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2020 Wildflower of the Year – North Carolina Botanical Garden

The 2020 North Carolina Wildflower of the Year: marsh-pink (Sabatia angularis "Sah-BAY-tee-ah ANG-you-LARE-iss) @NCBotGarden

• aka: rose gentian, rose pink, or bitter-bloom.
• A biennial - Native to the US (South & East), Grows in low, wet meadows, woods & along roadsides.
• Marsh-pink grows best in moist soil in full to partial sun and is infrequently offered in nurseries because of its biennial habit.
• It seemingly disappears in years of drought,

Vita Sackville-West on her garden at Sissinghurst (1950) | House & Garden

"The place had been in the market for three years since the death of the last farmer-owner...

Brambles grew in wild profusion; bindweed wreathed its way into every support; ground-elder made a green carpet; docks and nettles flourished; couch­ grass sprouted; half the fruit trees in the orchard were dead; the ones that remained alive were growing in the coarsest grass; the moat was silted up and so invaded by reeds and bulrushes that the water was almost invisible; paths there were none, save of trodden mud. It had its charm.

It was Sleeping Beauty's castle with a ven­geance — if you liked to see it with a romantic eye. But, if you also looked at it with a realistic eye, you saw that Nature run wild was not quite so romantic as you thought, and entailed a great deal of laborious tidying up.

The most urgent thing to do was to plant hedges. We were extravagant over this, and planted yew, and have never regretted it. Everybody told us it took at least a century to make a good yew hedge, but the photographs will, I think, disprove this: the hedge is now only seventeen years old, a mere adoles­cent, and, at the end where the ground slopes and it has been allowed to grow up in order to maintain the top-level, it is 16 feet high.

At the end of all this is the herb garden, which always seems to allure visitors, no doubt because it is a secret, senti­mental little place. "Old world charm" is the phrase I always expect to hear, and nine times out of ten I get it. But, less romantic­ally, the herb garden does supply very useful things to the kitchen.

One needs years of patience to make a garden; one needs deeply to love it, in order to endure that patience. One needs optimism and foresight. One has to wait. One has to work hard oneself, sometimes, as I had to work hard, manually, during the war years, cutting all those hedges with shears in my spare time. I hated those hedges when I looked at my blistered hands; but at the same time, I still felt that it had been worthwhile planting them. They were the whole pattern and design and anatomy of the garden; and, as such was worth any trouble I was willing to take.”

Botanical History On This Day

1743 Joseph Banks, the British botanist of the Endeavor whose Australian collections and stewardship of Kew helped spread Linnaean botany across the globe, was born.

1780 Lewis David von Schweinitz, Moravian clergyman, “Father of North American Mycology,” and namesake of the rare Schweinitz sunflower, was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

1822 Jeremiah Bailey of Chester County, Pennsylvania, patented the first practical horse-drawn lawnmower, allowing one person to mow up to ten acres a day.

Unearthed Words

Valentine-tinted garden and nature verses from Julia Dorr—Rutland’s beloved poet—whose window overlooked the flowers that filled her work with bees, roses, lilies, and larkspur. Read the February poems by Julia Dorr

Grow That Garden Library™

Read The Daily Gardener review of A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson

Buy the book on Amazon: A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson

Today's Botanic Spark

1825 Nantucket-born botanist Maria Louise Owen, author of the landmark Flora of Nantucket and beloved mentor to generations of island botanists, was born into a family of plant-loving women.

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