October 22, 2019 A Garden-Themed Wedding, Forager Gin, Helen Clay Frick, Edwin Way Teale, Discovering Vanilla, David Douglas, Bliss Carman, The Sanctuary of My Garden by Fotoula Reynolds, Last Call for Houseplants, and 4th-Grade Botany
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Curated News
A garden-history love story bloomed at London’s Asylum Chapel—an older couple brought together by 18th-century plant exchange research and Peter Collinson, then dressed the chapel as a “magical garden” with peach-and-apricot florals set boldly against a black ensemble.
And in Denver, a horticulturist from Denver Botanic Gardens and his college friend at Mythology Distillery turned chamomile, elderflower, and lemon verbena into a handsome collaboration: Forager Gin—proof, if any were needed, that botany is rarely far from celebration.
Botanical History On This Day
1910 Helen Clay Frick inspired a new chrysanthemum and—more lastingly—a wilderness birthday wish: Frick Park, created so Pittsburgh’s children could meet nature as companion and refuge.
1942 Edwin Way Teale was celebrated as the well-dressed man who could spend a “solid day” in a two-acre field doing apparently nothing, while quietly building a photographic universe of insects, later turning grief into cross-country seasonal journeys that became classic nature writing.
1974 Vanilla and the orchid tale drifted into print via a newspaper recipe for vanilla coffee liqueur—an indulgent reminder that behind a familiar flavor stands an orchid vine, years of patience, and the long history of human curiosity.
2014 David Douglas was memorialized at the “Doctor’s Pit” on Hawaiʻi Island—the botanist who identified hundreds of plants (including the Douglas fir) and died tragically after falling into an animal trap where a bull finished what gravity began.
Unearthed Words
Read Bliss Carman on autumn’s scarlet maples: A brisk little shiver of October color—maples like bugle-calls, asters like smoke on the hills.
Grow That Garden Library™
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The Sanctuary of My Garden: Poems by Fotoula Reynolds
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The Sanctuary of My Garden: Poems by Fotoula Reynolds
Today's Garden Chore
Last call for houseplants: bring them in before the cold deepens, rinse with a sharp spray (a touch of dish soap helps), and let your indoor “botanical library” become a living green centerpiece for the darker months.
Today's Botanic Spark
2003 A Louisville fourth-grade classroom became a botany laboratory—leaf studies, microscope work, carnations turned rainbow by colored water, flower dissections, and a sing-along of plant parts that proves curiosity is the most dependable seed.
At the end of the class, the children stood up and sang to the tune of Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, Stigma, Petal, Stem, and Roots.
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