May 1, 2026 Carl Linnaeus and Species Plantarum, May Theilgaard Watts, Joseph Addison, Fresh Cuts by Edwina von Gal, and Emerson’s May-Day
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Today’s Show Notes
It’s the last day of April.
And if you’ve been waiting for the right moment to tuck pansies into a pot or a border, this is it.
Pansies love a cool spring.
They want these exact mornings—bright but not hot, damp but not heavy.
Give them a little shade by afternoon, and they will bloom their hearts out for weeks.
The word pansy comes from the French pensée, meaning thought.
Bruce Springsteen once left pansies at the grave of Robert Ingersoll.
With this note:
“I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma.”
A pansy.
As a thought.
An idea.
And the start of action.
Today’s Garden History
1873 William Starling Sullivant died.
The American botanist passed away in Columbus, Ohio—the same city where he was born, the same place his father once surveyed when it was still frontier land.
William became the father of American bryology, the study of mosses.
While others chased orchids and towering conifers, William crouched, peered through lenses, and studied plants most people stepped over.
And what he found was an entire world.
He described nearly three hundred species of mosses and liverworts and wrote the bryophyte sections for Asa Gray’s Manual of Botany, a foundational guide for plant identification.
Then came his masterpiece, Icones Muscorum, published in 1864—one hundred twenty-nine copper plates of North American mosses, drawn with scrupulous accuracy.
Every frond.
Every spore capsule.
His work still matters today.
But his life was not quiet.
His first wife, Jane, died just months after their wedding.
At twenty, he left his studies when his father died suddenly and stepped in to run the family business.
Years later, he met Eliza Griscom Wheeler.
She ignited his botanical work.
Collected alongside him.
Discovered species on her own.
The genus Sullivantia bears his name.
But it was Eliza who found those delicate, cliff-dwelling plants.
When Eliza died of cholera in 1850, William had a wreath of Sullivantia carved into her headstone.
And then he returned to his mosses.
To the tiny worlds of green that brought him solace.
If you have ever planted Sullivant’s Milkweed—that smooth, rose-pink Asclepias that monarchs adore—that is for William.
And if you have grown Black-Eyed Susan called Goldsturm, tracing back to Rudbeckia fulgida variety sullivantii, that is him, too.
1827 David Douglas reached the summit of Athabasca Pass.
The Scottish botanist stood waist-deep in snow in the Canadian Rockies.
Carrying seeds, dried plants, and soaking journals.
His moccasins were rotting.
His eyesight already failing.
He was just twenty-eight.
On that same date, twenty-four years earlier, the Louisiana Purchase was signed.
A line drawn on paper.
And here was David.
Walking it.
Freezing.
Starving.
Collecting plants.
The Indigenous people he traveled among—the Chinook and the Kalapuya—called him the Grass Man.
They watched him wander, fixated on what others ignored.
In his journal that day, he wrote:
“The snow being very soft, and the weather warm, we were often waist-deep.
The view from the top is most terrific.
I was so much struck with the beauty of the scenery.
I ascended a mountain on the North side.
This I named Mount Brown, in honour of R. Brown, Esquire, the illustrious botanist.”
David introduced hundreds of species to Western gardens.
Douglas fir.
Sitka spruce.
Flowering currant.
California poppies.
Lupines.
Penstemons.
Oregon grape.
Plants we pass every day.
Carried home in a saddlebag.
He died seven years later in Hawaii.
Falling into a cattle pit trap.
Killed by a bull.
Thirty-five years old.
Every seed he sent back was paid for in labor, in danger, and in devotion to finding what nature held.
Unearthed Words
In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the American writer Annie Dillard, born on this day in 1945.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
A year spent watching, crawling through grasses, tracking insects, and seeing what others missed.
She wrote:
“All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water.
If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring.
At the ring’s center is a single atom of magnesium.
Now: if you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin.
The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood.”
Green.
Red.
One atom apart.
She reminds us that every leaf is a miracle.
And that what feeds a plant and what feeds us are cousins.
Book Recommendation
It’s time to Grow That Garden Library with today’s book: Fresh Cuts by Edwina von Gal.
This book is part of Modern Masters Week here on The Daily Gardener, a week devoted to contemporary voices who are reshaping how we garden and how we care for the land.
Edwina is known for championing naturalistic landscapes—gardens that feel loose and alive, yet are thoughtfully designed.
Fresh Cuts celebrates meadow-style planting, ecological awareness, and a gentler touch on the landscape.
In Edwina’s gardens, grasses bend, perennials weave, and nothing stands rigidly at attention.
Edwina asks gardeners to rethink what “finished” looks like.
Not perfection, but movement.
Not control, but balance.
She also writes beautifully about the small details hidden in trees and buds.
For example, she wrote:
“Buds are a big part of a tree’s identity.
They contain next year’s leaves, flowers, and twigs.When I was but a bud myself in my life with plants, I once confused Acer platanoides—the Norway maple—with Acer saccharum, the sugar maple.
This is no way to impress a nurseryman. But the buds tell the story.
Those of the Norway maple are larger and greener.
You just have to know where to look.”
Edwina reminds us that somehow the smallest details often reveal the most.
Botanic Spark
And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1966 Roland McMillan Harper died.
The American botanist passed away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
He was eighty-seven years old.
He was born in Maine but moved south as a boy, his family hoping the warmer air would save him from tuberculosis.
He spent the next sixty years traveling through the longleaf pine region.
A hundred thousand miles.
On foot.
By train.
What he understood was something no one else believed.
That forests need fire.
The longleaf pine begins as a grass stage—a low clump of needles.
Fire passes over it harmlessly, clearing space and making room.
Without fire, the forest chokes.
He wrote:
“Fire is as much a part of the environment of the longleaf pine as is the soil or the rain.”
They called him a crank.
He kept going.
For decades.
Late in life, he married Mary Susan Wigley.
When he died, she organized everything.
Seven thousand photographs.
Hundreds of boxes of notes.
So nothing he saw would be lost.
Today, a wildflower bears his name: Harperocallis flava.
Harper’s Beauty.
Final Thoughts
The pansy was named for a thought.
And the garden is where thoughts have room to rise.
Like a long drive or a hot shower, it is a place where something settles into clarity.
You plant.
You weed.
You harvest.
And somewhere in that motion, you let go of what you were carrying.
The garden holds it for you.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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