Strange Flowers and Time Machines: H.G. Wells’ Garden Connection

September 21, 1866

Dearest garden enthusiasts, today we celebrate the birth of a most peculiar and fascinating soul - one Herbert George Wells, who wrote as H. G. Wells.

His connection to gardens proves far more intriguing than his reputation as a mere science fiction pioneer might suggest.

Born to a rather humble family, young Herbert's earliest exposure to the natural world came through his father's work as a gardener. This early communion with the botanical realm would weave itself throughout his literary works in the most extraordinary ways.

Consider, if you will, his rather alarming tale, The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, where he presents us with a most cautionary tale of botanical hubris.

What collector among us hasn't been tempted by an unknown specimen?

Though perhaps not quite so fatally as his unfortunate protagonist.

In that masterpiece of temporal exploration, The Time Machine, Wells offers us this poignant reflection:

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.

His whimsical side emerges in The History of Mr. Polly, where he christens a character Uncle Penstemon - surely a nod to that sturdy stalwart of our summer borders.

In The Secret Places of the Heart, he makes this rather bold horticultural assertion:

All the English flowers came from Shakespeare.
I don't know what we did before his time.

Perhaps most delightfully, fate arranged for his own gardener, Ethelind Fearon, to be a writer herself - a rather poetic symmetry, wouldn't you say?

Let us conclude with Wells's own words, which might serve as sage advice for any gardener facing the vagaries of climate change:

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.