascended a mountain on the North side. This I named Mount Brown, in honour of R. Brown, Esquire, the illustrious botanist."

David introduced hundreds of species to Western gardens.

Douglas fir.

Sitka spruce.

Flowering currant.

California poppies.

Lupines.

Penstemons.

Oregon grape.

Plants we pass every day.

Carried home in a saddlebag.

He died seven years later in Hawaii.

Falling into a cattle pit trap.

Killed by a bull.

Thirty-five years old.

Every seed he sent back was paid for in labor, in danger, and in devotion to finding what nature held.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the American writer Annie Dillard, born on this day in 1945.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

A year spent watching, crawling through grasses, tracking insects, and seeing what others missed.

She wrote:

"All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water.

If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring.

At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium.

Now: if you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin.

The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood."

Green.

Red.

One atom apart.

She reminds us that every leaf is a miracle.

And that what feeds a plant and what feeds us are cousins.

Book Recommendation

Fresh Cuts by Edwina von Gal

It's time to Grow That Garden Library with today's book: Fresh Cuts by Edwina von Gal.

This book is part of Modern Masters Week here on The Daily Gardener, a week devoted to contemporary voices who are reshaping how we garden and how we care for the land.

Edwina is known for championing naturalistic landscapes—gardens that feel loose and alive, yet are thoughtfully designed.

Fresh Cuts celebrates meadow-style planting, ecological awareness, and a gentler touch on the landscape.

In Edwina's gardens, grasses bend, perennials weave, and nothing stands rigidly at attention.

Edwina asks gardeners to rethink what "finished" looks like.

Not perfection, but movement.

Not control, but balance.

She also writes beautifully about the small details hidden in trees and buds.

For example, she wrote:

"Buds are a big part of a tree's identity. They contain next year's leaves, flowers, and twigs.

When I was but a bud myself in my life with plants, I once confused Acer platanoides—the Norway maple—with Acer saccharum, the sugar maple.

This is no way to impress a nurseryman. But the buds tell the story.

Those of the Norway maple are larger and greener.

You just have to know where to look."

Edwina reminds us that somehow the smallest details often reveal the most.

Botanic Spark

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

1966 Roland McMillan Harper died.

The American botanist passed away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

He was eighty-seven years old.

He was born in Maine but moved south as a boy, his family hoping the warmer air would save him from tuberculosis.

He spent the next sixty years traveling through the longleaf pine region.

A hundred thousand miles.

On foot.

By train.

What he understood was something no one else believed.

That forests need fire.

The longleaf pine begins as a grass stage—a low clump of needles.

Fire passes over it harmlessly, clearing space and making room.

Without fire, the forest chokes.

He wrote:

"Fire is as much a part of the environment of the longleaf pine as is the soil or the rain."

They called him a crank.

He kept going.

For decades.

Late in life, he married Mary Susan Wigley.

When he died, she organized everything.

Seven thousand photographs.

Hundreds of boxes of notes.

So nothing he saw would be lost.

Today, a wildflower bears his name: Harperocallis flava.

Harper's Beauty.

Final Thoughts

The pansy was named for a thought.

And the garden is where thoughts have room to rise.

Like a long drive or a hot shower, it is a place where something settles into clarity.

You plant.

You weed.

You harvest.

And somewhere in that motion, you let go of what you were carrying.

The garden holds it for you.

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

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Today's Show Notes

It's the last day of April.

And if you've been waiting for the right moment to tuck pansies into a pot or a border, this is it.

Pansies love a cool spring. They want these exact mornings—bright but not hot, damp but not heavy.

Give them a little shade by afternoon, and they will bloom their hearts out for weeks.

The word pansy comes from the French pensée, meaning thought.

Bruce Springsteen once left pansies at the grave of Robert Ingersoll, with this note:

"I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma."

A pansy. As a thought. An idea. And the start of action.

Today's Garden History

1873 William Starling Sullivant died.

The American botanist passed away in Columbus, Ohio—the same city where he was born, the same place his father once surveyed when it was still frontier land.

William became the father of American bryology, the study of mosses.

While others chased orchids and towering conifers, William crouched, peered through lenses, and studied plants most people stepped over.

And what he found was an entire world.

He described nearly three hundred species of mosses and liverworts and wrote the bryophyte sections for Asa Gray's Manual of Botany, a foundational guide for plant identification.

Then came his masterpiece, Icones Muscorum, published in 1864—one hundred twenty-nine copper plates of North American mosses, drawn with scrupulous accuracy, every frond and every spore capsule carefully rendered.

His work remains relevant today.

But his life was not quiet.

His first wife, Jane, died just months after their wedding. At twenty, he left his studies when his father died suddenly and stepped in to run the family business.

Years later, he met Eliza Griscom Wheeler.

She ignited his botanical work—collecting alongside him and discovering species on her own.

The genus Sullivantia bears his name, but it was Eliza who found those delicate, cliff-dwelling plants.

When Eliza died of cholera in 1850, William had a wreath of Sullivantia carved into her headstone.

And then he returned to his mosses—to the tiny worlds of green that brought him solace.

If you have ever planted Sullivant's Milkweed, that smooth, rose-pink Asclepias that monarchs adore, that is for William.

And if you have grown Black-Eyed Susan called Goldsturm, tracing back to Rudbeckia fulgida variety sullivantii, that is him, too.

1827 David Douglas reached the summit of Athabasca Pass.

The Scottish botanist stood waist-deep in snow in the Canadian Rockies, carrying seeds, dried plants, and soaking journals.

His moccasins were rotting. His eyesight was already failing. He was just twenty-eight.

On that same date, twenty-four years earlier, the Louisiana Purchase was signed—a line drawn on paper.

And here was David, walking it—freezing, starving, collecting plants.

The Indigenous people he traveled among, the Chinook and the Kalapuya, called him the Grass Man.

They watched him wander, fixated on what others ignored.

In his journal that day, he wrote:

"The snow being very soft, and the weather warm, we were often waist-deep. The view from the top is most terrific. I was so much struck with the beauty of the scenery. I ascended a mountain on the North side. This I named Mount Brown, in honour of R. Brown, Esquire, the illustrious botanist."

David introduced hundreds of species to Western gardens—Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, flowering currant, California poppies, lupines, penstemons, and Oregon grape.

Plants we pass every day, carried home in a saddlebag.

He died seven years later in Hawaii, falling into a cattle pit trap and killed by a bull, at thirty-five years old.

Every seed he sent back was paid for in labor, in danger, and in devotion to finding what nature held.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the American writer Annie Dillard, born on this day in 1945.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a year spent watching, crawling through grasses, tracking insects, and seeing what others missed.

She wrote:

"All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water.

If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring.

At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium.

Now: if you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin.

The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood."

Green. Red. One atom apart.

She reminds us that every leaf is a miracle—and that what feeds a plant and what feeds us are cousins.

Book Recommendation

Berg Style by Peter Berg

It's time to grow the Grow That Garden Library, and today's book is Berg Style by Peter Berg.

It's Modern Masters Week—a week devoted to designers who shape how we build and experience gardens today.

Peter understands drama, but he uses it sparingly.

His work is bold, architectural, and intentional.

He leans into structure—strong lines, sculptural plantings, and purposeful geometry.

But he also listens to how people move through a space.

Paths are not just routes; they are experiences. Water features are not decoration; they are punctuation.

The book is visually striking, with clean layouts, generous photography, and projects that move from plan to reality.

Peter draws inspiration from Count Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, a designer who treated gardens like music.

From that comes the Beethoven Principle.

He writes:

"Just as Beethoven used this technique to immediately create great tension, Pückler also deploys it as a motif in his plantings.

He achieves the 'da-da-da — dum' by planting three trees relatively close together and then placing a fourth of the same species farther away.

The scene moves most often from front right to back left, with the solitary tree striking the final note as it draws the eye deeper into the distance."

It is rhythm. Repetition. Surprise.

A garden you feel before you understand.

Modern does not mean minimal. It means intentional.

Botanic Spark

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

1966 Roland McMillan Harper died.

The American botanist passed away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at the age of eighty-seven.

He was born in Maine but moved south as a boy, his family hoping the warmer air would save him from tuberculosis.

He spent the next sixty years traveling through the longleaf pine region—one hundred thousand miles on foot and by train.

What he understood was something no one else believed: that forests need fire.

The longleaf pine begins as a grass stage—a low clump of needles. Fire passes over it harmlessly, clearing space and making room.

Without fire, the forest chokes.

He wrote:

"Fire is as much a part of the environment of the longleaf pine as is the soil or the rain."

They called him a crank. He kept going—for decades.

Late in life, he married Mary Susan Wigley.

When he died, she organized everything—seven thousand photographs and hundreds of boxes of notes—so nothing he saw would be lost.

Today, a wildflower bears his name, Harperocallis flava—Harper's Beauty.

Final Thoughts

The pansy was named for a thought. And the garden is where thoughts have room to rise.

Like a long drive. A hot shower. A place where something settles into clarity.

You plant. You weed. You harvest.

And somewhere in that motion, you let go of what you were carrying.

The garden holds it for you.

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

Subscribe

Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart

Support The Daily Gardener

Patreon

Buy Me A Coffee

Connect for FREE!

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Today's Show Notes

April is nearly over.

And before it slips away, here are words from Sara Teasdale, from her collection Flame and Shadow:

How many million Aprils came before I ever knew how white a cherry bough could be, a bed of squills, how blue!

And many a dancing April when life is done with me, will lift the blue flame of the flower and the white flame of the tree.

Oh burn me with your beauty, then, oh hurt me, tree and flower, lest in the end death try to take even this glistening hour.

O shaken flowers, O shimmering trees, O sunlit white and blue, wound me, that I, through endless sleep, may bear the scar of you.

We have added another April to the pile. And how many come and go without us stopping to notice what this month offers in the garden?

Flowering bulbs are a delight, but only if we plant them in the fall. Spring requires planning.

The beauty we are seeing now was set in motion months ago, by effort that simply trusted the season would come.

Today's Garden History

1798 George Don was born.

The Scottish botanist came into the world at Doo Hillock, in Forfar.

His father served as principal gardener at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. The work was a family obsession, and it came with a cost.

The family teetered on the edge of poverty, sometimes relying on the kindness of neighbors just to eat. Nine of the fifteen Don children died young.

George came up through the garden ranks early, working at Dickson's nursery, then moving south to London.

By eighteen, he was a foreman at the Chelsea Physic Garden.

George was not an indoor botanist. He was a man of the field—calloused palms, sun-darkened skin, more at home checking the soil with his fingers than making small talk.

In 1821, the Royal Horticultural Society sent him abroad as their second professional plant collector, on the ship Iphigenia, to Sierra Leone, Brazil, and the West Indies.

On the Gold Coast, he discovered the Miraculous Berry, Synsepalum dulcificum, a plant known for turning sour things sweet.

He also recorded how local people used and cultivated their plants.

When George returned home, he felt the Society had underpaid him. He knew poverty. He knew the value of his work.

So he published independently—and he was let go.

But he kept working.

His great labor of love, A General System of Gardening and Botany, ran to four volumes—an attempt to describe every known plant on Earth.

He specialized in Allium, the onion family, and Combretum, the bushwillow.

He updated John Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Plants and named species still grown today, including Catharanthus roseus, the pink periwinkle.

George Don died unmarried in Kensington in 1856, his great work unfinished.

He was buried back in Scotland, in Forfar, where his story began.

Today, he and his father are commemorated side by side at the Plant Hunter's Garden in Pitlochry—two generations who gave their lives to plants.

1869 Agnes Chase was born.

The American botanist devoted nearly seventy years to the study of grasses.

She was tiny—just under five feet tall, ninety-eight pounds—but relentless.

Agnes grew up poor in Chicago, married at eighteen, and lost her husband just a year later. She never remarried.

He had been a newspaper editor. She had been his illustrator.

After he died, she was left in debt. She lived on almost nothing—beans and bread—proofreading by day and studying botany by night.

She never finished high school, but she could see grasses the way others could not, and she would not quit.

She began illustrating for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and caught the attention of Albert Spear Hitchcock, the leading expert on grasses.

He became her mentor. She became his equal.

Together, they wrote The North American Species of Panicum and the definitive Manual of the Grasses of the United States.

When he died, Agnes took over, leading the department of Systematic Agrostology and overseeing the Smithsonian's National Herbarium grass collection.

The Smithsonian would not pay for women to go on expeditions, so Agnes funded herself—Puerto Rico, Brazil, Venezuela.

She climbed mountains, waded through swamps, and once sprained her ankle in a Brazilian marsh. She did not slow down.

She collected tens of thousands of specimens and found over five hundred new grass species in Brazil alone.

Her book, First Book of Grasses, translated complex science into language anyone could understand.

She opened her home, Casa Contenta—the Happy House—mentoring young women scientists and helping them find their way.

In her office, she kept a small companion—a rescued squirrel named Toodles, perched on her shoulder or sleeping in her pocket.

Agnes once said the grass family holds the world together.

She died in 1963, ninety-four years old, leaving behind every lawn, every prairie, every blade moving in the wind.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, born and died on this day—April 29.

He lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt—a civil servant by day and a poet of history and stillness.

Here is an excerpt from his poem Morning Sea:

"Let me stop here. Let me, too, look at nature awhile. The brilliant blue of the morning sea, of the cloudless sky, the yellow shore; all lovely, all bathed in light."

The sea is not dramatic. It is simply blue. The sky is simply clear. The shore is simply lit.

And still, he insists—let me stop here.

A reminder that stopping the work, even for a moment, is something the garden understands and the gardener often forgets.

Book Recommendation

The Gardener's Mindset by Stephen Orr

It's time to Grow That Garden Library with today's book: The Gardener's Mindset by Stephen Orr.

It's Modern Masters Week—a week highlighting contemporary voices who have shaped how we garden and how we live with plants today.

Stephen writes less about plants and more about perspective—what separates someone who merely grows plants from someone who lives as a gardener.

Curiosity. Patience. Restraint. A willingness to fail and try again.

His tone is reflective but not heavy. The photography is crisp and contemporary, with gardens shown not as trophies but as evolving spaces.

He shifts the question away from what should I plant and toward how do I see.

He looks at light, at repetition, at editing—at how a garden matures when the gardener matures.

This is a book to read slowly—not because it is difficult, but because it makes you pause.

Botanic Spark

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

2017 Ron MacBain died.

The Tucson plantsman left his garden, Winterhaven, just days before his ninetieth birthday.

For years, he arranged flowers at his shop, The Plantsman—weddings, farewells, ordinary Tuesdays—all with the same tender hand.

When his knees would no longer kneel, when his body began to set its limits, he did not leave the flowers.

He began to paint—large, bright canvases filled with blossoms.

In one of his final interviews, he said:

"I imagine I'm in the flower shop… and arrange on canvas the way I would in a vase… The joy I get fills me so much, I wouldn't want to do anything else."

Right before he died, a solo exhibition was planned. The paintings were hung.

But in late April, he had a stroke. And then he was gone.

The opening happened without him.

Friends gathered beneath his paintings—flowers that would never wilt or need watering.

Outside, spring continued. Petals opening. Light shifting.

The garden holding what he had placed there decades before.

Final Thoughts

Sara Teasdale asked April to wound her—to leave a mark she could not undo.

And April did.

The white of the cherry. The blue of the squill.

That kind of beauty does not ask permission. It arrives—finding us mid-task, mid-season, mid-ordinary Tuesday.

And whatever it has left on you this April—even the faintest mark of light—that is already yours.

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

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Today's Show Notes

Late April still has mornings that feel like waiting.

Cold soil. Bare patches. Nothing moving yet.

You stand at the edge of the bed with your coffee and think, not yet.

And then one afternoon, you step outside and the whole garden has shifted without you.

The forsythia is done. The tulips are leaning. Something you didn't plant is blooming along the fence like it's been there for years.

Everything reaching. Open. And happening at the same time.

That's late spring.

The ground does not wait for you to be ready.

And the plan you made in February, the one with the graph paper and the colored pencils and the seed packets lined up on the kitchen table, is already somewhere behind you.

It can feel like chaos. It can feel like you're losing the thread of the thing before you even started pulling.

But there is a way through it. And it is simpler than you think.

Today's Garden History

1630 Charles Cotton was born.

He came into the world at Beresford Hall in Staffordshire, along the River Dove.

His father was a well-connected Royalist who counted poets and writers among his closest friends.

Including a retired London textile merchant named Izaak Walton.

When Charles was twenty-eight, his father died.

That is when Charles took over Beresford Hall. A beautiful legacy. Buried in debt.

He wrote about it plainly.

He said it had left him "snar'd in bonds and endless strife" and that even the bread on his table tasted of affliction.

It was Izaak who stepped in at that moment.

He had known the Cotton family since Charles was a boy. He was not after the land. Not after the estate.

He simply cared about Charles.

From the beginning, the two men shared a passion for fishing.

For over two decades, they fished together in the crystal water of the Dove.

Especially a stretch called Pike Pool, where a jagged rock rose straight up from the center of the water.

In 1674, Charles built a small folly right beside the river.

A little square stone building. A pyramid roof. Hidden in the gorge so completely you had to know it was there to find it.

Above the door, he carved the Latin words Piscatoribus Sacrum.

Sacred to all fishermen.

Below that, two sets of initials intertwined. C.C. and I.W.

Charles Cotton. Izaak Walton.

Cut into stone.

It was there that they would rest after fishing. Smoke their pipes. Dine on whatever they caught.

In 1675, Charles published The Planter's Manual.

A guide to raising fruit trees in what he called a "plain and easy style."

He called his trees his children.

And when it came to pruning, he wrote about finding the eye.

The living point on a branch where new growth will come.

Then making the cut three or four fingers above it.

Sloping the blade away so rain would run off the wound instead of sitting in it and rotting the new wood.

He believed a planter should have a quiet, gentle, and thoughtful spirit.

Just like his friend.

When Izaak was eighty-three, he asked Charles to write a second part to his famous fishing book, The Compleat Angler.

Charles wrote all twelve chapters in just ten days.

Five years later, the debt took the house. Beresford Hall was sold.

Two years after that, Izaak died.

Charles spent his final years in London, translating the essays of Michel de Montaigne.

Inside those essays, he found something familiar.

Montaigne had written about his own great friendship.

When asked why he loved his friend so completely, he answered simply:

"Because he was he, and I was I."

Charles translated those words two years after Izaak died.

He knew what they meant.

Charles Cotton died in 1687. Still in debt.

Beresford Hall is gone now.

But the small stone fishing house still stands on the Dove.

And the initials remain above the door.

C.C. and I.W. Still intertwined.

1950 Oakes Ames died.

The American botanist passed away at the age of seventy-five.

He was a quiet deserter of a very loud family name.

His grandfather built the Union Pacific Railroad and died in disgrace. His father served as Governor of Massachusetts.

The name Ames was everywhere.

Oakes chose orchids.

Not the showy ones. The difficult ones.

The ones that wilt the moment you pick them. The ones that turn to mush unless handled with a botanist's precision and a surgeon's patience.

He arrived at Harvard and stayed for fifty years.

Not in the sunlight. In the basement.

His workspace smelled sharp and medicinal from the mercuric chloride he used to keep insects away.

He worked not with a knife, but a needle.

Teasing apart petals no bigger than a grain of rice.

If his hand shook, the flower was gone.

When he found a partner in his wife Blanche, he sat at the microscope and called out measurements into the quiet.

Three millimeters. Notched at the apex. Hirsute.

And Blanche caught every word with her pen.

He did not need to look up.

He once said:

"Surely the unrest in my soul, caused by doubt, made me determined to represent all the types of orchids… You're in a sense of happiness I shall not attempt to describe."

One specimen. Then another. Then another.

A plant cannot feel shame. It cannot feel pride. It simply is.

And Oakes spent fifty years in a room full of them, learning how to do the same.

To just be Oakes.

Not the grandson. Not the Governor's son.

Just the man with the needle and the flower and the question he actually wanted to answer.

Sixty thousand orchids.

Sixty thousand contemplations.

Sixty thousand moments of being nobody's legacy but his own.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear from the English poet UA Fanthorpe, who died on this day in 2009.

She did not publish her first poem until she was nearly fifty.

Before that, she was a prestigious headmistress.

A woman of authority.

But she walked away from it.

She became a clerk in a psychiatric hospital.

Not to be noble. But because she realized being a boss was making her deaf to the truth.

She traded her office for a desk in a hallway.

Where she could watch. And give patients a voice.

In that hospital, she saw a different kind of love.

Not the dramatic kind.

But the kind that lives in daily care.

She called it maintenance.

Here is an excerpt from her poem Atlas:

"There are limited ways of saying I love you. Many of them are not even words. One is the steady, rickety, habit-bound performance of maintenance.

It's knowing what time and weather are doing to your property, it's the specific trust of the heart that understands the messages of the meter and the gauge.

It's the sensible side of love, which knows that for the heart to be at ease the roof must not leak, the garden must be kept, and the tax-man satisfied."

She lived this out for forty-four years with her partner Rosie Bailey.

In a cottage. With a garden. Simply tended.

When UA died, Rosie was beside her.

Watching the gauges. Keeping the garden.

Doing exactly what the poem described.

Book Recommendation

Bunny Williams by Bunny Williams

It's time to grow the Grow That Garden Library with today's book: Bunny Williams by Bunny Williams.

It's Modern Masters Week.

A week devoted to contemporary voices who have shaped how we live with plants today.

Bunny is a world-class decorator who is not afraid to get her boots muddy.

She understands that a garden is not a painting you look at through a window.

It is the first room you enter. And the last room you leave.

She writes the way she gardens.

With practical elegance.

She believes in good bones.

Clipped hedges. Stone walls. Structure first.

And then she lets the abundance take over.

Roses a little messy. Borders loose.

Bunny holds to one principle.

Restraint is not limitation. It is confidence.

The confidence to leave a space empty so the light can hit the grass.

The confidence to wait for a plant to grow instead of buying a finished look.

In this book, she invites you into her Sunken Garden in Connecticut.

And shows you that the most beautiful room you will ever own does not have a ceiling.

She writes that a garden is only successful if it makes you want to stay for one more cup of tea.

Botanic Spark

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

1834 Harry Bolus was born.

The South African stockbroker made a fortune in diamonds. But he is remembered for the hours he spent in the soil.

In 1864, he lost his eldest son. The boy was only six years old.

Harry was a man of logic. Of ledgers.

But he could not account for his sorrow.

In that hollow, a friend handed him a botany book.

Not as a gift. As a prescription.

Something for his hands to do while the rest of him tried to find a reason to begin again.

So Harry started pressing specimens. Learning the names of things.

The heaths. The orchids. The small, stubborn flowers of the Cape.

In 1876, he traveled to Kew Gardens. Spent forty days inside its great library.

He called them his forty happy days.

On the voyage home, his ship struck a reef.

Every specimen lost. Every note. Every piece of his happiness taken by the sea.

Harry stepped onto shore.

Looked at the water that took everything.

And started again.

He made twenty-eight more crossings.

When asked if he was a botanist, he answered quietly:

"I do not call myself a botanist, but I have studied botany in my leisure hours."

In those leisure hours, he built the oldest herbarium in South Africa.

Described hundreds of species.

And kept going.

Until the end.

Final Thoughts

When everything is moving at once and the season feels bigger than your hands, stop.

Ask the smallest question you can.

What did I love last year? What actually made it from the garden to the table?

You do not need the whole plan back.

Just one true answer.

The garden already knows.

It has been holding it all winter.

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

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The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community

Today's Show Notes

Late April has a particular kind of energy. It's messy. It's muddy. It's cold in the shade and warm in the sun.

We think to ourselves, "All that rain had better be delivering those May flowers."

After all, May is right around the corner. And yes, this is the stretch when things begin to move in earnest. It's time to turn on the sprinklers and get things going.

Every time you step outside, the list grows longer—what needs dividing, what needs fixing, what needs tending now before it gets too big to argue with.

Trips to the garden center become exercises in restraint. And in moments like this, it can feel as if there is simply too much to do.

You may not get it all done. The garden also has to-dos, but it will complete everything on its list. Maybe that's the comfort.

Today's Garden History

1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson died.

The American essayist and philosopher lived in Concord, Massachusetts, in a modest house edged with orchard rows and pines set against the western light.

Grief marked him early. Ralph's first wife died of tuberculosis, and his young son died of scarlet fever.

The woods became a place where Ralph's mind could steady itself. It became a daily practice.

Ralph walked with a notebook in his pocket, noting what bloomed and returning to see what had changed.

But Ralph was not a master gardener. He once confessed, "I have no skill… I cannot chop a stick of wood… I am a hopeless hand at every kind of work."

And so, in the vegetable patch, Ralph moved carefully—sometimes too carefully.

One afternoon, his young son watched him digging and called out in alarm, "Papa, I am afraid you will dig your leg!"

Ralph planted anyway.

He loved his orchard of apples, pears, and plums, his grapevine trained along a trellis, and his forty young pines that dotted the western edge of the yard.

Ralph asked a question gardeners still carry: "What is a weed?"

And he answered it this way: "A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."

Ralph's poem about the Rhodora, an azalea-like shrub that blooms in the woods before the leaves come in, ends with these lines:

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;

1902 Thomas Dolliver Church was born.

The American landscape architect, known as Tommy to his friends, dressed more like a gardener than a designer.

His clients often mistook him for the help before realizing he was the person in charge of their project.

Tommy's typical workday uniform included a soft, battered hat with a stiff brim, practical high-laced boots, and a corduroy jacket with pockets for pruning shears and tape measures—the tools he needed to shape a space.

When it came to design, Tommy did not begin with ornament. He began with movement: Where do you walk? Where do you sit? Where does the trash can go?

Tommy asked, and then he listened.

When Tommy designed the Donnell Garden in California, he did not begin with a blueprint. He started by asking Mrs. Donnell to walk from the house to where she imagined the pool would be.

As she walked forward, Tommy walked backward in front of her, carving the path into the soil with the heel of his boot. The curve stayed.

Later, Tommy laid a garden hose across the grass to find the line the path wanted to take—not ruler straight, not imposed, just listening.

Clients did not need to understand design. They needed to understand how they wanted to live.

Tommy had a way of asking questions until the answer revealed itself.

In 1955, Tommy ended his book Gardens Are for People with this reminder: "The only limit to your garden is at the boundaries of your imagination."

Over the span of his career, Tommy designed thousands of gardens—no two alike—because each one began with the people who lived there.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from the Irish-born British poet Cecil Day-Lewis, born on this day in 1904.

Cecil became the Poet Laureate of England. But before the title and before the ceremonies, he was a quiet, serious man who loved the soil, hedgerows, and the rhythm of the seasons.

In 1940, as World War II loomed and Europe felt increasingly unstable, Cecil sat down with an ancient Roman poem by Virgil called The Georgics—a long meditation on rural life, farming, beekeeping, and what it takes to care for the land.

Cecil spent the war years translating it into English.

In the poem, Virgil pauses to describe an old gardener who lived near Tarentum, in southern Italy.

Here is Cecil's translation of that gardener and his small, stubborn piece of ground:

"I saw once an old man, a Corycian, who owned a few poor acres of land, soil not rich enough for the grazing of cattle, unfit for the flock and unkind to the vine.

Yet, planting a few pot-herbs among the brushwood, with white lilies around them, and vervain, and slender poppies, he equalled in his contentment the wealth of kings.

Returning home late at night, he would load his board with unbought delicacies.

He was the first to pick roses in spring, and fruits in autumn; and when grim winter was still cracking the rocks with cold and holding the watercourses in icy harness, he was already clipping the soft tresses of the hyacinth, mocking the laggard summer and the loitering breezes."

In 1940, as bombs were falling across Europe, Cecil chose to translate this gardener—a man with a few poor acres, some pot-herbs, and the contentment of kings.

Book Recommendation

Martha Stewart's Gardening Handbook by Martha Stewart

It's time to grow the Grow That Garden Library with today's book, Martha Stewart's Gardening Handbook by Martha Stewart.

It's Modern Masters Week here on The Daily Gardener, and that means all this week's Book Recommendations are devoted to contemporary voices who have helped shape how we garden and how we live with plants today.

Martha's book came out last spring, and the cover alone tells you something—deep green, formal boxwood geometry, a strong center axis. It doesn't shout. It stands there.

But what stays with you is how direct Martha is once you're inside it.

Martha covers soil amendment without making you feel behind. She'll tell you when a plant is simply not worth the trouble in your zone—and she names the zone.

Martha talks about what happens when you plant too close because you couldn't wait—which is most of us, most of the time.

It really is a handbook, meant to be returned to, not just read once and shelved.

In her introduction, Martha writes: "Gardening is an ever-evolving relationship, making it both immediately gratifying and a source of long-term awe and enjoyment."

Botanic Spark

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

1898 Ludwig Bemelmans was born.

The Austrian writer and illustrator was born in Merano, an alpine town in the Tyrol, where the meadows are steep and the light comes in at an angle all year long.

Most people know Ludwig as the man who wrote Madeline. But that came later. First, there was the loss.

His father left when Ludwig was six—ran off with another woman, leaving his mother and the French governess Ludwig adored both pregnant.

The following year, the governess took her own life.

Ludwig was sixteen when he was sent to America. He arrived at Ellis Island on Christmas Eve, 1914. His father was supposed to meet him. He didn't come.

Ludwig found him eventually. They tried. But they were too alike, and it didn't hold.

So Ludwig went to work in the hotels of Manhattan—fifteen years at the Ritz-Carlton, carrying things, watching how people inhabited a room.

Somewhere in that time, his daughter Barbara was born, and Ludwig made sure her childhood was a lovely adventure.

Barbara inspired Ludwig's character, Madeline. And Madeline begins: "In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines."

Vines on a wall—that's where he put her. Not inside, not protected by stone, but held by something growing—seasonal, alive, slightly unruly.

A man who was not met at the door put his daughter in a house the vines had already claimed.

Final Thoughts

If you're standing in your yard unsure where to begin, walk.

Walk to the place you imagine the bench. Walk to the spot where you picture the roses. Walk toward the corner that feels unfinished.

Sometimes the garden tells you what it needs if you spend a little time in the very places that are calling to you.

And if you've wanted a garden—or you're between gardens, or you have one that doesn't yet feel like refuge—it is not too late.

It is not too late to widen it, to soften it, to reshape it. It is not too late to build the refuge you need now.

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