May 9, 2019 Your Impact on Your Garden, Alexandre Cassini, Lewis and Clark and Le Page, the Delaware State Flower, Hewett Watson, A Nation in Bloom, Matthew Biggs, Prune Time, and Erwin Frink Smith

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Monologue

Take two gardeners.

Have them grow up learning to garden from the same person.

Have them read the same gardening books.

Have them go to the same gardening workshops.

Have them tour the same public gardens.

Yet their gardens will look different from one another.

Unique.

Gardens are art.

They are personal.

Remember that the next time you are trying to copy the look of another garden.

The difference isn't just topographical.

When it comes to your garden, yes, consider microclimates, plant varieties, soil, sun, and so forth.

But also, make sure to add yourself to the list of variables.

Botanical History On This Day

1781 Count Alexandre Henri Gabriel de Cassini, lawyer by profession and botanist by inclination, devoted his spare hours to the sunflower family and left descriptions so precise they still stand, two centuries on.

1807 Lewis and Clark return a borrowed book with Meriwether Lewis’ elegant note in the flyleaf, confirming that The History of Louisiana had traveled with him to the Pacific and back again.

1888 Delaware adopts the peach blossom as its state flower, a rosy emblem of the era when the state’s orchards were so abundant that peaches were fed to pigs, until disease humbled the “Peach State” reputation.

Unearthed Words

1804 Hewett Cottrell Watson, the father of British plant geography, was born, and his stirring letter to Darwin reveals a mind both proud and astonished to see natural selection finally knitted into method.

Grow That Garden Library™

Read The Daily Gardener’s review of A Nation in Bloom by Matthew Biggs

Buy the book on Amazon: A Nation in Bloom by Matthew Biggs

Today's Botanic Spark

1906 While tracing the story of peach yellows, Erwin Frink Smith emerges not only as a botanist who tried to solve an orchard’s heartbreak, but as a tender husband who memorialized his beloved Charlotte in pages of poetry, grief, and luminous observation.

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And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.