The Daily Gardener is a weekday show.
It will air every day Monday - Friday
(I’m taking weekends off for rest, family, fun, & gardening!)
The show will debut April 1, 2019. The tagline for the show is thoughts & brevities to inspire growth.
Shows are between 5 - 10 minutes in length.
The format for the show begins with a brief monologue followed by brevities.
The Brevities segment is made up of 5 main topic areas.
1. Commemoration: Here, I dig up fascinating people, places, and events in horticulture and share them with you. This is the “On This Day” #OTD portion of the show helping you feel more grounded and versed o n the most enchanting stories from the history of gardening.
2. Unearthing Written Work: This is made up of poems, quotes, journal entries, and other inspiring works pertaining to gardening
3. Book Recommendations: These are the literary treasures that will help you build a garden library, strengthen your gardening know-how and inspire you.
4. Garden Chores: A Daily Garden To-Do; improve your garden one actionable tip at a time
5. Something Sweet: This segment is dedicated to “reviving the little botanic spark” in your heart - to paraphrase botanist Alexander Garden; to add more joy to the pursuit of gardening.
The show sign-off is: "For a happy, healthy life: garden every day"
There are a few easter eggs in the show for Still Growing listeners. I still start the show with - "Hi there, everyone" and I end the show by saying the show is "produced in lovely, Maple Grove, Minnesota”.
The music for the show is called “The Daily Gardener Theme Song” originally dubbed “Bach’s Garden". I wrote it on Garageband. It will be available as a ringtone for your smartphone through the show’s Patreon page.
If you enjoy the show, please share it with your garden friends. I would so appreciate that.
Sep 27, 2021
Today in botanical history, we celebrate a Spanish botanist, a
Swiss poet and diarist, and an American industrialist.
We’ll hear an excerpt from a best-selling book where the main
character is a 12-year-old girl named September.
We Grow That Garden Library™ with a book that offers a year of
fantastic wild flower paintings and notes.
And then we’ll wrap things up with a lab girl - a scientist whose
incredible book was released just five years ago.
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Curated News
New books: how designers see the world |
Wallpaper.com | Jonathan Bell
Important Events
September 27, 1777
Birth of Simón de Rojas Clemente, Spanish botanist, intellectual,
politician, and spy. He is regarded as the father of European
ampelography (the identification and classification of grapevines).
Today a statue of Simón overlooks the Royal Botanical Garden in
Madrid. In the early 1800s, Simón taught Arabic. One of his
students, Domingo Badía Leblich, invited Simón on an extensive trip
through Africa from the Atlas Mountains to the Nile. Anticipating
resistance from locals, Domingo and Simón disguised themselves as
Muslims and even changed their names. Simón became Mohamad Ben-Alí.
And at some point after joining the expedition, Simón learned the
true reason for the trip: spying on North Africa for Manuel Godoy,
the First Secretary of State of Spain. Simón went on to explore
Andalusia before returning to Madrid, where he served as the
director of the Royal Botanical Garden library. In 1820, Simón
planted a collection of grapevines at the Madrid Royal Botanic
Garden. To this day, Simón’s grapes are among the wine and table
grapes grown in the garden since the 18th century. Simón’s
herbarium contained 186 specimens of grapes, which remain in
excellent condition. They are especially prized because they are
the oldest collection of grapevines and because Simón collected
them before phylloxera arrived in Spain. Today Simón’s grapevine
specimens have been genetically analyzed thanks to modern DNA
testing.
September 27, 1821
Birth of Henri Frederic Amiel, Swiss philosopher & poet. He is
remembered for his Journal Intime, which he kept from
1847 until twenty-two days before he died in 1881.
On August 26, 1868, he wrote,
Say to yourself that you are entering upon the autumn of your
life; that the graces of spring and the splendors of summer are
irrevocably gone, but that autumn, too, has its beauties. The
autumn weather is often darkened by rain, cloud, and mist, but the
air is still soft, and the sun still delights the eyes, and touches
the yellowing leaves caressingly: it is the time for fruit, for
harvest, for the vintage, the moment for making provision for the
winter.
My life has reached its month of September. May I recognize it
in time, and suit thought and action to the fact!
He also wrote,
A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to
wait, more instruction than a library.
September 27, 1877
Birth of James Drummond Dole, American industrialist. Known as the
“Pineapple King,” he founded the pineapple industry in Hawaii. His
Hawaiian Pineapple Company (HAPCO) later became the Dole Food
Company. In 1899, James made his way to Hawaii after graduating
from Harvard. After realizing that the native Kona pineapple could
not be grown commercially, he started growing a Florida variety
known as Smooth Cayenne on sixty acres. The local newspapers
scoffed at his idea. James persisted and hired help to create a
machine that could process one hundred pineapples every minute. He
also aggressively marketed pineapple in mainland America. Within
twenty years, Hawaiian pineapples dominated the market. In the
first half of the 20th century, the popularity of the pineapple
upside-down cake further helped the pineapple become mainstream. In
terms of their makeup, pineapples contain an enzymatic protein
called bromelain - a chemical that prevents gelatin from setting.
Once a pineapple is heated for canning, the bromelain is destroyed,
which is why canned pineapple can be used successfully with jello.
Today, Hawaii produces only .13 of the world’s pineapple.
Unearthed Words
She liked anything orange: leaves; some moons; marigolds;
chrysanthemums; cheese; pumpkin, both in pie and out; orange juice;
marmalade. Orange is bright and demanding. You can’t ignore orange
things. She once saw an orange parrot in the pet store and had
never wanted anything so much in her life. She would have named it
Halloween and fed it butterscotch. Her mother said butterscotch
would make a bird sick and, besides, the dog would certainly eat it
up. September never spoke to the dog again — on principle.
― Catherynne M. Valente, The
Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own
Making
Grow That Garden Library
Wild Flowers of Britain by Margaret Erskine
Wilson
This book came out in 2016, and the subtitle is Month by
Month.
Here’s what the publisher wrote about this book:
Margaret Erskine Wilson, late President of Kendal Natural History
Society, was a keen amateur botanist and watercolorist. In 1999,
she donated to the Society 150 sheets of water-colour paintings
representing a thousand British and Irish plants in flower and
fruit, painted in situ over many years and in various places.
At the time she donated the paintings to Kendal Natural History
Society, she wrote:
Begun in 1943/4 for a friend who said, 'I might learn the names
of flowers if you drew them for me, in the months they're in
flower'!
The result is this beautiful, previously unpublished book of all
her accurate and informative illustrations, painted over a period
of 45 years.
Over a thousand British and Irish flowers are represented in this
book, and it still today serves Margaret Erskine Wilson's original
purpose - it is an easy way to learn the names of our delicate and
beautiful wild flowers.
This book is 176 pages of a year’s worth of Margaret Erskine
Wilson’s extraordinary paintings, notes, the English common names,
and the scientific names.
You can get a copy of Wild Flowers of Britain by Margaret
Erskine Wilson and support the show using the Amazon Link in
today’s Show Notes for around $12
Today’s Botanic Spark
Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart
September 27, 1969
Birth of Hope Jahren, American geochemist and geobiologist. In her
work at the University of Oslo in Norway, she analyzes fossil
forests dating to the Eocene. Her popular book Lab
Girl (2016) is part memoir and part ode to
nature. In Lab Girl, she wrote,
There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of
growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse
my students the most.
Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its
plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking
has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants
reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and
repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new
generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can
see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember:
“For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.”