Jul 25, 2020
Today we remember the founding of a garden that inspired the
book Alice in Wonderland.
We'll also learn about the botanist remembered with the Forsythia
genus.
We'll salute the Lake poet who likened plant taxonomy to
poetry.
We also revisit a diary entry about a garden visitor and a letter
from a gardener to her sister.
Today's Unearthed Words feature an excerpt from a July Afternoon by
Walt Whitman.
We Grow That Garden Library™ with a book about the unloved flowers
as they have been referred to Weeds.
And then we'll wrap things up with an unforgettable story of
flowers and a performance called "A Case of Floral Offerings" from
1874.
But first, let's catch up on some Greetings from Gardeners around
the world and today's curated news.
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Curated News
This L.A. music producer is obsessed with houseplants: See
how they amplify his work | latimes.com | Micah
Fluellen
“Mark Redito (“Ra-DEE-toe”) is an L.A.-based
electronic music producer who, it turns out, is also the proud
plant parent to over 40 houseplants. He visually couples his earthy
soothing sound with heavy plant imagery, from short snippets of him
tenderly caring for plants to abstract videos of 3-D modeled flora.
Redito’s aesthetic is the seamless marriage between the ambient
digital world and a tangible natural ecosystem. You can find short
teaser videos of thumping tracks playing over footage of sped-up
plant growth and gardens, photographs of technology blended with
nature, and updates of his own garden developments on his Instagram
account @markredito.
"My hope is that when people listen to my work, they would be
inspired to go outside and experience nature or start their own
garden. My upcoming album to be released this summer, “Natural
Habitat,” is all about that — the interconnectedness and innate
connection we have with nature and with plants.
(What’s your best tip for gardeners and new plant
parents?)
Ease into it and remember to take it slow. When I started
getting into plants, my collection grew from five plants to about
30 in a month. As much as I enjoyed having plants and taking care
of them, it was a lot of work for one guy to water and tend to
30-plus plants on one Saturday morning.”
Are you growing, Cleome?
My daughter just had her senior pictures taken, and I took some
cuttings from the garden for her to hold during her photoshoot. For
one of the images, I had her hold just one large white blossom in
her hands. It looked like a giant puffball, and it had a very
ethereal quality about it.
Cleome is beautiful - but it is also sticky - so keep that in mind
if you handle it.
I know some gardeners have no trouble sowing cleome directly into
their gardens, but some gardeners complain that it can be an
inconsistent germinater.
I like to sow cleome right now since the seeds like intense light
to get going. Sometimes cleome can benefit from staking - so keep
that in mind as well.
And, if you are planning a cutting garden, it is hard to beat
cleome. The blooms are a show-stealer in any arrangement.
Go to a local farmers market - not for the produce - for
the knowledge.
The growers at the farmer's market have expertise in growing, which
is often an untapped resource. Plus, the growers are so generous
with Information.
It's always a pleasure to talk to someone who has first-hand
knowledge about growing plants.
Alright, that's it for today's gardening news.
Now, if you'd like to check out my curated news articles
and blog posts for yourself, you're in luck, because I
share all of it with the Listener Community in the
Free Facebook Group - The Daily Gardener
Community.
There's no need to take notes or search for links - the next time
you're on Facebook, search for Daily Gardener Community and request
to join. I'd love to meet you in the group.
Important Events
1621 The Botanic garden at Oxford, also
known as the Physic Garden, was founded on this day in 1621 at
precisely 2 pm. It was a Sunday.
The garden is the oldest in England. When the garden was founded,
its primary purpose was to be a medicinal garden. Henry Danvers,
the first Earl of Danby, funded the garden by giving Oxford
University 250 pounds. Unfortunately, the land they purchased was
flood-prone. The 5-acre tract was mostly pasture land and lined the
banks of the River Cherwell. So, to protect the garden from
flooding, the ground for the garden was built up. Records show a
Mr. Windiat brought in 4,000 loads of "mucke and dunge" to elevate
the area that we now know as the Oxford Botanic Garden.
During the founding ceremony, dignitaries of the University walked
in a procession from St. Mary's church to the garden. Mr. Edward
Dawson, a physician, and Dr. Clayton, the Regius Professor of
Medicine, each gave a speech and a stone was placed in the garden
gateway by the Vice-Chancellor himself.
The Garden has a fascinating history, and there are at least two
father-son connections to the Garden.
Bobart the Elder and his son, Bobart the Younger, established the
herbarium.
Both William Baxter and his son served as curator.
Lewis Carroll, who was a math professor at Oxford and he visited
the garden with a young Alice Liddell, which inspired Alice in
Wonderland.
J.R.R. Tolkien, who also taught at Oxford, loved the gardens and
could be found sitting beneath his favorite tree: an ornamental
black pine.
In 1941, after the discovery of the dawn redwood tree, a dawn
redwood seed was planted in the garden. The tree still grows at the
Oxford Botanic Garden.
In 2019, Oxford University's gardens, libraries, and museums
attracted over 3 million visitors. The Garden and Arboretum had a
record-setting year with over 200,000 visitors, which was an
increase of 23%.
And, today, the garden is continuing to prepare for its 400th
anniversary in 2021. Planting projects and garden redesigns are all
being worked on to give visitors a stunning welcome next year. In
addition, some of the beds are going through a bit of a time
machine; they are being planted according to their 17th-century
prescriptions so that visitors can glimpse how the garden looked
when it was established four centuries ago.
1804 Today is the birthday of the Scottish
botanist William Forsyth.
William trained as a gardener at the Oxford Physic Garden and was
an apprentice to Philip Miller, the chief gardener. In 1771,
Forsyth himself took over the principal gardening position.
Three years later, he built one of the very first rock gardens with
over 40 tons of stone collected from the land around the Tower of
London and even some pieces of lava imported from Iceland. The
effort was noted for posterity; the garden was a bust.
Forsyth was also the founding member of the Royal Horticultural
Society. The genus, Forsythia, was named in his honor by Carl Peter
Thunberg. There are several different varieties of Forsythia, which
also goes by the common name golden bell. A member of the olive
family, Forsythias are related to the Ash tree. And, the Forsythia
is a vernal shrub. Vernal shrubs bloom in the spring.
1834 Today is the anniversary of the death
of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Along with his friend, William Wordsworth, he helped found the
Romantic Movement in England and was a member of a group called the
Lake Poets.
As a poet, Coleridge recognized the inherent rhythm of taxonomy,
and he likened it to poetry when he said that taxonomy was simply
"the best words in the best order."
In his poem called Youth and Age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote,
Flowers are lovely.
Love is flower-like.
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Coleridge wrote a 54-line poem about a Mongolian emperor's summer
garden at Xanadu. The emperor was Kubla Kahn.
Coleridge's Kubla Kahn is one of his most famous works. The poem
begins by describing Kahn's palace and the garden contrasted with
the setting of an ancient Mongolian forest.
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who said:
Summer has set in with its usual severity.
1938 On this day, the Canadian Naturalist
Charles Joseph Sauriol ("Sar-ee-all") wrote about sharing his
garden with a toad.
He wrote,
"One particular toad has taken quite a fancy to the Wild Flower
garden. His den is alongside the Hepatica plant. There he sits
half-buried, and blinks up at me while I shower water on
him."
1946 On this day Elizabeth Lawrence wrote to
her sister:
Dear Ann,
I am going to send you, as soon as they are ripe, some seeds of
Campanula americana, which came to me from one of my delightful
farm women correspondents. I asked Mr. Krippendorf if he knew it,
and he said yes, it was his favorite weed.
Scatter them as soon as you get them along the drive. Along the
fence at the foot of the terrace, and on the other side near the
tiger lilies.
Then in the spring, I will send (or maybe fall) some roots of
the day lily Margaret Perry. It will spread all along, and bloom
with the campanula and the lilies. ...The campanula is an annual
but it will self-sow, and the combination will make a mass of bloom
for six weeks or more.
Then I am going to send you seeds of Cassia marilandica (“The
virtuous and beloved dead need neither cassia buds nor myrrh”) to
scatter lower down on the driveway. ...
I expect that you will have more lycoris. Mine are still
coming, and I dash out very quickly to stake each one before Mr.
Cayce can get to it. Mr. Krippendorf wrote that his were coming out
fast, but that he did not expect them to last long as he was
bringing out his granddaughter’s boxer to spend a week with his,
and he thought the two of them would break off thousands. Mr.
Krippendorf feels as I do about dogs. But Bessie does not.
...
The summer has been so cool and green, and so many of the
choice and difficult amaryllids have bloomed.
So am I as the rich, whose blessed key
Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
The which he will not every hour survey.
For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.
[Shakespeare sonnet 52]
Unearthed Words
The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air —
the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped
leaves;
the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and
the
picturesque beeches and shade and turf;
the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the
warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence;
an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble
(they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as
they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go) —
the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up
there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs;
just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-colored
dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and
occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings
quivering all time, (are they not showing off for my
amusement?)—
the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus;
the water snakes—
occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders,
as he darts slantingly by—
the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and
shade—
the squawk of some pond duck—
(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I
hear the song of the first cicadas;)—
then at some distance, the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as
the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the
opposite side of the creek—
(what was the yellow or light brown bird, large as a young hen,
with a short neck and long-stretched legs I just saw, in flapping
and awkward flight over there through the trees?)—
the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery
perfume to my nostrils;
and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, and free space
of the sky, transparent and blue—
and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds
the sailors call "shoals of mackerel"—
the sky, with silver swirls like locks of tossed hair, spreading,
expanding—
a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—
yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything—
who knows?
— Walt Whitman, American poet and the Father of Free Verse, A July
Afternoon by the Pond
Grow That Garden Library
Weeds by Richard Mabey
This book came out in 2012, and the subtitle is In Defense of
Nature's Most Unloved Plants.
The author Richard Holmes said, "[A] witty and beguiling meditation
on weeds and their wily ways….You will never look at a weed, or
flourish a garden fork, in the same way again."
And, if you thought your garden was full of them, this book is
chock-full of 336 pages of weeds.
You can get a copy of Weeds by Richard Mabey and support
the show, using the Amazon Link in today's Show Notes for around
$14.
Today's Botanic Spark
1874 On this day, the
Opelousas Courier shared an incredible story called "A Case of
Floral Offerings."
The story was from Berlin, it told of an actress who was playing
the role of a female Hamlet.
She wanted to have bouquets and wreaths thrown to her at the end of
her performance.
When a man told her that the flowers would cost $20, the actress
said that it was too much for one night.
But, the gentleman had an idea. He said twenty dollars would be
sufficient for two nights.
And he explained how it would work. He said,
"Today, I and my men will throw the bouquets to you from the
first tier. After the performance is over, I shall take the flowers
home with me in a basket [and] put them in the water... Tomorrow
night [we will toss them at your feet again].
No one in the audience will know that the bouquets have been
used before."
The actress liked the man's ingenious plan, and she happily paid
him the money.