Feb 24, 2022
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Historical Events
1743 Birth of Joseph
Banks (books
about this person), English naturalist, botanist, and
patron of the natural sciences.
Joseph is best known for his study of Australian flora and fauna as
the botanist on board the Endeavor with Captain James Cook.
Before returning to England, Cook worried the Endeavor wouldn't
make it around the Cape of Good Hope.
In a fateful decision, Cook brought the ship to Batavia, a Dutch
colony, to fortify his boat. Batavia was rife with malaria and
dysentery. As a result, Cook lost 38 crewmembers. Joseph and fellow
botanist, Daniel Solander, became gravely ill but managed to
survive. Even as they battled back from illness, they still went
out to collect specimens.
As gardeners, we owe a great debt to Joseph. When he returned to
England, Joseph Banks advised George III on creating the Royal
Botanic Garden, Kew.
And, in 1778, when Linnaeus died, Joseph acted with haste to buy
Linnaeus's belongings on behalf of the Linnaeus Society. When the
king of Sweden realized Linnaeus' legacy was no longer in the
country, he sent a fast ship to pursue the precious cargo. But
Joseph was too quick, and that's how Linnaeus's collection came to
reside in London at the Linnaeus Society's Burlington House and not
in Sweden.
Earlier this month, there was breaking news that the HMS Endeavor
was discovered lying at the bottom of the Newport Harbour in the
United States. In 1778, 35 years after the Endeavor brought Joseph
Banks and Captain Cook to Australia, the ship was sold. HMS
Endeavor was renamed Lord Sandwich, and then during the
Revolutionary War, the British deliberately sunk her off the coast
of Rhode Island.
1955 Birth of Steve
Jobs (books
about this person), founder of Apple.
A lover of simplicity and elegance, Steve once said,
The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around
Kyoto.
To Steve, the ultimate Kyoto garden was the Saiho-ji ("Sy-ho-jee")
- and most people would agree with him. The dream-like Saiho-ji
garden was created by a Zen priest, poet, calligrapher, and
gardener named Muso Soseki ("MOO-so SO-sec-key") in the 14th
century during the Kamakura ("Comma-COOR-rah") Period.
The Saiho-ji Temple is affectionately called koke-dera or the Moss
Temple - a reference to the over 120 moss species found in the
garden.
Steve Jobs wasn't the only celebrity to find zen at Saiho-ji -
David Bowie was also a huge fan.
And when it comes to design, there's a Steve Jobs quote that garden
designers should pay attention to, and it goes like this:
Design is a funny word.
Some people think design means how it looks.
But... if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.
1963 On this day, The Anniston
Star out of Anniston, Alabama, published a little
retrospective on the adventures of Joseph Rock, the great
Austrian-American botanist, and explorer, who had passed away
almost three months earlier in Honolulu at 79.
Joseph was born in Austria but ended up immigrating to the United
States and eventually settled in Hawaii, where he was beloved. He
became Hawaii's first official botanist. Before he died, the
University of Hawaii granted Joseph an honorary doctor of Science
degree.
In addition to plants, Joseph had a knack for languages. He
cataloged and transcribed Chinese manuscripts and wrote a
dictionary of one of the tribal languages. He had an enormous
intellect and was multi-talented. In addition to being a botanist,
he was a linguist. He was also regarded as a world-expert
cartographer, ornithologist, and anthropologist.
From a gardening standpoint, Joseph Rock introduced
blight-resistant Chestnut trees to America. He also brought us more
than 700 species of rhododendron. Some of his original rhododendron
seeds were successfully grown in the Golden Gate Park in San
Francisco. Joseph spent much of his adult life - more than 20 years
- in southwestern China.
There were many instances where he was the first explorer to enter
many of the locations he visited. Joseph became so embedded in the
country that there were many times that his counterparts in other
parts of the world thought that he might have died in the Tibetan
or Yunnan ("YOU-nan") mountains.
And so it was on this day that The Anniston
Star shared a few of Joseph's most hair-raising
adventures, including this little story called Night Amid
Coffins.
Two of Dr. Rock's expeditions (1923-24 and 1927-30) were
sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Reporting on the
first of these in September 1925. National Geographic
Magazine. Rock [was] trapped by bandits in the funeral chamber
of an old temple in a small settlement north of Yunnanfu. While the
small army he had hired for protection kept the brigands at bay,
the explorer (Rock) sat amid coffins, with two .45 caliber pistols
(one in each hand), and his precious plant collection nearby. By
morning, the bandits had disappeared, though Dr. Rock noticed
several heads hanging from poles outside the village.
Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation
Claudia Roden's Mediterranean by Claudia
Roden
This book came out late in 2021, and the subtitle
is Treasured Recipes from a Lifetime of Travel.
A legendary cookbook writer, anthropologist, and regional cuisine
expert, Claudia Roden ("Roe-din") began traveling the Mediterannean
when her kids left home. She traveled extensively through the area
and fell in love with Mediterranean food. And in this book,
Mediterranean means favorites from France, Greece, Spain, Egypt,
Turkey, and Morocco.
Claudia knows the slight differences that make the flavors of these
regions. Listen to how the ingredients - like herbs, vegetables,
and citrus - get used in different places.
Claudia writes:
Despite the similarities, there are distinct
differences.
Where the French use cognac, Sicilians use Marsala, and
Spaniards sherry.
Where Italians use mozzarella, Parmesan, pecorino or ricotta;
the French use goat cheese or Gruyère ("groo-yair"), and the Greeks
Turks Lebanese and Egyptians use feta or halloumi
("huh-loo-mee").
Where an Egyptian or Syrian would use ground almonds or pine
nuts in a sauce, a Turk uses walnuts.
Crème fraîche is used in France, where yogurt and buffalo-milk
cream are used in the eastern Mediterranean.
In the northern Mediterranean, the flavors are of herbs that
gow wild;
in the eastern and southern Mediterranean, they are of spices,
flower waters, and molasses.
In Turkey they flavor their meats with cinnamon and allspice,
in Morocco they use cumin, saffron, cinnamon, and ginger.
While a fish soup in the French Midi includes orange zest and
saffron, in Tunisia it will have cumin, paprika, cayenne, and
cilantro leaves.
It's as if the common language of the Mediterranean is spoken
in myriad dialects.
Claudia grew up in Egypt. She was born there in 1936. She also
spent lots of time with extended family in France and Spain. The
cookbook shares some of her personal stories as well.
Claudia's dishes are a little bit of everything - simple to
sophisticated. But the recipes take center stage and speak for
themselves - magnified by spectacular photography.
Recipes range the gamut from appetizers to desserts and
include:
This book is 320 pages of what Josep Pla called
cooking: the Landscape in a saucepan
You can get a copy of Claudia Roden's Mediterranean by
Claudia Roden and support the show using the Amazon link in today's
show notes for $25.
Botanic Spark
1749 Birth of Mary Eleanor
Bowes (books
about this person), English Countess of Strathmore,
grandmother of John Bowes, and ancestor to the late Queen
Mother.
After her father died when she was 11, she became the wealthiest
and most educated woman in England. After the death of her first
husband, she was tricked into marrying a man who abused her nearly
to death more than once. But before this torturous time in her
life, she loved learning, she loved collecting, and she loved
botany.
Her father created an amazon garden at the family's beloved Gibside
estate in Northumberland. For Lady Eleanor, botany was not only a
genuine passion but a way to stay connected to her father and his
legacy.
Lady Eleanor was very interested in plant exploration and the
latest plant discoveries. She had hothouses installed at Gibside
and at Stanley House in London near the Chelsea Physick Garden.
She hired the Scottish botanist, William Paterson, to collect
plants on Cape of Good Hope in South Africa during four expeditions
between 1777 and 1779.
Lady Eleanor came up with some unique ways to showcase her love of
botany.
Around 1780, she commissioned an extraordinary mahogany botany
cabinet that featured long drawers on the side of the cabinet for
dry specimens and live specimens. The side of the cabinet flipped
down to create a little desktop and to make it possible to access
the drawers. The front of the cabinet was adorned with holly swags
and seven medallions with the heads of great men like Shakespeare,
Theophrastus, and Alexander Pope.
The cabinet also had a bottom shelf that would have had a
lead-lined tray for plants. The lead-lined legs of the cabinet had
taps and would have held water. The water could have been used for
the live plants sitting on the tray or perhaps the humidity somehow
helped preserve the dried specimens. Obviously, the combination of
water and wood never works well, but nonetheless, that was the
original design idea. Up until the 1850s, the cabinet was known to
hold some of her most prized herbarium specimens, but after Lady
Eleanor's death, they were lost to time when the cabinet was
sold.
The other unique botanical element Lady Eleanor enjoyed was an
adorable little plant theatre at Gibside. The theater was
essentially a little alcove or niche recessed into the brick wall
that wrapped around the garden. The niche was then filled with
prized potted plants. Today there is an adorable pale blue painted
wooden frame around the alcove with the words "Plant Theatre
"written across the top of the frame.
During her disastrous and tortured second marriage, which lasted
for nearly a decade, Lady Eleanor was forced to give up her
botanical endeavors and almost everything she enjoyed in life. In
the end, one of her maids helped her escape her husband.
Lady Eleanor became the first woman to keep her property after
divorce. Shortly thereafter, she signed her properties over to her
eldest son - including her most precious possession: her beloved
Gibside and its garden - her father's legacy.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener
And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every
day.