May 4, 2026 Luca Ghini and the First Herbarium, Mary Sutherland and Women in Forestry, Charlotte Turner Smith’s Sonnet on Grief and Gardens, Ninfa by Charles Quest-Ritson, and Gertrude Clarke Nuttall on the Willow
Subscribe
Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart
Support The Daily Gardener
Connect for FREE!
The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community
Today’s Show Notes
Early May is a strange time in the garden.
Nothing announces itself.
A branch that was bare three days ago now has leaves the size of a squirrel’s ear.
The groundcover that seemed nonexistent last week is suddenly there—not because anything dramatic happened, but because it kept going while you weren’t with it.
That’s how gardens work.
They don’t wait for you. They don’t perform.
They just keep going and growing.
And the ones who feel it most are the gardeners who keep showing up.
Morning after morning. Same path. Same bed. Same gate.
For no other reason than because they’re there.
And it’s always good to check.
Today’s Garden History
1556 Luca Ghini died.
The Italian botanist spent most of his life doing something no one had done before.
He collected plants, pressed them flat, dried them between sheets of paper, and glued them down.
What Luca created is what we now call a herbarium—a collection of preserved plants mounted, labeled, and stored so they can be studied long after the season ends.
Before Luca, if a scientist wanted to study a plant away from the field, the best option was a drawing.
Luca’s pressed specimens changed that.
For the first time, a botanist could hold the plant itself—dried and flattened, but real.
For centuries after Luca, botanists followed his lead, fanning out to collect specimens before the plants were gone.
Luca taught first in Bologna and later at Pisa.
He loved to teach by showing.
He brought his dried specimens into the lecture hall and passed them around so students could compare one leaf to another.
While Luca was at Pisa, he also founded one of the first university botanic gardens in the world.
The garden served his teaching—a living collection that could be studied alongside the herbarium Luca was always expanding.
Today, remarkably, none of Luca’s original herbarium sheets survive.
But we know about them because his students carried the practice forward.
They pressed plants, labeled them, and stored them.
And the method spread—from botanist to botanist, generation after generation.
1893 Mary Sutherland was born.
The English botanist was born in London and studied at the University College of North Wales in Bangor.
When she graduated in 1916, Mary became the first woman in the world to earn a degree in forestry.
She was twenty-three.
But there was a war going on.
So Mary joined the Women’s National Land Army, taking on the work of a forester—the work the men who had gone to war could no longer do.
After the war, Mary stayed in forestry.
But budget cuts kept finding her, and her gender did not help matters.
In 1923, after she lost her position in Britain, she moved to New Zealand.
There, the State Forest Service hired Mary as the first professional woman on their staff.
Still, the rules were different for Mary.
When male rangers went into the field, they always camped together.
But Mary was not allowed to follow suit.
The Service required her to stay in hotels.
And when the cost of that became inconvenient, they simply stopped sending Mary out.
That is how Mary became a grounded forester.
Not because she could not do the work—but because no one had planned on a woman doing the job.
Still, she continued.
And when another round of cuts came, Mary moved to the Dominion Museum in Wellington.
Her title there was clerk.
But the work she did was all botany-based.
Mary collected more than nine hundred plant specimens for the museum herbarium—pressing plants the same way Luca Ghini had done centuries earlier.
Mary attended the founding meeting of the New Zealand Institute of Foresters and later designed their official seal—a sprig of native rimu bearing ripe fruit.
Not the timber. Not the trunk.
But the fruit.
The part that carries the future forward.
In 1954, at sixty-one years old, Mary was still working in the field when she fell ill and died the following March.
Today, the Mary Sutherland Scholarship supports a young forestry student—someone just beginning the path Mary helped cut through the trees.
Unearthed Words
In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the English novelist and poet Charlotte Turner Smith, born on this day in 1749.
Charlotte’s life was not gentle.
She married at fifteen to help resolve her father’s debts.
By 1783, her husband was in debtor’s prison, and Charlotte chose to go with him.
While she lived there in confinement, she began writing in earnest.
There, Charlotte produced the first of ten novels and the sonnets that would later influence Wordsworth and Coleridge.
And incredibly, she wrote her books while raising twelve children and enduring lawsuits, financial strain, and a grief that never quite lifted.
But Charlotte also knew plants—the hedgerows, moss, lichens, and the small, bright wildflowers of the English downs.
In her writing, she did not speak vaguely of blossoms.
She named them.
In her poem Reflections on Some Drawings of Plants, Charlotte turned to painting flowers because describing grief was harder.
She wrote:
“I can in groups these mimic flowers compose,
These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew;Catch the soft blush that warms the early Rose,
Or the pale Iris cloud with veins of blue;Copy the scallop’d leaves, and downy stems,
And bid the pencil’s varied shades arrestSpring’s humid buds, and Summer’s musky gems:
But, save the portrait on my bleeding breast,
I have no semblance of that form adored...”
Charlotte could render every petal—but not the child she had just lost.
When Charlotte was fifty-seven, her husband died in debtor’s prison.
The inheritance that might have saved her family remained trapped in the courts.
A few months later, Charlotte herself died.
Rheumatoid arthritis had taken nearly everything.
Near the end, the physical act of writing was nearly impossible.
Even so, her final poem, Beachy Head, was left unfinished.
Yet it includes sixty-four endnotes filled with the Latin names of wildflowers Charlotte loved all her life.
They are not loose ends.
They are the record of a woman who loved the natural world until the moment she could no longer hold a pen.
Book Recommendation
It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: Ninfa by Charles Quest-Ritson.
This book is part of International Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener, a week devoted to gardens beyond our borders.
Places where culture, climate, and history shape the landscape.
In Ninfa, Charles tells the story of what is often called the most romantic garden in the world.
He spent twenty years studying the garden before writing his book.
Ninfa began as a ghost town—marshy ground, malaria, and crumbling towers.
Then the Caetani family began planting into the ruins.
Roses climbed broken walls. Wisteria spilled over arches. Streams ran where streets once stood.
Charles does not rush the story.
Instead, he explains the drainage, the politics, the planting choices, and the slow restoration that turned a ruined town into one of the world’s most extraordinary gardens.
Botanic Spark
And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1929 Gertrude Clarke Nuttall died.
The British botanist and writer passed away at Ivy House on Holywell Hill in St. Albans, England.
She was sixty-one years old.
Gertrude was born in Leicester in 1867.
Because her father was a surgeon, she grew up in a household where the human body was something to be studied carefully.
And when she began her professional work, she brought that same devotion to the natural world.
In 1891, Gertrude became one of the first women in Britain to earn a bachelor’s degree in botany from Bangor University.
Two years later, she married Dr. Charles Nuttall and turned her attention to nature writing.
In 1911, Gertrude published Wild Flowers as They Grow—seven complete volumes, all illustrated with some of the earliest color photographs of British plants.
Two years later, she published Trees and How They Grow.
This time, she focused on just twenty-four species—not as specimens to measure, but as lives to follow.
Of the elder, Gertrude wrote that its spirit was that of an old woman, and that “no forester in olden days would dare to cut it down or even lop off a branch without first asking her permission three times over.”
And of the willow, Salix, she wrote:
“To the botanist, as well as to the poet, the Willow is a sad subject.”
Gertrude knew trees.
She understood how their roots held the soil, how their branches moved in the wind, and how they appeared in spring after the first warmth of the year.
When Gertrude died on this day in 1929, the willows and the elder would have been in leaf.
Though no species bear her name, the name Nuttall appears across hundreds of botanical entries—but those honor the American naturalist Thomas Nuttall.
Gertrude’s books are rare collectibles now.
And if you happen to find one, you just might discover a leaf or two still marking the pages.
Final Thoughts
May is a strange time in the garden.
Nothing is happening—and then suddenly everything is happening.
The days can give you a bit of whiplash.
But that is how gardens work in spring.
They do not wait for perfect weather.
They simply keep going and growing.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
Featured Book
