May 13, 2022
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The Friday
Newsletter | Daily
Gardener Community
Historical Events
1815 On this day, Mary Russell Mitford wrote
about the changing times in a letter to her friend, Sir William
Elford, English banker, politician, and amateur artist.
Our grandmothers, when about to make a beau-pot (A large
ornamental vase for cut flowers.), proceeded, I fancy, much as
their gardeners when clipping a yew hedge or laying out a
parterre.
Every stalk and stem was in its place; tulip answered tulip,
and peony stared at peony.
Even a rebellious leaf was reduced to order, and the huge
bouquet spread its tremendous width as flat, as stiff, and almost
as ugly as its fair framer's painted fan.
We, their granddaughters, throw our honeysuckles and posies
into their vases with little other care than to produce the grace
of nature by its carelessness and profusion.
And why should we not...?
1896 Death of Nora Perry, American poet,
newspaper correspondent, and writer.
In her poem, What May Be, Nora wrote,
When the days are longer, longer,
And the sun shines stronger, stronger,
And the winds cease blowing, blowing,
And the winter’s chance of snowing
Is lost in springtime weather.
Here's an excerpt from her poem, The Coming of
Spring.
All this changing tint,
This whispering stir and hint
Of bud and bloom and wing,
Is the coming of the spring.
So, silently but swift,
Above the wintry drift,
The long days gain and gain,
Until on hill and plain—
Once more, and yet once more,
Returning as before,
We see the bloom of birth
Make young again the earth
1906 Birth of Enid Annenberg Haupt, American
publisher and philanthropist.
The president of the New York Botanical Garden called Enid,
The greatest patron American horticulture has ever
known.
Enid was one of eight children; her parents, Sadie and Moses, had
one son and seven daughters.
Her father was the founder of a large publishing empire. Enid
followed in his footsteps and became an heiress to the large family
fortune.
Enid's first marriage ended in divorce. Her second marriage to Ira
Haupt launched her philanthropic activities and introduced her to
the world of gardening.
When they got engaged, Ira gave Enid a cymbidium orchid.
Enid was immediately enthralled by it. She told Ira that for her
wedding present from him, she would be very happy with a gift of 13
cymbidium orchids.
Enid's brother, Walter, put her in charge of the magazine Seventeen
in 1953.
During her tenure, Seventeen magazine was more popular than Glamor
and twice as popular as Mademoiselle. At one point, more than half
of the teenage girls in the United States were reading Seventeen
magazine. Enid ran the magazine until 1970.
When Enid died in 2005, she had donated more than $140 million to
charities.
Her favorite charities involved gardening. This is how Enid became
known as "the fairy godmother of American horticulture" and "the
patron saint of public gardens."
One of Enid's most significant gifts was to the New York Botanical
Garden. Over her lifetime, Enid gave them over $34 million – $5
million of which was dedicated to restoring the stunning Victorian
glass greenhouse now called the Enid Haupt Conservancy. Without
Enid, the greenhouse would have been demolished.
After she retired from Seventeen magazine, Enid learned that the
Soviet Union was considering purchasing River Farm, the 27-acre
property once owned by George Washington as part of his Mount
Vernon estate. The news was abhorrent to Enid. In 1973, she donated
a million dollars to the American Horticultural Society to buy the
property with the stipulation that it would remain open to the
public.
In November 2020, the American Horticultural Society attempted to
sell River Farm for $32.9 million. AHS Board Chair Terry Hayes
argued that selling River Farm was the only way to effectively
carry out its national mission of “connecting people with plants
and to help all Americans learn about sustainable gardening.” The
move caused a rift on the board after five board members — Skipp
Calvert, Tim Conlon, Holly Shimizu, Marcia Zech, and Laura Dowling
— argued that it was "not only morally and ethically wrong, but...
fraught with serious legal issues.”
A year later, in the fall of 2021, the AHS officially took River
Farm off the market. The AHS board had shrunk to the five board
members who had fought to keep the historic property. In a
statement, they said River Farm would remain as the permanent
headquarters of the AHS and as a green space open to the public in
honor of Enid Annenberg Haupt.
1823 On this day, William Bartram, American
botanist, ornithologist, natural historian, and explorer, wrote in
his diary that there were,
numerous tribes of small birds, feeding on the aphids on the
apple, pear trees - towhe buntings building their nests in the
garden.
Sharon White summarizes William Bartram's May garden life in her
book Vanished
Gardens: Finding Nature in
Philadelphia (2011).
May was misty sometimes with a morning wind and cruel
with cold rains for a week "injurious to vegitation and to the
farmers. Wheat just begining to ear appears to be blasted in
many instances," and young birds drowned in their nests on the
ground.
Now and then Bartram's notations look different, smaller
script, less detail.
In the last year he kept the diary his writing scrawls
across one page as if his hand slipped.
The green twig whortleberry is in flower on May 6 in 1802, and
the next May he records that a bullfrog swallowed: large mole
instantly. That May there was hard frost on the seventh that
killed the young shoots of trees and shrubs.
Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation
The Multifarious Mr. Banks by Toby
Musgrave
This book came out in 2020, and the subtitle is From
Botany Bay to Kew, The Natural Historian Who Shaped the
World.
Toby Musgrave is a plant and garden historian, independent scholar,
and consultant. He is the author or coauthor of eighteen books.
By the way, a multifarious person has many sides or different
qualities, and you can see for yourself that Banks was a tremendous
personal force in Toby's introduction:
Sir Joseph Banks was only twenty-five years old when in 1768 he
convinced both the prestigious Royal Society and the
bureaucratic Admiralty that he should join HMS Endeavour as
expedition natural historian. He personally paid a fortune
toundertake the three-year voyage led by James Cook, and en route
became the first European to make an extensive study of the
natural history and anthropology of Tahiti,' New Zealand and
Australia. He is said to have had an affair with the 'queen of
Tahiti' and, upon his return, he jilted his fiancée. Later, as a
close personal friend of King George III, he persuaded the
monarch that he was the man to develop the Royal Botanic
Garden at Kew. Under Banks's leadership it became the world's
leading botanic garden, a position it still holds today.
This book is 386 pages of the biography of Joseph Banks and all he
accomplished during his incredible life of adventure and
botany.
You can get a copy of The Multifarious Mr. Banks by Toby
Musgrave and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show
notes for around $39.
Botanic Spark
1907 Birth of the English author and
playwright Daphne du Maurier (“Mor-ee-aya”)(books
by this author), who was born in London.
She was the middle daughter of a well-to-do family of creative
bohemian artists and writers. Her father was a famous actor and a
favorite of James Barrie - the author of Peter
Pan.
Daphne’s writing inspired Alfred Hitchcock - especially her
novels Rebecca, Jamaica
Inn, and her short story, The
Birds. In 1938 Daphne published her popular
book, Rebecca. It has never gone out of print. During
the pandemic in 2020, Netflix released their movie version
of Rebecca starring Lily James, Armie Hammer,
and Kristin Scott Thomas.
In Rebecca, Daphne writes about the beautiful azaleas that grow on
the estate at Manderley. And she says that the blooms were used to
make a perfume for its late mistress. Yet, most azalea growers know
that this is likely an example of artistic license since most
evergreen azaleas have little to no fragrance. That said, some
native deciduous azaleas can be very fragrant.
In the opening pages of Rebecca,
Daphne’s narrator vividly describes the wild and wooly garden of
Manderley:
I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the
woods had done. The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted
and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage
with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard thing that clung
about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin. A
lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more
closely to one another, the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to
grace, had thrown her tendrils about the pair and made them
prisoners.
Daphne du Maurier incorporated gardens into many of her books. Her
daughters recall that their mother loved flowers and flower
arranging. Their home was always filled with flowers.
Yet, in her book, The
King’s General, as in Rebecca, the
garden can feel like a dangerous place at times.
I was a tiny child again at Radford, my uncle’s home, and he
was walking me through the glass houses in the gardens. There was
one flower, an orchid, that grew alone; it was the color of pale
ivory, with one little vein of crimson running through the petals.
The scent filled the house, honeyed and sickly sweet. It was the
loveliest flower I had ever seen. I stretched out my hand to stroke
the soft velvet sheen, and swiftly my uncle pulled me by the
shoulder. ‘Don’t touch it, child. The stem is poisonous.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener
And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.