May 12, 2026 William James Beal, William Robinson, Amy Lowell, The Glory of Roses by Allen Lacy, and Edward Lear
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Today’s Show Notes
For the past week, I’ve been working on dividing plants.
Redesigning and refreshing my cottage garden.
Little by little.
Anyway, I potted up extras.
And set them on the curb with a “free” sign.
They were all gone by noon.
And I kept thinking about that afterward.
Not the plants.
Although I’m sure they’ve found good homes.
But how easy it was.
How little it cost me to share them.
And how the very thing that made me feel most like a gardener this week wasn’t anything I planted.
It was something I gave away.
Today’s Garden History
1924 William James Beal died peacefully in his sleep.
He was ninety-one years old.
William studied at Michigan and Harvard under Asa Gray before landing a professorship at Michigan State.
He taught botany for nearly four decades.
William was wiry and energetic.
And he was most famous for his long white beard.
And the broad-brimmed hat he always wore.
Whether he was in the garden or not.
True to form, William was not a small-talk man.
But if you handed him a glass of punch at a party, he would have probably handed you back a magnifying glass.
And pointed to a weed.
Asking, “What do you see?”
And he wouldn’t have let you leave until you actually looked.
And told him.
William called his hands-on approach the New Botany.
In his approach, he threw out the textbooks.
And handed students living plants.
Their job was to observe them.
Not to memorize the Latin name for them.
And that simple idea—learning by doing, learning by experience—is still how most of us learn to garden.
When William was forty, he founded the W.J. Beal Botanic Garden on the Michigan State campus.
On the north bank of the Red Cedar River.
It is the oldest continuously operating university botanical garden in the country.
And visitors can still enter through the ornate metal gates.
But William did something else in 1879.
Something that is still going on today.
He filled twenty narrow-necked glass bottles.
Like pint jars.
With moist sand.
And fifty seeds each from twenty-one species.
Mostly common weeds from any Michigan field.
Then he buried them in a secret spot on campus.
About twenty inches deep.
Upside down.
And slanting.
So water wouldn’t pool.
Every twenty years, a small group of Michigan State plant biologists are given a map.
To find a single bottle.
And dig it up.
In the middle of the night.
For secrecy.
And to keep the seeds from being exposed to sunlight.
Then, back at the lab, they empty out the seeds.
Plant them.
And see if they still grow.
Remarkably, many do.
With Verbascum, or mullein, proving the most resilient.
The next bottle is scheduled to be unearthed in 2040.
With the final one uncovered in the year 2100.
William was forty-six when he buried those bottles.
And he knew he would not live to see them all opened.
But that was the point.
It was a message written in seeds.
To young scientists he would never meet.
1935 William Robinson died peacefully at his home in Sussex, England.
He was ninety-six years old.
As a young man, he arrived in London totally penniless.
But what William did have was opinions.
And when it came to Victorian gardens, he disliked them.
Very much.
The rigid rows.
The geometric beds.
And the thousands of identical greenhouse flowers.
All ripped out at the end of every season.
William called it a mutilation.
Instead, he believed plants should be allowed to grow according to their nature.
If a flower thrives in a woodland, it should be planted under a tree.
If it loves wet feet, it should be planted by a pond.
Right plant.
Right place.
In 1870, William published his thoughts in a book called The Wild Garden.
And it shook English horticulture.
In it, William pushed back against the rage for exotic plants that needed hothouses.
And the constant cycle of bedding out.
Where flowers were replaced three to four times each season just to keep the look fresh.
To William, the entire approach was wasteful.
And soulless.
To name what he preferred, William coined the term wild garden.
His notion of growing hardy perennials.
Plants that come back year after year.
Three years later, William wrote another book.
The English Flower Garden.
And it was so popular and timeless that it has never gone out of print.
In midlife, William used the money from his writing to buy a crumbling Elizabethan home.
Gravetye Manor.
Nestled on a sandstone ridge about thirty miles south of London.
Once he got to work, he treated it as a giant canvas.
Planting thousands of wildflowers and spring-flowering bulbs.
Daffodils.
Scilla.
Anemones.
And giving the meadows around Gravetye the wild, unstyled beauty he had chased his whole life.
When William was seventy, he was paralyzed from the waist down after a serious fall on his way to church.
After the accident, he made Gravetye accessible for his wheelchair.
Including a little path system from inside his house.
And out to his beloved elliptical kitchen garden.
Undaunted, he gardened almost every day with the help of his staff.
For another twenty-six years.
Despite his spinal injury.
And he somehow managed to scatter bluebell seed until his final days.
In the end, William left Gravetye.
And all of its thousand acres.
To the people of England.
Unearthed Words
In today’s Unearthed Words, we hear from the American poet Amy Lowell, who died on this day in 1925.
Amy lived her entire life at Sevenels.
Her family’s estate in Brookline, Massachusetts.
The home sat on ten acres of land.
With formal garden beds.
Long borders.
And plenty of lilacs planted deep into the New England soil.
Amy was a leader of the Imagist movement.
A school of poetry that was clear, precise, and rooted in the imagination.
Here’s an excerpt from Amy Lowell’s poem Lilacs:
“Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England.
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds
and sing their little weak soft songs;
In the crooks of your branches
You are everywhere.
You were everywhere.
You tapped the window
when the preacher preached his sermon,
And ran along the road
beside the boy going to school.
Maine knows you,
Has for years and years;
New Hampshire knows you,
And Massachusetts and Vermont.
Cape Cod starts you along the beaches
to Rhode Island;
Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea.
You are brighter than apples,
Sweeter than tulips,
You are the smell of all Summers,
Lilac in me because I am New England,
Because my roots are in it,
Because my leaves are of it,
Because my flowers are for it,
Because it is my country
And I speak to it of itself
And sing of it with my own voice
Since certainly it is mine."
Amy never wanted to stray far from Brookline.
The estate and its lilac-bordered gardens weren’t just scenery for her.
They were who she was.
Amy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the year she died.
For a collection she humorously called What’s O’Clock, which includes her poem Lilacs.
Yet she never knew she’d won.
She died before anyone could tell her.
But I think she would have shrugged.
The lilacs were already enough.
Book Recommendation
The Glory of Roses by Allen Lacy
It’s time to Grow That Garden Library, with today’s book: The Glory of Roses by Allen Lacy.
It’s Mother’s Day Week here on The Daily Gardener.
And that means all of this week’s Book Recommendations are devoted to garden stories about care, inheritance, teaching, and the quiet ways gardening is passed from one generation to the next.
Allen Lacy was a garden writer who thought slowly.
And wrote carefully.
The kind of writer who could spend a whole chapter on one rose and make you feel like you’d spent an afternoon beside him.
In The Glory of Roses, Allen turns his gaze to a flower often burdened with symbolism.
But he doesn’t reduce roses to romance.
Instead, he writes about the discipline roses require from gardeners.
The pruning.
The feeding.
And the patience.
In the book, Allen quotes Candace Wheeler, who wrote in 1902:
“[The rose has] a mysterious something in its nature — an inner fascination, a subtle witchery, a hidden charm which it has and other flowers have not — ensnares and holds the love of the world.”
That’s the rose, isn’t it?
All of it together.
The fragrance.
The thorn.
And the beauty.
A kind of magic that other flowers just don’t carry.
If someone in your life grows roses in their garden, or simply loves them as their favorite flower, this is the book to hand to them.
Botanic Spark
And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1812 Edward Lear was born in London.
The English artist and nonsense poet was the twentieth of twenty-one children.
And when his family ran out of money and couldn’t care for him, his eldest sister Ann raised him.
Ann taught Edward to draw.
And drawing became his way forward.
By his early twenties, he was producing scientific illustrations for the Zoological Society in London.
Alongside that work came taxonomy.
The Latin names.
The rigid classifications.
The serious business of labeling everything properly.
Edward could take the drawing seriously.
But the naming struck him as a little absurd.
So he invented his own botanical Latin.
And illustrated his creations.
He drew people dangling upside down from a plant stem like bleeding hearts.
And called it Manypeeplia Upsidownia.
He drew a lily where tigers became the petals.
And called it Tigerlillia Terribilis.
And he drew a flower with a large, grumpy face.
And called it Phattfacia Stupenda.
Edward’s creations were an immediate success.
The popularity of his nonsense books exceeded his serious art.
But he never complained about his work.
Or his chronic poor health.
Edward suffered from epilepsy.
Which he called “the Demons.”
And from depression.
Which he called “the Morbids.”
He moved repeatedly.
Searching for warmer climates.
From London to Rome.
To San Remo on the Italian coast.
Where he eventually settled.
And named his home Villa Emily.
At Villa Emily, Edward finally had a garden of his own.
With a fat tabby cat named Foss.
Who inspired his beloved poem The Owl and the Pussy-cat, which begins:
“The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.”
When the end came, his friends could not be with him.
Dear old Foss had died the summer before.
Edward Lear died alone in San Remo in 1888.
He was seventy-five years old.
And was buried beneath a fig tree.
Final Thoughts
The garden gives you more than you can hold.
And you don’t have to keep it all to yourself.
Nobody’s keeping score.
Nobody’s checking to see if you gave away your best division.
Or your scrappiest one.
The giving is the thing.
Most of us don’t keep it all.
Most of us end up at the fence.
Or in a neighbor’s yard.
Saying, “Here — take some.”
It’s part of gardening.
And it’s what the best gardeners are known for.
Generosity.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.
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