The Daily Gardener

Jennifer Ebeling

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

    June 11, 2026 Jean Louis Marie Poiret, Father Julius Nieuwland, Ben Jonson's Song: To Celia, The Restoration Garden by Sara Blaydes, and Johan Herman Hofberg

    The Daily Gardener

    23 min

  2. 2d ago

    June 10, 2026 Robert Brown, George Caley, Edward Osborne Wilson, How to Know the Wild Flowers by Frances Theodora Parsons, and Frances Theodora Parsons

    The Daily Gardener

    20 min

  3. 3d ago

    June 9, 2026 Peter Henderson, Carl Ludwig Blume, John Howard Payne, The Garden Book by Monty Don, and Vincent van Gogh

    The Daily Gardener

    20 min

  4. 4d ago

    June 8, 2026 Marguerite Yourcenar, Brenda Colvin, Gillian Clarke, The Garden of Lost and Found by Harriet Evans, and George Lamming

    The Daily Gardener

    20 min

  5. Jun 5

    June 5, 2026 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Anna Maria Hussey, Benington Marsh, Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi, and Robert Hermann Schomburgk

    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 One of my favorite garden books is A Year at Brandywine Cottage by David L. Culp. And tucked inside it is the most magnificent recipe for strawberry rhubarb upside-down cake. This is the week I'm usually making it for the third time. And I'm already on the hunt for the next good rhubarb recipe to try. I've put David's recipe in the Facebook group for the show. And I'd love to know what you're making with rhubarb right now. Everyone has a favorite. They are all worth trying. Today's Garden History 1656 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was born in Aix-en-Provence, France. The French botanist grew up under a plan his father had carefully arranged. The Church. A priest's life. A certain future. At the Jesuit college in Aix, Joseph followed the plan — visibly. His prayer books had botanical texts tucked inside them. Before dawn, he slipped out to climb the limestone hills, returning with dried flowers pressed inside his coat. He never fought the rules. He used them as cover. When his father died in 1677, Joseph was twenty-one. He walked out of the seminary and went straight to the mountains — the Pyrenees, the hills of Savoie. In the Pyrenees, bandits stopped him on the trail. They took his horse, his coat, and his money pouch. They left him with his shirt and his walking shoes. What they couldn't see was that Joseph had anticipated this. He had sewn gold coins into the soles of his boots. He kept walking — standing on his father's money, moving toward a life his father never imagined for him. By 1683, Joseph was appointed professor at the Jardin du Roi — the King's Garden in Paris. Louis XIV wanted medicines, trade crops, imperial glory. Joseph said: of course. And then, quietly, reorganized the garden beds according to his own classification system — grouping plants by the shape of their flowers, their corolla. The King thought he was growing medicines. Joseph was building the world's first genus garden. He didn't announce a revolution. He just tended it, bed by bed, until it was done. Before Joseph, plant names were long Latin sentences nobody could carry in their head. Joseph wanted a gardener to look at a flower and know its name from ten feet away. His masterwork, Institutiones rei herbariae, organized nearly seven hundred genera for the first time in history. In December of 1708, Joseph was walking home through a narrow Paris street, carrying a heavy bundle of botanical proofs — the printed pages of his latest work. The pole of a passing carriage struck him in the chest. He lingered for weeks in his apartments at the Jardin du Roi, surrounded by nearly seven thousand dried specimens, each one pressed by his own hands. Joseph spent those final days making sure every page was in order. Every genus correctly named. He bequeathed his entire collection to the King — so the garden he had quietly built inside the royal pharmacy would outlast them both. Joseph died on December 28, 1708. He was fifty-two years old. Carl Linnaeus, the man who would eventually replace Joseph's system with his own, admitted that before Joseph, botany was chaos. To honor the man he dethroned, Linnaeus named a genus after him. Tournefortia. It still blooms. 1805 Anna Maria Hussey was born in Leckhampstead, Buckinghamshire, England. The British mycologist grew up in a rectory garden — the daughter of a clergyman, one of seven children, educated well beyond what most girls received, and curious about everything that grew in the overlooked corners of the world. When she married the Reverend Thomas Hussey in 1831, she married a man who shared her hunger. Thomas was an astronomer. He built a thirteen-foot copper-domed observatory in the garden of their rectory in Hayes, Kent. For a while, they looked at the sky together. Then in 1839, Thomas sold the telescopes. He went quiet. The observatory became a schoolroom. The shared horizon closed. Anna Maria walked into the woods. Not the manicured gardens. The dark ones. The damp shady lanes where the sun never penetrated, where the moss was deep and the air was heavy with the scent of earth. Most Victorian women who studied plants chose flowers at their peak — upright, colorful, hopeful. Anna Maria chose fungi. The organisms that live on dead things. That fruit from rot. That need no light. On the forest floor, she found her mirror. She had buried four of her six children. She was living alongside a man who had sold his wonder and kept his silence. She was writing anonymous romantic fiction for magazines just to pay the bills — telling her mentor, the mycologist Reverend Berkeley, that the fiction paid well. "Much better than Mycology." And yet, every morning, Anna Maria went back to the woods. Back to the things that thrive in the dark. Back to the brief, strange, honest kingdom no one else wanted to look at. She brought specimens home and painted them at the dining table long after the house went quiet. She painted the rot alongside the beauty. She put flies in the corner of the plate. She refused to make nature prettier than it was. She once wrote that she loved the rain that drove everyone else indoors — because it was the rain that brought out the mycologist's jewels. Anna Maria's great work, Illustrations of British Mycology, took years and cost nearly everything. She fought her publishers for the finest paper. She insisted on Royal Quarto size — heavy, authoritative volumes that announced she was a scientist, not a hobbyist. Her sister Frances walked every shady lane beside her, co-illustrating every plate. Together they produced 140 hand-colored lithographs so precise that botanists still use them today. Her mentor Berkeley named a genus after her — Husseia, later reclassified as Calostoma. Beautiful mouth. A shouting thing rising from the dirt. Anna Maria died in August of 1853. She was forty-eight years old. The second volume of her masterwork was unfinished on her desk. Frances picked up the brush and finished it. She made sure the world saw the science and not the shattering. The plates went to Kew. The watercolors went to Chicago. The names went into the taxonomy — where they remain. Anna Maria had once written that the study of nature offered, "a source of pure and exhaustless pleasure that the world cannot give, nor take away." She was right. Thomas could go quiet. The parish could whisper. The bills could mount. The dark could come. But the forest floor was always full of life. And Anna Maria always knew where to look. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear an excerpt from a letter by the English writer and gardening enthusiast Benington Marsh, written on this day in 1971. Benington's letter appeared in The Guardian. It was later collected in Ruth Petri's book Notes from the Garden: A Collection of the Best Garden Writing from the Guardian. Benington titled the letter Trees Putting Elbows on the Lawn. Benington wrote, "We should alas sympathise with boys and girls who put their elbows on the table at meals: it shows they understand what tables are for. But how many gardeners are alive to the charms of trees that put their elbows on the lawn?" Benington had a name for this. Gardening tolerance. The willingness to let living things pursue their wayward impulses without let or hindrance. Benington wrote, "They reveal lavender leaning unashamedly upon close-mown grass, St John's wort overhanging a path, and a lusty oak threatening to enter bedroom windows." Benington ended the letter with a yew tree. The tree grows in Whittingham, in East Lothian, in Scotland. Benington wrote, "A remarkable 700-year-old yew rests a host of gnarled limbs upon the ground in a grand circle — it was under this canopy, we are told, that the plot to murder Lord Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots, was hatched in 1567." Benington wrote that and then moved quietly to the next paragraph. I think about that oak reaching for the bedroom window. I think about what we tidy away without ever asking why. Book Recommendation Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week's book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Yotam Ottolenghi has spent his career making vegetables the most exciting thing on the table. Ottolenghi Simple is his argument that bold flavor doesn't have to mean complicated cooking — just thirty minutes, or ten ingredients, or one pot, or something already in your pantry. Here's a recipe that proves it: hot, charred cherry tomatoes with cold yogurt. "One of the beauties of this dish lies in the exciting contrast between the hot, juicy tomatoes and fridge-cold yogurt — so make sure the tomatoes are straight out of the oven and the yogurt is straight out of the fridge. The heat of the tomatoes will make the cold yogurt melt, invitingly — so plenty of crusty sourdough or focaccia to mop it all up is a must alongside." That's the whole Ottolenghi philosophy in three sentences. Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi — the book that belongs on the counter, not the shelf. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1804 Robert Hermann Schomburgk was born in Freyburg, Saxony. The German-born explorer had lost everything twice by the time he was twenty-seven — a tobacco business in Virginia, and then every possession he owned in a fire on the island of St. Thomas. Broke and without a path, he taught himself to survey and walked into the jungle. On New Year's

    19 min

  6. Jun 4

    June 4, 2026 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, Walter Edward Lammerts, Robert Fulghum, Ruffage by Abra Berens, and Sarah Martha Baker

    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 British writer William Earle Johns once wrote in The New York Times Magazine: "Queer things happen in the garden in May. Little faces forgotten appear, and plants thought to be dead suddenly wave a green hand to confound you." The garden holds our dreams. And it holds our disappointments. Every gardener has a plant they quietly grieved — something that didn't come back the way they hoped, something written off over a long winter or a dry summer or just the slow accumulation of not knowing. And then one morning, there it is. Waving a green hand. As if it never heard you give up on it. Today's Garden History 1868 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward died in St. Leonards-on-Sea, on the Sussex coast. The English physician and botanist was seventy-seven years old. Nathaniel grew up in London. And Nathaniel wanted to be a sailor. So at thirteen, Nathaniel's father put Nathaniel on a ship bound for Jamaica. The sea cured Nathaniel of the sailor idea. But Jamaica did something else entirely. Nathaniel walked into the interior — the dripping, impossible green interior — and Nathaniel never fully came back. Nathaniel returned to London to study medicine. And Nathaniel spent the rest of his life trying to get that green back. Nathaniel set up his practice in Wellclose Square, in the East End docks — one of the sootiest, most crowded corners of Victorian London. Nathaniel wrote that the earliest ambition of his life was to possess "an old wall covered with ferns and mosses." So Nathaniel built one. Nathaniel stacked rock in the yard. Nathaniel ran a little pipe down the top so water could trickle over the stones. Nathaniel planted ferns, mosses, primroses, wood-sorrel. The coal smoke killed every single one. In 1829, Nathaniel was trying to hatch a moth chrysalis. Nathaniel buried it in damp soil inside a sealed glass bottle and set it on the windowsill. Nathaniel forgot about it for a while. When Nathaniel looked again, there was no moth — but there was a fern. And a blade of grass. Growing inside the sealed bottle. Alive. Watering themselves from the moisture on the glass. A tiny microclimate contained in glass. Nathaniel didn't open it. Nathaniel watched it for four years. Nathaniel's sealed glass cases — Wardian cases — made it possible to ship living plants across oceans for the first time. Tea from China to India. Rubber from Brazil to Malaysia. Medicinal plants from the Andes to everywhere. Nathaniel never patented any of it. Nathaniel gave the design away freely — to any carpenter, any nursery, any hospital that asked. On Christmas Day, 1866, two years before Nathaniel died, Nathaniel wrote to his friend, the American botanist Asa Gray. Nathaniel admitted that in thirty-three years, Nathaniel had never received "the slightest acknowledgement or thanks from any public body" in England. And then Nathaniel wrote: "But were my time to come over again, I should do precisely as I have done — considering that my life, though one of constant labour, has been one of great delight." Nathaniel died the following June. And by Nathaniel's own request, was buried in an unmarked grave. A genus of African mosses bears Nathaniel's name: Wardia. And all the terrariums sitting on windowsills — every sealed little world made of fern and moss and damp stone — is a nod to Nathaniel's humble offering to anyone trying to keep something green alive. 1996 Walter Edward Lammerts died in California. The American horticulturist was ninety-one years old. Walter grew up in the sagebrush town of Kennewick, in eastern Washington, the son of a farmer. As a boy, Walter watched his father press a branch from one tree into the rootstock of another — watched the graft take hold — and understood that a plant was not fixed. It could be guided. Rebuilt. Made into something it had never been before. That understanding took Walter to Berkeley, where Walter earned his doctorate in genetics in 1930. By 1935, Walter was at Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario, California, building their rose breeding program from scratch. Walter's first great rose won an All-America award in 1940. Walter named it Charlotte Armstrong — after the owner's wife. Then came Descanso Gardens in La Cañada, California. And the camellias. In 1948, Walter learned that Yunnan Province in China held camellia varieties no one in the Western world had ever grown. Walter arranged a shipment — twenty rare plants — just as China's civil war was closing the country off for good. When the shipment arrived in California, the plants were infested. USDA inspectors ordered them destroyed. Walter refused. Walter argued, negotiated, pushed — and won a high-risk fumigation as an alternative to incineration. Five plants died in the treatment. Fifteen survived. Walter grafted every survivor onto hardy rootstock before anything else could go wrong. Those fifteen plants are still at Descanso today. But Walter's crowning moment came in 1954. Walter crossed his Charlotte Armstrong rose — a Hybrid Tea — with a Floribunda called Floradora. What Walter got was something awkward. Too tall for a Floribunda. Too cluster-blooming for a Hybrid Tea. The American Rose Society had no category for it. So they invented one. They called it the Grandiflora. They named the rose Queen Elizabeth, in honor of the new British monarch. A rose so distinct it forced the classification system to make room for itself. Walter lived forty-two more years after that — a man of faith in a world of labs, a man of science in a world of creeds. Walter never fully belonged to either side. Walter died in 1996. But at Descanso Gardens, the camellias Walter wrestled from the inspectors still bloom every winter — proving they were worth all the fuss. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It by the American essayist Robert Fulghum, born on this day in 1937. Robert spent years as a Unitarian minister. Robert stood in front of people week after week, trying to find the right words for how to live. Later, Robert became a writer. Robert wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. And then Robert wrote this. Robert wrote, "The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be." Robert understood a brown thumb. Robert had probably had one himself. But Robert could not understand standing by and watching something wither when the answer was right there in your hand. For Robert, love was not something you waited for. It was something you did. Every day. Even when the ground was hard. Even when the results were slow. Even when you were not sure it was working. You showed up anyway. You watered anyway. That was the whole sermon. Book Recommendation Ruffage by Abra Berens It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Ruffage by Abra Berens. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week's book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Abra Berens was a farmer before she was a chef. And that changed everything about the way she cooks. Here's Abra Berens: "Plants are sensible creatures. Their whole goal is to create seed, protect that seed, and ensure germination the next season — thus continuing the plant's existence. Even the most rudimentary understanding of what a plant does has made me a better cook — because I am playing to the strengths of the vegetable instead of trying to conform it to my desires. It is true, you are in charge — not the cauliflower. It is also true that by playing to the inherent strengths of a particular ingredient, you can coax out the most delight with the least amount of fight." Ruffage covers twenty-nine vegetables, from asparagus to zucchini, with more than a hundred recipes and three variations on each one. A James Beard Award nominee. Named a best cookbook by The New York Times and Bon Appétit. Ruffage by Abra Berens — the book that will make you stop fighting with your vegetables. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1887 Sarah Martha Baker was born in London. The English botanist was the only daughter of a Quaker family. As a girl, Sarah had two loves: Art. And the living world outside the window. Sarah's first plan was to become a medical missionary — to sail to the South Sea Islands and serve. Sarah's parents said no. So Sarah turned to science. Sarah studied art at the Slade School in London. Then chemistry and botany at University College London, where Sarah took her degree with First Class Honours. But the real classroom was Sarah's family's cottage on Mersea Island in Essex — where the tide moved in and out across the salt marsh, and the brown seaweeds clung to the rocks in their distinct bands. Sarah wanted to know why. Why did certain seaweeds grow only at certain tidal depths? Why didn't they trade places? Sarah discovered that each species could survive only within its own narrow band — defined by how much drying, sunlight, and immersion it could bear. Sarah spent years finding out — wading into the marsh, taking measurements, running experiments back in her lab. Sarah often sang while she worked. Sarah's colleagues remembered it for years. On June 4, 1914 Sarah's twenty-seventh birthday, she was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society. A new lectureship was being created for Sarah at University College.

    17 min

  7. Jun 3

    June 3, 2026 Katherine Bashford, Patrick Blanc, Kliment Timiryazev, Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari, and Margaret Gatty

    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 How does Annette Wynne's poem go? Why was June made? Can you guess? June was made for happiness! Even the trees Know this, and the breeze That loves to play Outside all day, And never is too bold or rough, Like March's wind, but just a tiny blow's enough; June was made for happiness. I believe that. And June was also made for garden-adjacent chores — the ones that don't add to the gardening to-do list, but make the garden more worth being in. String up those cafe lights. Clean the outdoor fixtures. Add a cushion to that chair you keep meaning to sit in. The garden is already doing its part. This week, do yours. Today's Garden History 1953 Katherine Bashford died at her home in Pasadena, California. The American landscape architect was sixty-seven years old. Her grandfather Levi came around the Horn to California on the Argonaut in 1849. Her father Coles built the family into one of the most prominent households in Los Angeles. And Katherine, born in 1885, grew up knowing that the West was still being made — and someone would have to decide what it would look like. She graduated from the Marlborough School for Girls and then did what the women of her era with the means to do it did: Katherine went to Europe. She spent a summer moving through the famous gardens of Italy, Spain, France, and England — not as a tourist, but as a student. She came home a landscape architect. There were no formal programs for women in the West at the time. So in 1921, she apprenticed under Florence Yoch — the most formidable woman in Southern California landscape design. Two years later, she opened her own firm in Pasadena. The architect Myron Hunt, who watched her work for years, said Katherine had an "inborn interest" in the planting and yearly renewal of the annuals and perennials whose blending colors make the jewels of the garden. But she was not a romantic. Rather, she was an engineer of atmosphere. Katherine believed a garden should contain only plants that could grow freely in the place where they were planted — that no plant flourishes in unnatural localities. She carried clinker bricks in her purse — the ugly, over-fired cast-offs nobody wanted — so she could thump one on a linen tablecloth and show a client how its burnt-umber color matched the bark of a Sycamore. At a 1929 dinner honoring young architects, the Los Angeles Times noted Katherine's presence — "the lone exhibitor of her sex in the profession." There were two hundred men in the room. And Katherine Bashford. She designed terraced rock gardens and sandstone fountains for the grand estates of the wealthy. She designed the grounds of the Palm Springs Woman's Club — desert verbena and bougainvillea and rows of manzanita and olive trees. Katherine worked with Wallace Neff and with the architects who built the showplaces of Southern California's golden age. And she designed Ramona Gardens — the first public housing project completed in Los Angeles, finished in 1941. The same eye. The same standards. Whether the client was a millionaire or a family in Boyle Heights. By 1943, Katherine's health forced her into early retirement. She spent her final decade at home on Virginia Road in Pasadena, with her sister beside her. She never married. She wrote no book. But she left behind many terraced stone gardens, and courtyards built to last, in a city that she filled with gardens that looked like they had always belonged there. Katherine's obituary in the Los Angeles Times ran just four lines: A Fellow of the Landscape Architects Society. Who designed many Southland gardens. Survived by a sister. And the places Katherine created still stand. 1953 Patrick Blanc was born in the suburbs of Paris. The French botanist was around ten years old when his mother took him to a large flower exhibition in Paris. Most children looked at the colors. Patrick looked at the rocks. Beside the exhibition waterfalls, orchids and ferns were growing straight out of wet stone — no soil, no one tending them, just clinging and alive. Patrick said later, "Nobody was taking care of the plants growing on the waterfalls. I was impressed by this freedom." At twelve, Patrick had an aquarium in his bedroom. Patrick fixed a board above it, rigged a small pump to carry water up from the tank, and trained plants to grow along the wall. The roots dangled into the water. The plants thrived. Patrick had built his first vertical garden in his childhood bedroom before he had a name for it. In 1972, at nineteen, Patrick traveled to Thailand and Malaysia and found the same thing he had seen at the flower show — but wild, and vast, and everywhere. Ferns and orchids covering cliff faces and waterfalls. The earth, irrelevant. Patrick spent the next decade at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, perfecting a system — a metal frame, a layer of PVC, a polyamide felt that wicked water to the roots the way moss holds rain on a cliff. Patrick patented it in 1988. In 1986, Patrick installed his first public wall at the Cité des Sciences in Paris. Engineers had said the roots would rot the masonry. The wall thrived. That same year, Patrick and his partner Pascal Héni decided to dye their hair. Pascal chose blue. Patrick chose green. Pascal lasted one week. Patrick has never changed it back. Patrick covered the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris — hundreds of species at once, ferns and mosses and epiphytes clinging to felt the way they once clung to stone. Patrick once called his walls "a kind of redemption — a way of going back to Eden." In the Philippines, Patrick found a tiny dark-leaved plant on a wet rock face in Palawan. It was a new species. In 2011, botanists named it Begonia blancii in Patrick's honor. Patrick still works. At seventy-two, Patrick still travels the world half the year — looking for plants that grow where they're not supposed to. Patrick still wakes each morning in his home in Ivry-sur-Seine, where the floor is glass and beneath it, twenty-one thousand liters of water, fish, and the dangling roots of his indoor jungle. Patrick looks down before he starts his day and sees exactly what he saw at ten years old: Plants that don't need the earth to keep themselves alive. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a passage about plants and sunlight from the Russian plant physiologist Kliment Timiryazev, born on this day in 1843. Kliment's mother, Adelaide, was English. Adelaide taught him at home. In her language. Adelaide gave Kliment — he would say later — his boundless love for truth. Kliment spent decades studying the green leaf. What happened when sunlight touched it. What the leaf was actually doing in all that light. Kliment visited Darwin at Down House. Kliment defended Darwin's ideas in Russia for years. And Kliment never stopped going back to the leaf. In 1903, Kliment stood before the Royal Society of London. Thirty-five years into his work. Kliment gave the lecture in Adelaide's language. Kliment said, "A plant is a mediator between heaven and earth. It is the true Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven." Near the end of his life, Kliment wrote his final book dedication. His hand was trembling. Kliment sent the book to Lenin. But Kliment dedicated it to his mother. Adelaide had given him, Kliment wrote, his boundless love for truth. The book went to Lenin. The dedication went to Adelaide. Kliment knew the difference. Book Recommendation Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week's book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Luay Ghafari is an urban gardener in Toronto who has spent more than a decade figuring out how to grow abundant food in small spaces — and how to cook it the moment it comes out of the ground. Here's Luay Ghafari: "Garden-to-table borrows from the farm-to-table movement and shrinks that radius down to one's own backyard. You are the chef, the farmer, and the consumer. You are invested in every step of the process." And this: "Ask any gardener and they will tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that a vine-ripened tomato is the stuff dreams are made of. There is simply no comparison to store-bought. Seasonality matters." And this: "Walking into my garden with a basket in hand and harvesting homegrown fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness — that is what I love about having a garden. Taking what my garden provides and creating seasonal recipes is what garden-to-table living is all about." Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari — for everyone who has ever wanted to close the distance between the ground and the plate. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1809 Margaret Gatty was born in Burnham, Essex. The English writer and naturalist married a Yorkshire vicar and settled into a quiet life in a country parsonage. Margaret had children — eventually ten of them. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Margaret's body began to fail her. By 1848, after the birth of her seventh child, Margaret was sent to the seaside town of Hastings to recover. Margaret was thirty-nine years old, and she had seven months ahead of her with almost nothing to do. So Margaret looked down. At the shore, where the tide pulled back, Margaret found what she would later call the unseen flowers of the sea — seaweeds, clinging to rocks, delicate and strange and completely ignored by everyone walking past. Margaret was smitten. Margaret spent those seven mont

    17 min

  8. Jun 2

    June 2, 2026 Charles von Hügel, Joachim Zinner, Vita Sackville-West, The Cook's Garden by Kevin West, and Edwin Way Teale

    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 Gertrude Jekyll asked a question once that I think about every June. Gertrude wrote, "What is one to say about June — the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade?" What is one to say about June. I think about that every year when I walk outside and the garden has finally, fully arrived. There is nothing tentative about June. No apologizing. No hedging. Just the wood-dove cooing, the butterflies, the sweet earth-scents — and the whole world saying the same thing over and over again. Gertrude wandered up into her wood and said out loud, "June is here — June is here; thank God for lovely June!" I think Gertrude had the right idea. Go outside today and say it out loud. Nobody has to hear you. The garden already knows. Today's Garden History 1870 Baron Charles von Hügel died in Brussels, Belgium. The Austrian explorer and botanist was seventy-five years old. Charles was born in 1795 in Regensburg, Germany — the son of a diplomat who filled the house with botanical drawings and dried specimens from foreign posts. At seventeen, he rode into the Napoleonic Wars as a Hussar officer. By thirty, he was decorated, a fixture in the Viennese court, and engaged to be married. Her name was Melanie. And the man who quietly broke the engagement while he was away was Prince Metternich — the most powerful man in Austria. Charles came home to a wedding invitation where his future used to be. Then he left. Not for a country estate. Or for a quiet post abroad. But for six years — through the Punjab, through Kashmir, through the scrublands of Australia — collecting plants from places no European botanist had reached. When Charles returned to Vienna in 1837, he found a patch of land in Hietzing. Then, he began to build. Twenty-three interconnected glasshouses. Thirty thousand species. Lilac hibiscus from Western Australia. Blue lace flower from the Swan River. Himalayan cedar from Kashmir — the tree Charles loved most. Visitors came expecting a baron. They found a man in a leather apron, hands in the soil, crouched over a specimen. When the heating failed one winter night, Charles didn't send for a servant. Instead, he went into the glasshouse and covered his most delicate plants with his own military cloaks. He refused to let anything that had survived the journey die in his care. The 1848 Revolution ended it. The Austrian economy collapsed. The estate had to be sold. Thirty thousand plants scattered to other collections, other gardens, other hands. That's when Charles left Vienna for the second time. He spent his final years in Brussels — in a rented house with a small terrace and a few potted plants where his glasshouses used to be. His family said Charles never seemed bitter. Somehow, after all his struggles, he had come to believe that a garden wasn't something you owned. It was something you set in motion. In his final weeks, Charles planted bulbs in the small patch of earth behind the house. He knew he wouldn't see them bloom. But he planted them anyway. Charles von Hügel was buried at the Hietzing Cemetery — just down the road from the glasshouses he once kept burning through Viennese winters. His name still grows. Alyogyne huegelii — the Lilac Hibiscus — blooms in gardens Charles never lived to see. 1814 Joachim Zinner died in Brussels, Belgium. The Austrian landscape architect was seventy-two years old. Joachim was born in Vienna around 1742 — the son of Anton Zinner, court gardener to Prince Eugene of Savoy at the Belvedere. He grew up inside the most spectacular baroque garden in Europe. Watching his father command nature the way other men command armies. His father Anton died when he was twenty-one. And that's when Joachim was sent to Brussels — capital of the Austrian Netherlands — to manage the forests and parks of a territory he had never seen. Joachim's first great commission was the Brussels Park — Parc de Bruxelles. Built on the ruins of a royal palace that had burned and sat empty for forty years. Joachim and the architect Guimard felled twelve hundred old trees. They planted thirty-two hundred new ones. They laid out avenues radiating from a central point — three long lines of sight connecting the Royal Palace to the Parliament with mathematical precision. Joachim was so proud of it he spent two years building a scale model of the park in miniature. Every path. Every tree. Every building. Rendered in cork and wood shavings. Joachim packed the model up and hauled it across Europe to Vienna to show the Emperor. The Emperor reimbursed him for the trip. It was the closest thing to praise Joachim ever received. His second commission was the Sonian Forest — a vast woodland south of Brussels. The Emperor's instruction was simple. Grow timber. Joachim grew a cathedral. He planted beech trees — tens of thousands of them — in dense rows. The trunks grew straight and smooth as stone columns. They rose fifty meters before their branches opened into an interlocking canopy like the vaulted ceiling of a Gothic church. Joachim knew the trees would take two hundred years to reach their full height. He planted them anyway. His private life was quieter. And harder. Joachim had secretly married his first cousin in Brussels in 1761. They had four children. He outlived all of them. His wife died in 1802. Jeanne Marie at five. Louise Jeanne at twenty-four. By the end there was no one left. For more than thirty years, Joachim funneled nearly everything he earned into his uncle's debts. And although the debts were not his, he paid them in full — out of a stubbornness no one asked for and no one rewarded. Joachim lived alone at The Swan — La Maison du Cygne — a guildhall on the Grand-Place of Brussels. His rooms were full of maps and models. He avoided the theater, the salons, the social machinery of the city he had helped build. The only person who came regularly was his barber — Corneille Hommelen. When Joachim died on this day in 1814, he left his barber everything. His furniture. His tools. His drafting maps. His savings. Because Hommelen, the records say, had taken good care of him. The Swan is still standing. The Brussels Park still follows Joachim's geometry. And the Sonian Forest is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The beech trees are more than two hundred years old. Still rising in their columns. Still holding the light the way Joachim imagined it from a workshop full of cork in a city that never quite knew his name. There is a street in Brussels called Rue Zinner. That is what Joachim got. The barber got the rest. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear garden thoughts from the English poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West, who died on this day in 1962 at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England. She was seventy years old. Vita created the garden at Sissinghurst with her husband Harold Nicolson. They began with the ruins of an Elizabethan manor. A tumbledown, nettle-choked wreck. She fell in love with it on sight. She spent the rest of her life making it one of the most beloved gardens in the world. Vita wrote a gardening column for The Observer for years. Her voice was as distinctive on the page as her garden was on the land. Precise. Sensory. Entirely her own. On the subject of June, Vita wrote, "It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June. Larger than any rose, it has something of the cabbage rose's voluminous quality… it sheds its petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap." Vita knew exactly what she was looking at. And she never tired of saying so. Vita died on a warm sunny day in the Priest's House at Sissinghurst. The small tower room she made her own. Her golden retriever, Glen, nosed the door in her final hours. Vita looked up and said her final words: "Oh, Glen." Book Recommendation The Cook's Garden by Kevin West It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Cook's Garden by Kevin West. This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week's book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table. Kevin West comes from East Tennessee farmers and Smoky Mountain settlers — people who grew food because that was simply what you did. In The Cook's Garden, he argues that the surest path to a successful garden leads through the kitchen door. You don't start with the seeds. You start with the meal. Here's Kevin West: "It was black raspberry season when I went to see Talea and Doug Taylor at Montgomery Place Orchards. They are fruit people, and the extraordinary apples they grow read like poetry: Hidden Rose, Belle de Boskoop, Ashmead's Kernel, Duchess of Oldenberg, Black Twig, Cox's Orange Pippin, and dozens more. But Talea and Doug also grow vegetables to stock their farm stand until apples come in. Garlic is a reliable crop for them, and their daughter Caroline Olivia upcycles the scapes to make pesto — the recipe for which she generously shared. On many, many nights it has proven to be the solution to the urgent question: what's for dinner?" The Cook's Garden by Kevin West — for everyone whose cooking begins in the soil. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1899 Edwin Way Teale was born in Joliet, Illinois. The American naturalist was the kind of man who rented the insect rights to a two-acre field. The right to photograph every creature living in it. Edwin spent whole days crawling through it with a

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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
    649
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    Copyright ©2019-2026, Jennifer Ebeling|The Daily Gardener All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    The Daily Gardener

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