May 3, 2021
Today we celebrate a Canadian conservationist and author.
We'll also learn about a pioneering Belgian-American gardener,
poet, and novelist.
We hear an excerpt about how poets find inspiration in nature.
We Grow That Garden Library™ with a cookbook that shows how to
prepare beautiful meals with fewer ingredients and offers foolproof
meal-prepping and effortless entertaining.
And then we’ll wrap things up with the story of a brand new gazebo
in a community garden.
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Important Events
May 3, 1904
Today is the birthday of the naturalist and conservationist Charles
Joseph Sauriol.
An esteemed son of Toronto, Charles worked to preserve natural
areas in Canada. He was primarily devoted to the forests and
waterways of Ontario, including his beloved Don River Valley -
where his family had a cottage.
Even as a teenager, Charles loved the Don, writing in an
unpublished manuscript:
“The perfume I liked was the smell of a wood fire.... The dance
floor I knew best was a long carpet of Pine needles.”
In 1927 Charles purchased the 40-hectare property at the Forks of
the Don, which would become his second home. The Sauriol family
cottage became the place that Charles and his wife and their four
children would stay over the long months of the summer. Life at the
cottage was elemental and straightforward. Charles tapped the maple
trees for syrup and kept beehives near his cottage. The family also
had ducks, a goat, and a pet raccoon named Davy, who followed
Charles around like a dog.
Charles wrote:
“In the '20s and 30s, entire slopes of the East Don
Valley...were carpeted with flowering trilliums in the spring. It
was an unforgettable sight… A woodland without wildflowers is as
empty and desolate in some respects as a community without
children."
During 2018 the Toronto Archives shared many of Charles’s charming
diary entries on their Twitter feed. The Toronto Archives is the
repository for the Charles Sauriol record and it consists of
diaries, manuscripts, subject files, and over 3,000 photos.
Charles kept a lifelong diary. At the Don cottage, Charles
created a little woodland garden. Many of his diary entries share
his gardening adventures and philosophies on plants, like this one
from 1938:
"I find it hard to come in from the flower borders. My Pansies
are a garden of enchantment in themselves. People who love Pansies
should grow them from seed. I took the advice, and I have never had
such a profusion of bloom and of so many colors."
and
"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."
At the end of his first summer at the cottage in Don Valley,
Charles wrote about leaving the place he loved so much:
With summer’s heat, the weeks sped by,
And springtime streams did all but dry.
But days grew short and followed on,
Oh, blissful memory of the Don.
Of you, we think with saddened heart,
Our time is up, and we must part.
Today the annual Charles Sauriol Leadership Award recognizes people
who make lasting contributions to conservation.
May 3, 1912
Today is the birthday of the prolific writer and poet May
Sarton.
She came out in 1965 after her parents died. The decision impacted
her career.
May’s writing centers on our humanity, our relationships with
ourselves and others, our values, and mindfulness. In a 1983
profile in The New York Times, May said,
“I make people think, 'I have flowers in my house, why don't I
look at them?' The thing that is peaceful for me is that I feel I
have helped people. I'm constantly told, 'You've said the things
I've wanted to say.'”
Margaret Roach writes about discovering May Sarton this way:
“She actually came to my attention thanks to two men, at
different times in my life. I might have missed her altogether if
not for a one-two punch by Sydney Schanberg, an ex-New York Times
colleague who, thirty-odd years ago, offhandedly said, “You would
like May Sarton,” and then years later my therapist gave me
“Journal of a Solitude”... They knew that the natural world,
and specifically the garden, called to me, as it did
Sarton.”
May wrote :
“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few
triumphs, like life itself.”
May’s tiny home in Nelson, New Hampshire, was her happy place. She
had a garden which she loved, and she cared for many
houseplants.
She once wrote these relatable garden witticisms:
“I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and
then I become fanatically greedy.”
“True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and
the tender root.”
And some of her thoughts on gardening are prayerlike:
“Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know
that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light
nothing flowers.”
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything
that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.
Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
Unearthed Words
The seasonal urge is strong in poets.
Milton wrote chiefly in winter.
Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous
months of April and May 1819).
Burns chose autumn.
Longfellow liked the month of September.
Shelley flourished in the hot months.
Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work.
Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room.
Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a
poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke.
Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol.
Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at
night.
And so it goes.
― Helen Bevington, American poet, prose author, and
educator, When
Found, Make a Verse of
Grow That Garden Library
Half Baked Harvest Super Simple by Tieghan
Gerard
This book came out in October of 2019, and the subtitle
is More Than 125 Recipes for Instant, Overnight,
Meal-Prepped, and Easy Comfort Foods: A Cookbook.
In this New York Times Best-Selling cookbook, Tieghan delights and
tempts us with comfort food - much of it made with ingredients
fresh from the garden - in her Half
Baked Harvest Super Simple.
Tieghan is known for her blog, where she effortlessly shows how to
make beautiful food for your family. Her Super Simple versions of
her famous recipes are distilled into quicker, more manageable
dishes. Tieghan includes one-pot meals, night-before meal prep, and
even some Instant Pot® or slow cooker recipes. Highlights for
family meals include everyday dishes like Spinach and Artichoke Mac
and Cheese and Lobster Tacos. And Tieghan’s stress-free dinner
party recipes include Slow Roasted Moroccan Salmon and Fresh Corn
and Zucchini Summer Lasagna.
Tieghan’s cookbook was named one of the best cookbooks of the year
by Buzzfeed and Food Network.
This book is 288 pages of the 125 easy, show-stopping recipes -
each with fewer ingredients, foolproof meal-prepping, and
effortless entertaining.
You can get a copy of Half Baked Harvest Super Simple by
Tieghan Gerard and support the show using the Amazon Link in
today's Show Notes for around $15
Today’s Botanic Spark
Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart
Today at the Grow Regina Yara community garden, a gazebo, designed
by Victor Cicansky, will be installed.
Two years ago, the Regina community garden received a $90,000 grant
from Federated Co-op.
Grow Regina wanted to add a gazebo to the community garden for many
years. The garden is a unique space in that it offered the
community a place to grow and a place to admire art. The garden
features a variety of art pieces, including two massive sculptures
installed in August of 2010 that frame the entrance to the garden
by local artist Victor Cicansky.
Gardens have been a consistent theme in Victor’s life. His 2019
memoir, Up
From Garlic Flats, is set in the east end of the
community in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Victor’s father came from Romania, and his Romanian ancestors were
gardeners. To Victor, the garden is a place of endless inspiration.
Much of Victor’s work features garden tools like shovels and
spades, along with aspects of nature like roots and trees. Victor
even incorporates garden imagery from fruit, vegetables, and
canning jars in his creations.
An article featured in the Regina Post from June 2019 said one of
Victor’s pieces called “Compost Shovel”
featured,
“A gigantic blue ceramic shovel covered in vegetables,
eggshells, and soil.”
Today, the installation of the gazebo today marks the beginning of
a new chapter for the garden. Once the install is completed later
this week, the gazebo will host numerous functions.
And to give you an idea of how beautiful Victor's artistic gazebo
is: Imagine a gazebo that has sculpted trees with branches for
support beams and a canopy of leaves for a roof. And then the
railing of the gazebo features the garden harvest - all kinds of
vegetables.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember:
"For a happy, healthy life, garden every day."