July 6, 2020 Gardens on Lockdown, Hollyhocks, Leonard Plukenet, William Jackson Hooker, Frank Smythe, Bee Poetry, The Humane Gardener by Nancy Lawson, and an Ode to Basil
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Curated News
The hidden gardens of lockdown | The Guardian
“As some of the UK’s best-loved gardens prepare to reopen to the public, we ask the head gardeners what has been happening behind their closed gates.”
“Hollyhocks are designed to give easy access to quantities of pollen, through the open funnels of the single varieties. Just watching a less svelte bee (like a bumble bee) climbing around a hollyhock illustrates how double flowers can be problematic. Aesthetically, the simple singles are very desirable but have been out-marketed by the doubles. The best way to procure singles, in the best colors, is through a generous friend.”
Botanical History On This Day
1706 Leonard Plukenet, royal botanist to Queen Mary II, whose herbarium joined Sir Hans Sloane’s vast collections and whose gloriously overlong name for the sacred lotus predated Linnaeus’s tidy binomials.
1785 Sir William Jackson Hooker, the wealthy botanist and illustrator, who rebuilt his Icelandic discoveries from memory and later transformed Kew into a world-class botanical garden.
1900 Frank Smythe and the Valley of Flowers: the Himalayan climber and plantsman who helped reveal India’s famed Valley of Flowers, a high-mountain fairyland of alpine blooms.
Unearthed Words
Buzzing hymns to July’s busiest garden visitors—bees in clover, dandelions, dahlias, and moonlit borders.
Poems About Bees
Grow That Garden Library™
Read The Daily Gardener review of The Humane Gardener by Nancy Lawson
Buy the book on Amazon: The Humane Gardener
Today’s Botanic Spark
2015 An Ode to Basil, as Leah Raup of unboredhousewife.com celebrates summer’s sweetest herb—Caprese, penne, ice cream, cookies, and all—in a playful, fragrant tribute.
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