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

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

Subscribe Apple [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-gardener/id1458062597] | Google [https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Im4i25xyanawqu5fin7oy6smrnm?t%3DThe_Daily_Gardener%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/5ODID572hLPggNp9WZBnzC] | Stitcher [https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=387618] | iHeart [https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-daily-gardener-51539428/?cmp=web_share] Support The Daily Gardener Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/TheDailyGardener] Buy Me A Coffee [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DailyGardener] Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter [https://thedailygardener.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1f92c654190e77439b2813550&id=5f0634e0cd] | Daily Gardener Community [https://www.facebook.com/groups/thedailygardener/] 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 [https://thedailygardener.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Ottolenghi-Simple-by-Yotam-Ottolenghi.jpg] https://thedailygardener.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Ottolenghi-Simple-by-Yotam-Ottolenghi.jpg 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 Day in 1837, paddling up the Berbice River in British Guiana, he rounded a bend and stopped. Leaves the size of tables floated on the surface. Each one rimmed in crimson. Each one holding its shape against the current without a ripple. The giant water lily — Victoria amazonica. Robert wrote: "All calamities were forgotten. I felt as a botanist, and felt myself rewarded." He sent his sketches back to England. Among them — the underside of the leaf. Not the flower. The ribs. A web of ridges radiating out from the center like the bones of a cathedral — a design that held six feet of leaf flat on the water and could bear the weight of a child. Joseph Paxton, the head gardener at Chatsworth, studied those ribs. He placed his daughter Annie on a lily pad to prove they held. And when he was asked to design a building for the Great Exhibition of 1851, he drew the Crystal Palace from the lily's own logic — iron ribs, glass panels, light pouring through. Robert was in the Caribbean when the Crystal Palace opened. He never stood inside it. He just sent the sketches. And the lily did the rest. Final Thoughts Rhubarb doesn't wait. It comes in fast and bright and tart and then it's gone. If you've been meaning to make something with it, this is the week. David's recipe is in the Facebook group. And if you have one you love — share it. That's what the group is for. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

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

Subscribe Apple [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-gardener/id1458062597] | Google [https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Im4i25xyanawqu5fin7oy6smrnm?t%3DThe_Daily_Gardener%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/5ODID572hLPggNp9WZBnzC] | Stitcher [https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=387618] | iHeart [https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-daily-gardener-51539428/?cmp=web_share] Support The Daily Gardener Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/TheDailyGardener] Buy Me A Coffee [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DailyGardener] Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter [https://thedailygardener.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1f92c654190e77439b2813550&id=5f0634e0cd] | Daily Gardener Community [https://www.facebook.com/groups/thedailygardener/] 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 [https://www.amazon.com/Ruffage-Practical-Vegetables-Abra-Berens/dp/1452169322?crid=1CYRKQWWJ5MHV&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ITzSWcXQH-nPtyGg1-rSRqCHfvETnml41aYcFUEWMaRCsElMnwlRD6_j0G2oO4A8.YOcUP32fjxha3iqjEe82RsGVifMutMe3upiilwKP3mc&dib_tag=se&keywords=Ruffage+by+Abra+Berens&qid=1775970311&s=books&sprefix=ruffage+by+abra+berens%2Cstripbooks%2C156&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=de5b637d51e823a581b5547740b1752e&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl] https://www.amazon.com/Ruffage-Practical-Vegetables-Abra-Berens/dp/1452169322?crid=1CYRKQWWJ5MHV&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ITzSWcXQH-nPtyGg1-rSRqCHfvETnml41aYcFUEWMaRCsElMnwlRD6_j0G2oO4A8.YOcUP32fjxha3iqjEe82RsGVifMutMe3upiilwKP3mc&dib_tag=se&keywords=Ruffage+by+Abra+Berens&qid=1775970311&s=books&sprefix=ruffage+by+abra+berens%2Cstripbooks%2C156&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=de5b637d51e823a581b5547740b1752e&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl 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. Sarah died on May 29, 1917 — five days before her thirtieth birthday. Sarah had been working without ceasing — her research, her teaching, her wartime volunteer work — until her body gave out. Sarah had told her Sunday school children: "The universe is always singing, and we must learn to listen, so that our heart may join the universal chorus." Sarah heard it in the seaweeds, in the tide moving over Mersea Island. Sarah heard it in her lab, where she sang while she worked. Still listening — right up to the end. Final Thoughts The garden has a longer memory than your disappointment does. It held the thing you wrote off. And then, when the conditions were right — not when you were ready, but on the garden's own schedule — it handed it back. So this spring, don't be too quick to decide what's gone. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

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

Subscribe Apple [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-gardener/id1458062597] | Google [https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Im4i25xyanawqu5fin7oy6smrnm?t%3DThe_Daily_Gardener%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/5ODID572hLPggNp9WZBnzC] | Stitcher [https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=387618] | iHeart [https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-daily-gardener-51539428/?cmp=web_share] Support The Daily Gardener Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/TheDailyGardener] Buy Me A Coffee [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DailyGardener] Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter [https://thedailygardener.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1f92c654190e77439b2813550&id=5f0634e0cd] | Daily Gardener Community [https://www.facebook.com/groups/thedailygardener/] 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 [https://www.amazon.com/Seed-Table-Organically-Preserving-Gardening/dp/1684818494?crid=3IZV3ZJLIB611&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LeVgn8cGtYK-ZF8nhy6UPw.NQbc4OxsOIRbS5DqA2otMzMum6-s321GRWW_nisar_k&dib_tag=se&keywords=seed+to+table+by+luau+ghafari&qid=1775970280&s=books&sprefix=seed+to+table+by+luay+ghafari%2Cstripbooks%2C163&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=ec04d8b96ed56bfa4c71237c1df8e9ae&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl] https://www.amazon.com/Seed-Table-Organically-Preserving-Gardening/dp/1684818494?crid=3IZV3ZJLIB611&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LeVgn8cGtYK-ZF8nhy6UPw.NQbc4OxsOIRbS5DqA2otMzMum6-s321GRWW_nisar_k&dib_tag=se&keywords=seed+to+table+by+luau+ghafari&qid=1775970280&s=books&sprefix=seed+to+table+by+luay+ghafari%2Cstripbooks%2C163&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=ec04d8b96ed56bfa4c71237c1df8e9ae&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl 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 months collecting, pressing, studying. And when Margaret came home to Yorkshire, she didn't stop. Margaret kept going for fourteen years. By then, Margaret's illness had crept into her arms. Eventually Margaret could no longer hold a pen. So Margaret dictated her scientific notes to her daughters while they wrote. Margaret called seaweed collecting her "consolation of consolations." In 1863, Margaret published British Sea-weeds — a book that stayed in use for nearly a century. Margaret died on October 4, 1873. She was sixty-four years old. After Margaret was gone, a memorial tablet was placed in her church. It wasn't funded by a scientific institution. It was funded by more than a thousand children from across the country — children who had read Margaret's stories and her nature parables — who each sent in small coins. A thousand small offerings for the woman who had taught them to look down. Final Thoughts June was made for happiness. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that lives in a garden chair with a cushion on it, under a string of lights you finally hung. The garden has been working all spring. It's June now. Go enjoy what it made. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

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

Subscribe Apple [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-gardener/id1458062597] | Google [https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Im4i25xyanawqu5fin7oy6smrnm?t%3DThe_Daily_Gardener%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/5ODID572hLPggNp9WZBnzC] | Stitcher [https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=387618] | iHeart [https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-daily-gardener-51539428/?cmp=web_share] Support The Daily Gardener Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/TheDailyGardener] Buy Me A Coffee [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DailyGardener] Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter [https://thedailygardener.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1f92c654190e77439b2813550&id=5f0634e0cd] | Daily Gardener Community [https://www.facebook.com/groups/thedailygardener/] 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 [https://www.amazon.com/Cooks-Garden-Gardeners-Selecting-Vegetables/dp/059331932X?crid=9MG5K59ATXXW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.REzW2IllRQh3KMuyZo6DGt296Og6HFrGQ4G9ekAB1o_QiYkkkkCpOlAKk7gtdRyKJRIGg9-JNumsYqk5luj86V_FdiowTGm6HbxYOXxc_cR_upey96oOR6nGDGKVOCWIehB14VrhNR3IbC8CdASRUg.tCDV1I2Wv3LlZM3pcFW3hVgiECKPSHyn3A14wFeXC0c&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+Cook%E2%80%99s+Garden+by+Kevin+West&qid=1775970253&s=books&sprefix=the+cook+s+garden+by+kevin+west%2Cstripbooks%2C170&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=0ab7c3a24f5483cdd3ef926f892c4c15&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl] https://www.amazon.com/Cooks-Garden-Gardeners-Selecting-Vegetables/dp/059331932X?crid=9MG5K59ATXXW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.REzW2IllRQh3KMuyZo6DGt296Og6HFrGQ4G9ekAB1o_QiYkkkkCpOlAKk7gtdRyKJRIGg9-JNumsYqk5luj86V_FdiowTGm6HbxYOXxc_cR_upey96oOR6nGDGKVOCWIehB14VrhNR3IbC8CdASRUg.tCDV1I2Wv3LlZM3pcFW3hVgiECKPSHyn3A14wFeXC0c&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+Cook%E2%80%99s+Garden+by+Kevin+West&qid=1775970253&s=books&sprefix=the+cook+s+garden+by+kevin+west%2Cstripbooks%2C170&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=0ab7c3a24f5483cdd3ef926f892c4c15&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl 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 magnifying glass. Neighbors watched from a distance, trying to figure out what on earth he was doing. But Edwin was making friends. He estimated there were eighteen hundred varieties of insects in that field. He photographed fifteen thousand of them. Once, Edwin befriended a praying mantis. He named her Dinah. Dinah lived in his study for weeks. Once Edwin took Dinah to New York City. Dinah escaped from his pocket on Broadway. There, Edwin — well-dressed, and six feet tall — ran down the street after a bug. Back home, one afternoon, Dinah devoured her own arm. He had just enough time to get the picture. Edwin married Nellie Donovan in 1923. Nellie became his navigator, his note-taker, his companion in the field. Every day on the road they wrote things down together. Birds. Insects. Blossoms. Weather. The slow movement of the season itself. Then the war came. Their son David was killed in Germany. Edwin and Nellie got in a black Buick and started driving. Seventeen thousand miles. Following the advance of spring north. The season moving up the continent at about fifteen miles a day. Sweeping up the valleys. Climbing the hillsides. They followed it all the way. That journey became North with the Spring. Three more books followed. The last one won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. Edwin once wrote — "How strangely inaccurate it is to measure the length of living by length of life. The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living." In 1974, Edwin was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He did what he had always done. He kept field notes. Documenting the progression with the same care he had given to insects in a meadow and spring moving up a continent. Edwin Way Teale died on October 18, 1980, in Norwich, Connecticut. He was eighty-one years old. Final Thoughts Gertrude asked what one could say about June. And then answered her own question by walking into the wood and saying it out loud. June doesn't show its hand. It just gives — fully, without reservation, without a word about what comes next. That's worth something. That's worth going outside for. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

June 1, 2026 Johann Sebastian Müller, William Bull, Henry Beston, The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom, and Mary Beal

Subscribe Apple [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-gardener/id1458062597] | Google [https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Im4i25xyanawqu5fin7oy6smrnm?t%3DThe_Daily_Gardener%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/5ODID572hLPggNp9WZBnzC] | Stitcher [https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=387618] | iHeart [https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-daily-gardener-51539428/?cmp=web_share] Support The Daily Gardener Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/TheDailyGardener] Buy Me A Coffee [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DailyGardener] Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter [https://thedailygardener.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1f92c654190e77439b2813550&id=5f0634e0cd] | Daily Gardener Community [https://www.facebook.com/groups/thedailygardener/] Today's Show Notes Let's talk about rhubarb — one of the spring garden's greatest gifts. I grew up with a big rhubarb patch right by the back fence. Those enormous, celery-like stalks just took over that corner of the yard. My mom would cut them and mix them with strawberries for the most delightful crumble. She'd dish it up and serve it with Schwan's vanilla ice cream. I still make it. Rhubarb is one of those plants that keeps coming back no matter what. It dies back at the end of the season, disappears completely, and then — right when you've almost given up — there it is again. That's a good thing to remember on the first day of June. Some of the garden's best gifts keep coming back. Today's Garden History 1792 Johann Sebastian Müller died in Lambeth, London. The German-born botanical illustrator was seventy-seven years old. Johann was born in 1715 in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of a Kunstgärtner — a professional art-gardener who tended the private gardens of the noble Stromer family. That's how Johann knew plants so well. Because he lived beside them day after day. But while Johann loved plants, he didn't want a spade to work the land. Instead, he wanted to capture it — artistically, with engraving tools and paintbrushes. And so in 1744, after apprenticing for nearly a decade, Johann packed his portfolio and crossed the Channel with his brother Tobias, headed for London. Somewhere in that crossing, Johann Sebastian Müller became John Miller. Not a lie. Just a way to make his name legible in a city that would not have met him halfway. John settled in Westminster. And whenever he needed a specimen, he walked three miles down to the Chelsea Physic Garden. He refused to draw from dried herbarium sheets. Instead, John found his inspiration exclusively among living plants, where he took a very matter-of-fact approach and didn't hide what was right before him. He painted not only the beautiful blossoms, but also the stamens and the pistils — the husbands and the wives, as Linnaeus called them — classifying plants by their reproductive parts. Critics called all of that material lewd and morally suspect. But John just kept working. Over the course of seven years, he self-published his masterwork — the Illustratio Systematis Sexualis Linnaei, An Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus — in twenty installments. Eighty-five subscribers supported him, including a fellow transplant from Germany and garden lover, Queen Charlotte, who ordered two copies. In July of 1775, a letter arrived from Carl Linnaeus himself. It was about John's engraving of the sunflower — a plate so precise it showed the flower from every angle, its seeds, its stem, its reproductive parts — nothing omitted, nothing softened. Linnaeus wrote that it was "more beautiful and more accurate than any seen since the beginning of the world." The father of modern botany had looked at John Miller's sunflower and said: no one has ever seen a plant more clearly. John worked until the very end. He fathered twenty-seven children and trained two of his sons, John Frederick and James, to follow in his footsteps. They both went on to illustrate the voyages of Captain Cook. John died on this day in 1792 and was buried at St. Mary's Church in Lambeth — which, as it turns out, was the most fitting place imaginable, because that church is now the Garden Museum. And John is still there — under the floor, beneath a building devoted entirely to the history of gardening. John Miller gave the living world its most precise, most honest portraits of plants — no apologies, no prettifying, and no hiding what was actually there. 1902 William Bull died in Chelsea, London. The English nurseryman and plant collector was seventy-four years old. William was born in Winchester, England, and lost his father young. He was raised by his grandfather in Shirley, near Southampton — a comfortably off household that expected him to do something sensible with his life. At fourteen, he chose gardening. And to their credit, his family supported his choice. William spent the rest of his life proving it wasn't a mistake. He apprenticed first in Winchester, then made his way to London to join Henderson's nursery in St. John's Wood — one of the finest establishments in the city. By twenty, William was traveling the country as a representative, carrying delicate plant specimens to private estates, walking the last miles himself so nothing shifted in transit. When a later employer refused him a partnership, William took over the nursery of John Weeks on King's Road in Chelsea — a world-class establishment with state-of-the-art glasshouses and a seventy-foot winter garden. William was thirty-three years old and couldn't afford the purchase price, so he negotiated an annuity instead — three hundred pounds a year — and spent the next thirteen years building his dream on borrowed ground. William called his establishment Bull's Establishment for New and Rare Plants. His peers called it something else. Fellow nurseryman Benjamin Williams declared that Bull's nursery was "Horticulture in Excelsis" — horticulture at its absolute highest. As the business grew, William paid to send plant hunters to Colombia, Liberia, Panama, and the Eastern Archipelago — the most dangerous corners of the globe — to bring back species no European greenhouse had ever held. Some of those men didn't come home. Richard Pearce, one of the finest plant collectors of his generation, died of yellow fever in Panama at thirty-three years old, looking for orchids for William's collection. Beginning in 1883, William held annual orchid exhibitions at his King's Road nursery. For fifteen years, it was one of the great sights of the London season — visited by the King of Siam, the Prince of Wales, and what felt like every duke and earl in England. The Morning Post declared it "a sight that could be seen nowhere else in the world." 1878 A disease called coffee rust swept through the plantations of Ceylon — modern-day Sri Lanka — and wiped out the coffee crop entirely. An entire island's economy collapsed overnight. William had been quietly growing a Liberian coffee variety that was immune to the blight. He called the ruined planters his "suffering brethren of the soil," and he sent them everything he had — thousands of seedlings, packed into his specially patented plant cases, germinated to exactly the right height to survive the journey. The plantations recovered. The island found its footing again. In 1897, the Royal Horticultural Society named William one of the first sixty recipients of the Victoria Medal of Honour — the highest honor the botanical world could offer. The following year, William sold some of his grounds and stepped back from the grand exhibitions. But still, he kept working — with a smaller operation, and thirteen employees — until a short illness took him in the spring of 1902. William died on this day and was buried at Brompton Cemetery in London. His sons carried William Bull & Sons fourteen more years after he was gone. And somewhere in a botanical garden today, beside a plant that arrived in England because a young man walked into a jungle and didn't come back — a label still reads W. Bull. Unearthed Words In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from The Outermost House by the American writer Henry Beston, born on this day in 1888. In 1926, Henry went to Cape Cod for a two-week vacation — at a small cottage he had built on the sand dunes near Nauset Beach. He never left. Instead, he stayed a full year — alone with the tides, the shorebirds, the winter storms, and his journal. That year became The Outermost House — one of the great works of American nature writing. In it, he wrote about gardens. Henry wrote, "A garden is the mirror of a mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms." Henry stayed with me after I read that. I think about it every time I walk into the garden for just a few minutes — and stay until my husband comes to get me. Book Recommendation The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom [https://www.amazon.com/Salad-Garden-Joy-Larkcom/dp/0711238707?&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=585570ca422c9904f8395f3344b6876c&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl] https://www.amazon.com/Salad-Garden-Joy-Larkcom/dp/0711238707?&linkCode=ll2&tag=gardenradione-20&linkId=585570ca422c9904f8395f3344b6876c&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom. 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. There is a quote on the cover of this book by Alys Fowler, and it says everything: "The minute I finished reading this book, I went outside and sowed some lettuce." That is exactly what Joy Larkcom does to you. Joy spent years traveling through Europe in a caravan with her husband and two young children, collecting the seeds of local vegetable varieties that were quietly vanishing from the world. Here she is, from the introduction: "Finding these plants and learning how to grow them has been a long and wonderful voyage of discovery. Its first leg was what we fondly call our grand vegetable tour. In August of 1976, my husband Don Pollard and I, with our children Brendan and Kirsten, who were then seven and five years old, left Montrose Farm for a year to travel around Europe in a caravan. Our main purpose was to learn about traditional and modern methods of vegetable growing — and to collect the seed of local varieties of vegetables which, as a handful of far-sighted people had begun to appreciate, were an invaluable genetic heritage that was vanishing fast." And this is what she did with everything she learned: "To get height — a key element in potagers — I train tomatoes up an attractive spiral steel support, sometimes intermingling them with ornamental climbers. I always leave a few clumps of chicory to run to seed in their second season. They grow over seven feet high and produce fresh flushes of sky blue edible flowers every morning over many weeks. The giant winter radishes will do the same, making glorious pink or white flowered clumps in their second spring and seemingly endless crops of delectable edible seed pods. To make the most impact with colorful plants, I almost always plant in groups at equidistant spacing rather than in traditional rows. Bull blood beetroot is a favorite with its scarlet leaves — red cabbage, ornamental cabbages and kales — and for textured effects, I add the ground-hugging ice plant, glossy-leaved purslanes, dill, and fennel. And every year I succumb to the temptation to make patterns with the many salad plants grown as cut-and-come-again seedlings." The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom — the book that will send you straight outside the minute you finish it. Botanic Spark And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. 1964 Mary Beal died in Daggett, California. The American botanist and painter was eighty-five years old. In 1910, Mary was working as a librarian in Riverside, California, when pneumonia stopped her cold. Her friend — the naturalist John Burroughs — knew someone who might help. John Muir's daughter Helen had moved to a ranch in the Mojave Desert for her own health, and Muir arranged for Mary to come and stay. That's why she pitched a tent on the Van Dyke Ranch in Daggett. And although she planned to stay a year or two, she ended up staying fifty-four years. Friends would stop on train layovers and bring her flowers and their sympathy. They called it a desolate place. But Mary looked at the sand and saw a universe. She taught herself botany from Jepson's manual. Each morning, she mounted her horse, Dolly Varden, and rode out into the canyons with a camera and a notebook and a pocketful of chia seeds for lunch. Mary's friend Harold Weight described her this way: "If you should come upon a small active woman in some isolated corner of the Mojave, wrapped about with photographic equipment and clinging to the canyon wall with fingers and toes — it will be quite safe to say: Hello, Mary Beal." For years, Mary searched for a flower called the Samija — the stick-leaf — that she had photographed once on Ord Mountain and never found again. A decade passed. The memory grew hazy. And Mary began to doubt her own eyes. Mary wrote: "If it had not been for the photograph I had taken of that Ord mountain specimen, I would have doubted my memory of finding it." Then one spring, a small box of tagged flowers arrived to be identified. Number one was Mary's elusive Samija. Two days later, she rode out to the Bullion Mountains. Mary wrote: "One small winding canyon held treasure-trove beyond my most wishful dreams. Even today I have a vivid memory of one gorgeous specimen that was truly the queen of the desert garden." Mary Beal arrived in the Mojave to survive. She stayed to learn every plant by name, paint them by hand, and send their scent to botanists who had never seen them. Mary died on this day in the desert she had chosen. And a trail at Mojave National Preserve still carries her name. Final Thoughts If you have a rhubarb plant, go easy on it. Never take more than a third of the stalks at once. Leave the rest and let it grow back. Then come back in a couple of weeks and it will have more for you. And if your rhubarb hasn't been quite right — fewer stalks than usual, a little sluggish — try a handful of lime worked into the soil around the base. Sometimes that will do the trick. Rhubarb is generous. And it's a great gardener gift. Divide it every so often and give some to a friend. That's how the best things travel: one gardener to the next, roots and all. Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.