Feb 11, 2021
Today we celebrate a woman who was insatiable when it came to
plants, and she is remembered forever with the Portland Rose.
We'll also learn about a famous speech given at a Vermont botanical
club about why botany wasn’t taught in schools - and the reasons
were pretty spot on.
We hear a story about a beautiful cherry tree found near the
Osakabe ("sah-KAH-bay") Hotel.
We Grow That Garden Library™ with a book about Darwin’s plants - in
addition to his theory of evolution, Darwin experimented and
observed plants extensively at his home in Kent.
And then we’ll wrap things up by getting you ready for Valentine’s
Day with a few of my favorite garden-inspired verses about
love.
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Important Events
February 11, 1715
Today is the birthday of the British aristocrat, naturalist, plant
lover, and botanist Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of
Portland. Her family and friends called her Maria.
Maria married when she was 19 years old. Together, she and William
Bentinck had five children; one of their sons became prime minister
twice. When William died after their 27th anniversary, Maria threw
herself into her many passions.
As the wealthiest woman in England, Maria could acquire virtually
any treasure from the natural world - and she did. She cultivated
an enormous collection of natural history, which was tended by two
experts she hired to personally attend each item: the naturalist
Reverend John Lightfoot and the Swedish botanist Daniel
Solander.
Maria's home in Buckinghamshire was referred to by society as the
hive - it was a reference to the hub of activity for Solander and
Lightfoot and the other people who helped process her
acquisitions.
At one point, Maria had reached out to Captain James Cook. James
gave Maria some shells from his second expedition to Australia.
Meanwhile, Daniel Solander was in charge cataloging Maria's massive
shell collection, but, sadly, he left the work unfinished when he
died in 1782. Maria had an enormous appetite for curation and
collecting. In addition to her Botanic Garden on her property,
Maria opened a zoo, kept rabbits, and had an aviary.
A constant stream of scientists, explorers, socialites, and artists
visited Maria to exchange ideas and inspect her collections.
And, think about the limitless ambition she must have had as
Lightfoot wrote that Maria wanted,
"...every unknown species in the three kingdoms of nature
described and published to the world."
Now, Maria had a special love for collecting plants and flowers
from far-off places worldwide. She retained the botanist and the
incomparable botanical illustrator Georg Dionysius Ehret as a
drawing instructor. Struck by the luminescence of his work, Maria
bought over 300 of Ehret's paintings.
Maria also became friends with the botanical artist Mary Delany.
Mary made botanical paper mosaics, as she called them. Mary was
essentially creating flower specimens out of tissue paper. And Mary
was exacting - dissecting real flowers and then replicating what
she saw with tissue paper. To gather more material for her work,
Maria and Mary loved to go out into the fields and collect
specimens together.
As the Duchess of Portland, Maria shared her specimens with the
public, and she displayed her various collections from around the
globe in what she called her Portland Museum.
Once, in 1800, Maria received a rose from Italy, which became known
as the Portland Rose in her honor. The rose was a beautiful crimson
scarlet with round petals - and it was a repeat bloomer. And,
here's a fun fact: all Portland Roses were developed from that very
first Portland Rose - the sweet gift to Margaret Cavendish Bentinck
- Maria - the Duchess of Portland.
February 11, 1896
It was on this day that the Burlington Free
Press shared a story called Vermont’s Flora:
Winter Meeting of the State Botanical Club.
Generally speaking, these early botanical meetings can err on the
side of rules and regulation, and they can be a little boring to
read. However, the account of this meeting caught my eye.
The meeting started as per usual with a discussion of nomenclature.
Here the club decided to follow the lead of Harvard and the way
they pronounced botanical names.
But, then, things got interesting because the topic changed to
"How Should Botany be Taught In Schools?" after an address
given by Reverend JA Bates.
Bates began his popular presentation by saying that he could begin
his speech like the boy who wrote a paper about “The Snakes of
Ireland.” The paper began, “There are no snakes in Ireland.”
Reverend Bates found himself in the same situation for his speech,
“How Should Botany be Taught in Schools?”
Well, as Reverend Bates began to speak, he bluntly pointed out
there is no botany taught in schools.
Bear in mind this speech was made in 1896 when Reverend Bates said
that,
“only one in forty students has studied botany.”
And I don’t think we’ve moved the dial that much on that
statistic.
Then Bates attempts to explain why botany is not taught - and this
is what caught my attention. He said,
“The chief reasons for [botany not being taught in schools] are
twofold.
First, most of the teachers are poorly prepared for teaching
botany.
And second, botanists are conservative and conceal the charms
of their study behind the long Latin names.”
Unearthed Words
There, in a garden of a house near the Osakabe Hotel
("sah-KAH-bay"), towering above a tall wooden fence, stood a tree
with narrow leaves and bunched clusters of double mauve-pink
blossoms with close to 100 petals. Ingram's immediate reaction was
to work out how to spirit cuttings of the tree to England.
Fate was on his side. Nineteen years earlier, on his honeymoon, he
had visited this very village while hunting birds, and he
remembered meeting there, a one-legged war hero whose parents ran
the Osakabe Hotel. That man, who had lost a limb during the
Russo-Japanese war, was still alive, a villager told Ingram. Indeed
he was now running the hotel. And his hobby was gardening! In
typical Ingram fashion, he convinced the Innkeeper to send him
scions from the tree in exchange for one yen to cover the postage.
By 1929, a couple of sturdy offspring were growing in Benenden.
— Naoko Abe, Japanese Journalist, author, and a 2016 Nihon
Essayist Club Award winner, Cherry
Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms,
Saving the Sakura
Grow That Garden Library
Darwin's Most Wonderful Plants by Ken
Thompson
This book came out in 2019, and the subtitle is Darwin's
Botany Today.
In this book, Ken helps us understand Darwin as a botanist.
After taking his famous voyage on The Beagle, Darwin experimented
with and observed growing plants at his home in Kent. Carnivorous
and climbing plants were a favorite of Darwin's; he was fascinated
by their pollination and flower evolution.
Thanks to Ken, we get to know Darwin as a pioneering botanist who
was way ahead of his time. Darwin’s work seems totally in step with
plant science today: plant movement, hunting, and intelligence.
This book is 256 pages of a side of Darwin that most folks have
never known: Darwin as a curious and intelligent botanist.
You can get a copy of Darwin's Most Wonderful Plants by Ken
Thompson and support the show using the Amazon Link in today's Show
Notes for around $14
Today’s Botanic Spark
Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart
Today I thought I’d close the show by getting you ready for
Valentine’s Day with a few of my favorite garden-inspired verses
about love.
Violet has the shortest wavelength of the spectrum.
Behind it, the invisible ultraviolet.
Roses are Red,
Violets are Blue.
Poor violet, violated for a rhyme.
— Derek Jarman, gardener and poet
If apples were pears
And peaches were plums
And the rose had a different name.
If tigers were bears
And fingers were thumbs
I'd love you just the same.
— Anonymous
“So, timely you came, and well you chose, You came when most
needed, my winter rose. From the snow I pluck you, and fondly press
Your leaves 'twixt the leaves of my leaflessness.”
— Alfred Austin, English poet Poet Laureate
“Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart.”
— Russell Page, British gardener, garden designer, and
architect
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember:
"For a happy, healthy life, garden every day."