April 28, 2026 Charles Cotton, Oakes Ames, UA Fanthorpe, Bunny Williams by Bunny Williams, and Harry Bolus
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Today’s Show Notes
Late April still has mornings that feel like waiting.
Cold soil. Bare patches. Nothing moving yet.
You stand at the edge of the bed with your coffee and think, not yet.
And then one afternoon, you step outside and the whole garden has shifted without you.
The forsythia is done. The tulips are leaning. Something you didn’t plant is blooming along the fence like it’s been there for years.
Everything reaching. Open. And happening at the same time.
That’s late spring.
The ground does not wait for you to be ready.
And the plan you made in February, the one with the graph paper and the colored pencils and the seed packets lined up on the kitchen table, is already somewhere behind you.
It can feel like chaos. It can feel like you’re losing the thread of the thing before you even started pulling.
But there is a way through it. And it is simpler than you think.
Today’s Garden History
1630 Charles Cotton was born.
He came into the world at Beresford Hall in Staffordshire, along the River Dove.
His father was a well-connected Royalist who counted poets and writers among his closest friends.
Including a retired London textile merchant named Izaak Walton.
When Charles was twenty-eight, his father died.
That is when Charles took over Beresford Hall. A beautiful legacy. Buried in debt.
He wrote about it plainly.
He said it had left him “snar’d in bonds and endless strife” and that even the bread on his table tasted of affliction.
It was Izaak who stepped in at that moment.
He had known the Cotton family since Charles was a boy. He was not after the land. Not after the estate.
He simply cared about Charles.
From the beginning, the two men shared a passion for fishing.
For over two decades, they fished together in the crystal water of the Dove.
Especially a stretch called Pike Pool, where a jagged rock rose straight up from the center of the water.
In 1674, Charles built a small folly right beside the river.
A little square stone building. A pyramid roof. Hidden in the gorge so completely you had to know it was there to find it.
Above the door, he carved the Latin words Piscatoribus Sacrum.
Sacred to all fishermen.
Below that, two sets of initials intertwined. C.C. and I.W.
Charles Cotton. Izaak Walton.
Cut into stone.
It was there that they would rest after fishing. Smoke their pipes. Dine on whatever they caught.
In 1675, Charles published The Planter’s Manual.
A guide to raising fruit trees in what he called a “plain and easy style.”
He called his trees his children.
And when it came to pruning, he wrote about finding the eye.
The living point on a branch where new growth will come.
Then making the cut three or four fingers above it.
Sloping the blade away so rain would run off the wound instead of sitting in it and rotting the new wood.
He believed a planter should have a quiet, gentle, and thoughtful spirit.
Just like his friend.
When Izaak was eighty-three, he asked Charles to write a second part to his famous fishing book, The Compleat Angler.
Charles wrote all twelve chapters in just ten days.
Five years later, the debt took the house. Beresford Hall was sold.
Two years after that, Izaak died.
Charles spent his final years in London, translating the essays of Michel de Montaigne.
Inside those essays, he found something familiar.
Montaigne had written about his own great friendship.
When asked why he loved his friend so completely, he answered simply:
“Because he was he, and I was I.”
Charles translated those words two years after Izaak died.
He knew what they meant.
Charles Cotton died in 1687. Still in debt.
Beresford Hall is gone now.
But the small stone fishing house still stands on the Dove.
And the initials remain above the door.
C.C. and I.W. Still intertwined.
1950 Oakes Ames died.
The American botanist passed away at the age of seventy-five.
He was a quiet deserter of a very loud family name.
His grandfather built the Union Pacific Railroad and died in disgrace. His father served as Governor of Massachusetts.
The name Ames was everywhere.
Oakes chose orchids.
Not the showy ones. The difficult ones.
The ones that wilt the moment you pick them. The ones that turn to mush unless handled with a botanist’s precision and a surgeon’s patience.
He arrived at Harvard and stayed for fifty years.
Not in the sunlight. In the basement.
His workspace smelled sharp and medicinal from the mercuric chloride he used to keep insects away.
He worked not with a knife, but a needle.
Teasing apart petals no bigger than a grain of rice.
If his hand shook, the flower was gone.
When he found a partner in his wife Blanche, he sat at the microscope and called out measurements into the quiet.
Three millimeters. Notched at the apex. Hirsute.
And Blanche caught every word with her pen.
He did not need to look up.
He once said:
“Surely the unrest in my soul, caused by doubt, made me determined to represent all the types of orchids… You’re in a sense of happiness I shall not attempt to describe.”
One specimen. Then another. Then another.
A plant cannot feel shame. It cannot feel pride. It simply is.
And Oakes spent fifty years in a room full of them, learning how to do the same.
To just be Oakes.
Not the grandson. Not the Governor’s son.
Just the man with the needle and the flower and the question he actually wanted to answer.
Sixty thousand orchids.
Sixty thousand contemplations.
Sixty thousand moments of being nobody’s legacy but his own.
Unearthed Words
In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the English poet UA Fanthorpe, who died on this day in 2009.
She did not publish her first poem until she was nearly fifty.
Before that, she was a prestigious headmistress.
A woman of authority.
But she walked away from it.
She became a clerk in a psychiatric hospital.
Not to be noble. But because she realized being a boss was making her deaf to the truth.
She traded her office for a desk in a hallway.
Where she could watch. And give patients a voice.
In that hospital, she saw a different kind of love.
Not the dramatic kind.
But the kind that lives in daily care.
She called it maintenance.
Here is an excerpt from her poem Atlas:
“There are limited ways of saying I love you. Many of them are not even words. One is the steady, rickety, habit-bound performance of maintenance.
It’s knowing what time and weather are doing to your property, it’s the specific trust of the heart that understands the messages of the meter and the gauge.
It’s the sensible side of love, which knows that for the heart to be at ease the roof must not leak, the garden must be kept, and the tax-man satisfied.”
She lived this out for forty-four years with her partner Rosie Bailey.
In a cottage. With a garden. Simply tended.
When UA died, Rosie was beside her.
Watching the gauges. Keeping the garden.
Doing exactly what the poem described.
Book Recommendation
Bunny Williams by Bunny Williams 
It’s time to grow the Grow That Garden Library with today’s book: Bunny Williams by Bunny Williams.
It’s Modern Masters Week.
A week devoted to contemporary voices who have shaped how we live with plants today.
Bunny is a world-class decorator who is not afraid to get her boots muddy.
She understands that a garden is not a painting you look at through a window.
It is the first room you enter. And the last room you leave.
She writes the way she gardens.
With practical elegance.
She believes in good bones.
Clipped hedges. Stone walls. Structure first.
And then she lets the abundance take over.
Roses a little messy. Borders loose.
Bunny holds to one principle.
Restraint is not limitation. It is confidence.
The confidence to leave a space empty so the light can hit the grass.
The confidence to wait for a plant to grow instead of buying a finished look.
In this book, she invites you into her Sunken Garden in Connecticut.
And shows you that the most beautiful room you will ever own does not have a ceiling.
She writes that a garden is only successful if it makes you want to stay for one more cup of tea.
Botanic Spark
And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1834 Harry Bolus was born.
The South African stockbroker made a fortune in diamonds. But he is remembered for the hours he spent in the soil.
In 1864, he lost his eldest son. The boy was only six years old.
Harry was a man of logic. Of ledgers.
But he could not account for his sorrow.
In that hollow, a friend handed him a botany book.
Not as a gift. As a prescription.
Something for his hands to do while the rest of him tried to find a reason to begin again.
So Harry started pressing specimens. Learning the names of things.
The heaths. The orchids. The small, stubborn flowers of the Cape.
In 1876, he traveled to Kew Gardens. Spent forty days inside its great library.
He called them his forty happy days.
On the voyage home, his ship struck a reef.
Every specimen lost. Every note. Every piece of his happiness taken by the sea.
Harry stepped onto shore.
Looked at the water that took everything.
And started again.
He made twenty-eight more crossings.
When asked if he was a botanist, he answered quietly:
“I do not call myself a botanist, but I have studied botany in my leisure hours.”
In those leisure hours, he built the oldest herbarium in South Africa.
Described hundreds of species.
And kept going.
Until the end.
Final Thoughts
When everything is moving at once and the season feels bigger than your hands, stop.
Ask the smallest question you can.
What did I love last year? What actually made it from the garden to the table?
You do not need the whole plan back.
Just one true answer.
The garden already knows.
It has been holding it all winter.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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