The Daily Gardener

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

  1. 1d ago

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

    Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Support The Daily Gardener Patreon Buy Me A Coffee Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community Today's Show Notes In her 1968 memoir Plant Dreaming Deep, the Belgian-American writer May Sarton wrote: "From May on, I can hardly wait to get up to see what has happened overnight, for one of the pleasures of a garden is that something is always happening; it is not static, even for a day. I go out by six-thirty and sometimes earlier, still in my pajamas and a wrapper, to take a look around before breakfast." There is something about a garden that makes us feel comfortable enough to come to it like that — in our pajamas, without makeup, without shoes, before the day has made any demands. We do not get ready for the garden. We just go. And the garden never seems to mind. Today's Garden History 1919 The governor of New Hampshire, John H. Bartlett, signed his name to a law declaring the purple lilac the official state flower. The law said the lilac was more than a flower. It was a symbol of the hardy character of the men and women of the Granite State. But John was not naming something new. He was acknowledging something that had already endured. In 1750, an Englishman named Benning Wentworth — the colony's first royal governor — planted lilacs at his home near Portsmouth. When he left England, Benning carried them across the ocean — small roots tucked in with other trees and shrubs, brought from England to a new and colder place. They took. Over time, they grew tall beside the house. And they flowered each May, lavender against timber and stone. Fast forward nearly two centuries later. In April of 1939, another governor, Francis P. Murphy, stood on the Capitol grounds with six root cuttings taken from those original Wentworth lilacs. Just before pressing them into the earth, he said: "Six roots were taken from the famous lilac trees in the garden of the first colonial governor of New Hampshire. So today, we are placing root cuttings in the earth of the Capitol grounds from the very first lilacs ever to come to America. We are very proud of this little flower, which is uniquely ours, and as I plant these roots today, I ask you to join with me in the hope that they may thrive and, over time, grow into full beauty." Those roots were not ornamental. They were continuation. And here is something else — the lilacs planted at Mount Vernon, at the home of George Washington, are believed to be slips taken from the Wentworth estate. They were a passing of wood, beauty, and will. Today, in some of the oldest parts of New England, there are lilacs blooming in places where houses no longer stand. And one of the reasons they are still there is simple — like peonies, lilacs can live for over a century. For generations, people have planted lilacs close enough to smell from the front porch or their kitchen window. They have been used to mark the edges of properties, to hide a clothesline pole, and to provide a backdrop for family photos. And on this May morning in 1919, John signed his name to the lilac — giving the Granite State something fragrant, something beautiful and soft, and something that returns reliably year after year.   1847 The English clergyman and botanist William Herbert died. He was seventy-one. For most of his life, William moved between two kinds of rooms. On Sundays, he stood in a stone church among his parishioners. On weekdays, he worked alone in a greenhouse, where the glass caught the light and the soil stayed damp underfoot. William devoted himself to the amaryllis family, Amaryllidaceae. And at a time when many naturalists dismissed hybrids as mistakes, as unstable, and even improper, William saw something different. In the natural world, bees carry pollen from one plant to another without hesitation. But when a person did the same, it raised a question — whether such crossings overstepped what nature, or even God, intended. William did not turn away from that question. As a clergyman, he knew the Bible and the language of creation intimately. Yet he understood plants not as something fixed, but as a living gift — something that could be tended, worked, and even, carefully, joined for man's enjoyment. He understood plant breeding as participation, not disruption. Hand-pollination moves slowly. It requires closeness, repetition, and the willingness to begin again the following season. So he gathered pollen and lifted it carefully, sometimes with a camel-hair brush. He crossed one bloom with another, and then he waited. William recorded what happened when species met. Some crosses failed. Some faltered. But others opened into colors no one had seen before. William saw deeper crimsons, unexpected striping, and petals thick as velvet. And when morning light struck certain blooms, their surfaces shimmered, as though the flower had been brushed by frost. Gardeners later called this the diamond dust effect — light caught in the cells of the petal, scattering into brightness. William lived among it. He saw it again and again in the greenhouse light, and he kept working to bring it forward. He kept crossing amaryllis plants until his death on this day in 1847. After he was gone, the church grew quiet. But the greenhouse stayed warm, a different kind of parish, still opening into color, light, and that fine, sparkling diamond dust. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a poem from the American poet May Swenson, born on this day in 1913 in Logan, Utah. May grew up with mountains on the horizon and a big sky overhead. She carried that sky with her everywhere she went. Here is an excerpt from May's poem Strawberrying. "We're picking near the shore, the morning sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there, their squishy wounds . . . . Flesh was perfect yesterday . . . . June was for gorging . . . . sweet hearts young and firm before decay. 'Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,' a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot in the furrows. 'Don't step on any. Don't change rows. Don't eat too many.' Mesmerized by the largesse, the children squat and pull and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half for the baskets, half for avid mouths. Soon, whole faces are stained. When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty, still attached to their dead stems— families smothered as at Pompeii — I rise and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped head. Red-handed, I leave the field." May and her ten siblings grew up listening to their Swedish mother read stories aloud to them every evening. And when I read May's poetry, in my mind it sounds exactly like something she heard her mother read to her right before she fell asleep when she was just a little girl. Book Recommendation The Apothecaries' Garden by Sue Minter This book is part of Specialty Gardens Week, which means all this week's book recommendations focus on a particular plant or a particular practice. In 1673, the Society of Apothecaries founded a garden in Chelsea to research and classify the plants that healed people. For more than three hundred years, the Chelsea Physic Garden led the world in that work. Here's Sue Minter: "At the dawn of the new millennium, the Chelsea Physic Garden remains the only botanic garden to retain physic in its title — after the old name for the healing arts. At a time when there is great interest in both health and in garden history, no doubt this re-establishment of its role will continue." And from the postscript: "Despite these approximately four acres having been continually cultivated from 1673 until 2000, there has always been a level of interest and influence beyond the walls. The degree has varied. Sometimes the garden has been a veritable conduit of influence between Britain and the rest of the world — and vice versa. Certainly in terms of the introduction of species to British horticulture, these four acres have probably been more influential than any other. Inventions popularized from here, such as the Wardian case — the portable glass terrarium that made it possible to transport living plants across oceans — have dominated some countries' economies, making some and ruining others. Agricultural cropping techniques have been revolutionized partly as a result of research work done here in the twentieth century." Four acres. Three hundred years. One wall between it and everything that changed because of it. The Apothecaries' Garden by Sue Minter — The Hidden History of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1912 The Australian novelist Patrick White was born in London. Patrick grew up in Australia, but his childhood was shaped by severe asthma. Even between attacks, he could never quite get enough air. When he turned thirteen, his mother sent him to England hoping that the climate might help his breathing. But it did not save him. It only uprooted him. And so he spent years between two worlds, never quite belonging to either one. It's part of the reason why Patrick once described himself as an unplanted tree, bearing roots from another soil and bent by a harsh sun. In 1948, Patrick and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, bought six acres at Castle Hill, outside Sydney. The first thing they did was plant four dogwood trees — and they named their farm after them: Dogwoods. At Dogwoods, Patrick rose at six each morning to weed. Then he would milk the cows and haul produce to market. And though he often called himself a slave to the garden, he said he never felt happier

    18 min

  2. 2d ago

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

    Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Support The Daily Gardener Patreon Buy Me A Coffee Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community Today's Show Notes Spring always feels a little unsettled to me until I plant the kitchen garden. It sits just outside the deck door. Close enough that I can step out barefoot with a pair of scissors in my hand. The thyme settles first. Then dill and parsley. Rosemary. Sage. Mint that refuses containment. And later — basil in generous handfuls. I tuck a few pots near the table and by the chairs. Slipping in lemon verbena so the air carries something bright when evening comes. All winter long, food feels finished when it leaves the stove. In spring, there's something waiting just outside the door. A handful of green. A torn leaf. A small correction. Today's Garden History 1865 Charles Waterton died at Walton Hall in Yorkshire, England. He was eighty-two. When Charles was a boy at school, two older boys dared him to kill a goose. Although he felt it was wrong, Charles did it anyway. When the schoolmaster heard what happened, he punished the older boys. But not Charles. The mercy stayed with him. As Charles finished school, an older priest pulled him aside and said he worried that one vice might undo him. And he made Charles promise never to drink. Charles agreed. And he kept that promise for the rest of his life. As a young man in British Guiana, Charles saw how quickly animals were killed. For sport. For trade. For habit. Once, standing on a sandbank with a group of men, Charles faced a giant caiman. He wrote, "They wanted to kill him, and I wanted to take him alive." Charles leapt onto its back. And wrestled it down. The story later appeared in his popular book Wanderings in South America. In 1806, when his father died, Charles inherited Walton Hall. He was only twenty-four. Yet somehow already certain of what he wanted. His first instinct was to build a wall around his property. Not to keep people out. But to keep wildlife safe inside. A place where there would never be hunting. The wall was three miles of stone. And nine feet high. Charles liked to say he paid for it with the wine he did not drink. While his neighbors measured their worth by the quality of their hunts, Charles measured his by how many birds found refuge inside his walls. Herons stood unstartled even when gunshots rang out beyond the wall. People would later call it the world's first bird sanctuary. Then in the 1830s, when a soap factory was built nearby, smoke began drifting across Walton Hall. Charles successfully sued the factory. Arguing that the fumes damaged his property. Killed the trees. And fouled the land. In 1829, when he was forty-seven, Charles married Anne Edmonstone. Who had been promised to him three decades earlier when he was exploring Guyana with Anne's father. Anne was just seventeen. Not long after giving birth to their son Edmund, Anne died. That's when her sisters came to Walton Hall to raise their nephew. After Anne's death, something else happened. Charles began sleeping on the floor. And rising at three each morning to pray. It became another lifelong discipline. At the end of May in 1865, Charles was working in the park when he fell hard. He knew the injury was serious. But he took the time to give a blessing to his grandchildren and family. In his introduction to Wanderings in South America, Norman Moore wrote: "He was buried on his birthday, the 3rd of June, between two great oaks at the far end of the lake, the oldest trees in the park. He had put up a rough stone cross to mark the spot where he wished to be buried. Often on summer days he sat in the shade of these oaks watching the kingfishers." Moore remembered Charles once saying: "C**k Robin and the magpies will mourn my loss, and you will sometimes remember me when I lie here." At the foot of that cross is the inscription Charles wrote himself: "Pray for the soul of Charles Waterton, whose tired bones are buried near this cross." 1793 Robert Kyd died in Calcutta, India. He was forty-seven. By then, Robert had lived and worked in Bengal for more than twenty years. In 1770, when he was still a young officer there, famine swept through the region. Monsoon rains failed. Rice crops collapsed. And millions died. Robert could not change the weather. But he believed something else could change. What people chose to plant. What else could grow alongside rice when the monsoon failed. Robert believed famine could be softened if more reliable food crops were grown alongside rice. So he began experimenting with plants. In 1787, at forty-one, Robert secured three hundred acres at Shalimar. A stretch of marshland on the opposite side of the Hooghly River from the city of Calcutta. The land was difficult. Wet. And unstable. Canals were dug to make more soil usable. Then he planted food plants that could survive difficult conditions. Robert chose sago palms because they store starch inside their trunks. When they are cut open, that starch can be dried into flour. He planted teak for durable timber. And tea to see if it could thrive locally. He also selected date palms so there would be fruit in dry seasons. By day, Robert crossed the Hooghly River into Calcutta to serve as Secretary to the Military Department. By evening, he returned to Shalimar. To walk the young plantings with local malis. Gardeners. Checking which species survived. And which failed. Robert liked to call the garden a "magazine" — a military word for a storehouse of supplies. In May of 1793, as illness weakened him in Calcutta, Robert decided to write a will. He requested a simple burial at the Shalimar garden he founded. But the East India Company instead buried him at South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta. Two years later, in 1795, a marble urn sculpted by Thomas Banks was placed in the Botanic Garden in his memory. And his successor, William Roxburgh, named the genus Kydia after Robert. Today the garden at Shalimar is known as the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden. And on that riverbank, the work Robert began — testing plants against hunger — still continues alongside the Great Banyan, now over two hundred fifty years old and one of the widest trees in the world, covering about four and a half acres. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a recipe for Marigold Custard from the American garden writer Helen Morgenthau Fox, born on this day in 1903. In 1933, Helen published Gardening with Herbs for Flavor and Fragrance. A book that grew out of three years devoted almost entirely to herbs. At her home, Foxden, in Peekskill, New York, she raised dozens upon dozens of aromatic plants. Seeking seeds and cuttings. Experimenting in her kitchen. And recording what she learned. Helen's book described sixty-seven herbs. And included more than fifty recipes. Dishes that drew herbs out of the medicine chest and placed them squarely on the table. Among them was this older recipe for Marigold Custard. A dish that used marigold petals as a kind of poor man's saffron. For color. And a faint, warm bitterness. Here is Helen's documentation of the traditional preparation: Marigold Custard Recipe. Ingredients: 1 pint of milk 1 cup of marigold petals, freshly gathered A pinch of salt 3 tablespoons of sugar A piece of vanilla bean or a dash of nutmeg 3 eggs, beaten Rosewater, optional, for a traditional finish Preparation: Infuse the Milk: Pound the marigold petals in a mortar, or crush them to release their color and essence. Add them to the milk and bring it slowly to a boil. Strain: Once the milk has taken on a yellow hue and the flavor of the petals, strain the mixture through a fine cloth. Combine: Stir in the sugar, salt, and chosen seasoning — vanilla or nutmeg. Thicken: Gradually pour the warm milk into the beaten eggs, stirring constantly to avoid curdling. Cook: Pour the mixture into a double boiler or individual custard cups. Cook gently until the custard coats the back of a spoon, or a knife inserted comes out clean. Serve: Chill before serving. A dash of rosewater can be added just before serving for an authentic old-world aroma. There's a whole kitchen hiding in the garden. Helen reminds us that marigolds can stand in for saffron. Offering color and warmth and flavor from something we deadhead without thinking. We've just forgotten how to read it. Book Recommendation Citrus by Pierre Laszlo It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Citrus by Pierre Laszlo. This book is part of Specialty Gardens Week, which means all this week's book recommendations focus on a particular plant or a particular practice. Nearly a hundred million tons of citrus are produced around the world every year. Pierre Laszlo wants to know how we got here. Tracing the fruit from Southeast Asia in 4000 BC. Through the Roman Empire. Through the gardens of Versailles. Through the canvases of Van Gogh. All the way to the orange groves of California. But first, he wants you to try something. He writes: "Take a piece of peel from lime, lemon, orange, grapefruit. It does not matter. Bend it between thumb and index finger over a piece of paper and note the dots of oil that spurt onto it. These are the essential oils." Those tiny glands in the peel, Laszlo writes, are miniature gold mines. For centuries, the oils they produce became perfumes. Orange bitters. Furniture wax. And some of the most valuable trade items in the world. We have been throwing away the most valuable part of the fruit ever since. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1832 Georgina Burne Hetley was born in Battersea, England. As a young woman, Georgina crossed oceans. First to Madeira. And then to New Ze

    19 min

  3. 3d ago

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

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

    21 min

  4. 4d ago

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

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

    19 min

  5. May 22

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

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

    22 min

  6. May 21

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

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

    18 min

  7. May 20

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

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

    16 min

  8. May 19

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

    Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Support The Daily Gardener Patreon Buy Me A Coffee Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community Today's Show Notes Today is Plant Something Day. And I know — you probably don't need a holiday to tell you to plant something. You've been planting for weeks. But I like what this day can be if you let it. Not just — plant something. But — plant something you've been meaning to get to. Something more of what you already love. Something your grandmother grew. Something you keep seeing at the nursery and putting back. Or something to remember someone. It doesn't have to be big. One pot. One seed. Or one division from the thing that's finally big enough to share. May in Minnesota is generous right now. The soil is warm. The evenings are long. And there's still time to put something in the ground and watch it decide what it wants to become. Today's Garden History 1834 Kate Furbish was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. When she was still an infant, Kate's family moved to Brunswick. And that was where she stayed — nearly all her life. As a child, her father took her into the woods and taught her all he knew about nature. And even though Kate studied painting for a time in Paris and attended botany lectures in Boston — she always came back to Brunswick. But then, in her mid-thirties, Kate gave herself a task that no one asked for and no one funded. To find, collect, and paint every flowering plant in the state of Maine. She started at thirty-six. It took her nearly forty years to finish her quest. Throughout those years, Kate traveled alone to the most remote parts of the state — Aroostook County, the Saint John River, the bogs and the riverbanks and the places where no woman was expected to go. Despite being a single woman, she rode mail coaches with no springs in the seats and no backs to lean on. But she did carry a revolver. Ingenious to a fault, Kate built rafts out of scrap lumber to reach plants growing in the middle of swamps. And she crawled on her stomach through bogs to sketch what she found. And in instances when the ground got too soft, she backed out on her hands and knees. Her unending devotion to wildflowers led the French Canadians in the northern towns to call Kate the Posey Woman. Yet somehow, she didn't mind. Though the people in Brunswick proper simply called her crazy. Kate liked that much less — but it didn't slow her down. She once wrote, "Had I listened to those who discouraged me, I should be as ignorant as they are of its natural beauties." Traveling along the Saint John River, Kate once came upon a plant with dull yellow leaves — a lousewort no one had ever recorded. She sent her findings to Sereno Watson at Harvard. Watson named the plant in her honor. When Kate responded by letter, to say she would visit the school, she also issued this opinion: "My second reason for writing is to say, that were it not for the fact that I can find no plants named for a female botanist in your manual, I should object to 'Pedicularis Furbishae'... But as a new species is rarely found in New England and few plants are named for women, it pleases me." And that is how the plant named for Kate stuck. She gave it her blessing. A tiny leap forward for women thanks to a tiny step forward for herself. Nearly a century later, that same lousewort was rediscovered after decades of no sightings, growing on land about to be flooded by a billion-dollar dam. Its presence helped stop the project — eighty-eight thousand acres of northern Maine forest saved by a little plant found by Kate all those years ago, with mud on her skirt and a revolver on the seat beside her. Ultimately, her Flora of Maine — fourteen folio volumes and more than thirteen hundred watercolors — went to Bowdoin College. The four thousand sheets of dried plants she painstakingly collected went to her friend Sereno Watson at Harvard. Ever humble, Kate claimed no artistic merit. She called it simply truthful representation. Kate once said that flower and botanical books had been her only friends when she collected. She wrote: "The flowers [have been] my only society and the manuals [my] only literature for months [all] together. Happy, happy hours." Kate Furbish lived to ninety-seven. And if flowers were her only friends, she'd known plenty during her life and was never truly alone. In 2020, the Kate Furbish Elementary School opened in Brunswick. Its hallways were lined with her watercolors — so that children walk past the plants of Maine every morning on their way to class. 1898 E. Genevieve Gillette was born in Lansing, Michigan. Her family and friends called her Genevieve. When Genevieve was three, her family moved to a farm on the Grand River in Dimondale. Every spring, her father would take her into the woods to kneel by the brook with the trailing arbutus flowering around them, and say, "Can you hear what it is saying? It's talking to us." She never forgot that. When her dad died when she was a teenager, the family sold the farm. But the memories of her father wrapped up in those moments in nature stayed with Genevieve forever. After high school, Genevieve enrolled at Michigan Agricultural College and in 1920 became the first woman to graduate from its first landscape architecture program. After dozens of applications, she received just one offer — from the landscape architect Jens Jensen in Chicago. A man who designed with native trees and believed trees enjoy each other's company. Jensen paid her twenty-five dollars a week. At first, Genevieve was only allowed to answer the phone. But Jensen saw her potential and pestered her to return to Michigan and start a state park system. So she did. When Genevieve went back home, she met an old classmate and friend named P.J. Hoffmaster, who had become Michigan's first superintendent of state parks. Together, P.J. and Genevieve began a quest to find and save special places throughout Michigan. On weekends, she scouted for park land — driving across the state alone, identifying thirty state parks, like Hartwick Pines, Ludington, and the Porcupine Mountains. She slept under the boughs of evergreen trees, inspected shorelines, walked dunes, and knelt in the woods the way she had with her father. And when Sleeping Bear Dunes was about to be developed into condominiums, she made repeated trips to Washington, D.C. until it was protected as a national lakeshore. For decades, Genevieve worked as an unpaid volunteer. The Detroit Free Press called her a saving angel. Although she admitted that talking to legislators terrified her, she did it anyway. And when P.J. died of a heart attack in 1951, she was left to carry their vision alone. She kept going. And didn't stop. Somehow, Genevieve found an inner courage she didn't know she had. Which is how she founded the Michigan Parks Association and then kept working for another thirty-five years. Although she never married or had children, she said she felt that the parks were her life's work. By 1965, President Johnson invited her to serve on his committee for recreation and natural beauty. When Genevieve heard the news, she called it the honor of her career. After all the scouting, and the planning, and the struggle to save the most glorious wild spaces in the state, Genevieve could look back and see her part in all of it. She died on May 23rd, 1986 — just four days after her eighty-eighth birthday. Genevieve's final wish was that money from her estate be used to buy park land. And that's how three hundred thousand dollars went to purchase five thousand acres along Lake Huron — saving the limestone cobble beaches, the deep sand dunes, and the small dwarf lake iris that grew happily only in that place. Even when Michiganders thought she had finished her work, she managed to save the best gift for last. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from A Garden in the Hills, a garden diary by the Scottish gardener and writer Katharine Stewart, written on this day in 1994. Katharine wrote from Abriachan, a hillside village near Loch Ness in Scotland. Katharine's garden lay beside a burn — a small Highland stream — with birches, currants, and wind off the water. After all the years living on the hills, Katharine understood that May in the north is never guaranteed. "If April is the cruellest month, May, so far this year, is not much kinder. Still, the tatties and the first sowings of vegetables are in the ground, though they'll be wise enough to bide their time before emerging. The birches are greening and in the hollow by the burn there's the gleam of celandine. Chaffinches are singing non-stop and a thrush is shouting from the top of the highest pine. Some years ago, when there was no one living in these parts, I came upon a garden, a long, narrow stretch beside the burn. Rhubarb plants had grown to the size of small trees, there were blackcurrant bushes drastically overgrown, but alive, and gooseberries still bearing pale yellow fruit. I took cuttings of these and now have half a dozen good bushes fruiting happily. This little garden must have had a really devoted gardener, for in one corner was a lilac and in another a gean — a wild cherry." Katharine found that abandoned garden beside the burn — rhubarb the size of small trees, gooseberries still bearing — and her first instinct was to take cuttings. Abandoned gardens are just another way of describing someone else's devotion left dormant for a while, but still alive in the ground, waiting for the right person to find it. Book Recommendation The Alcatraz Rose by Anthony Eglin This book is part of Garden Mysteries Week, which means all this week's book recommendations feature tales of intrigue, plants, and poison straight from the garden. We close the week with

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

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  • Creator
    Jennifer Ebeling
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    639
  • Rating
    Clean
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    Copyright ©2019-2026, Jennifer Ebeling|The Daily Gardener All rights reserved
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    The Daily Gardener

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