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The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community

Today's Show Notes

Happy National Gardening Day.

A day when the world tilts, just slightly, toward green.

This is the time of year when you walk outside and count quietly.

The daffodils are up.

Good.

The scilla have scattered themselves like blue confetti.

Good.

And then you look at the magnolia.

Those swollen buds.

Furred and silver all winter long.

Just beginning to loosen.

And you check the forecast.

Thirty-two.

Thirty-one.

You know what that means.

April is beautiful.

But it is not trustworthy.

This is the season when gardeners hold their breath.

Waiting to see what comes back.

And what doesn't.

Today's Garden History

1888 Harry Evan Saier was born.

In Lansing, Michigan.

Harry started out with big plant dreams.

One goal.

To have a nursery of his own.

He began running a newsstand in downtown Lansing.

Then studied agriculture and engineering at a local college.

Before most men his age had settled into a trade, Harry was running a seed store and a flower shop of his own.

Around town, people knew:

If it was green and growing, Harry Saier had his hands in it.

He was always hustling.

And because of that, he was always looking for help.

He placed newspaper ads for men and women to assist with the work.

Transplanting cabbages in the greenhouse.

Handling trees and nursery stock.

One notice simply read:

"Wanted.

Lady to canvass city for shrubs, seeds, and garden supplies."

By 1926, Harry bought a century farm along Highway 99 in Dimondale, Michigan.

There was a Victorian brick house in the front.

Long outbuildings behind it.

This was the dream.

Where Harry could do it all.

From that point on, he began thinking bigger.

Shipping seeds would be easier than shipping plants.

So he bought a printing press.

And began publishing his own catalog.

Year after year, the catalog grew thicker.

For the price of a postage stamp, Harry wrote to growers and botanists all over the world.

Collectors in Africa and Asia.

Farmers and seed savers in Latin America and South America.

Gardeners and everyday people willing to send him what others could not find.

Harry became a one-man seed repository.

By the 1950s, his catalog listed over eighteen thousand kinds of seed.

More varieties than anyone else in the country.

All in a single book.

When gardeners wrote to newspapers asking where to find a particular plant, editors answered plainly.

Try Harry Saier in Dimondale.

The Southern garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence wrote to her friend, the writer Katharine White, that Harry's catalog arrived by mail and she owed him a quarter for three years running.

Because he sent the seed first.

And took payment later.

That was his system.

You wrote a letter.

You enclosed what you could.

Eventually, a seed packet arrived in the mail.

Back on the farm in Dimondale, orders were kept in drawers.

Seeds were stored in jars.

Everything done by hand.

He married Hazel.

They raised two daughters on the farm.

One daughter married there during the years when the catalog was at its height.

For a time, the letters kept coming.

The seeds kept moving.

But by the 1960s, the world had changed.

Full-color seed packets were everywhere.

Garden centers multiplied.

Hybrid varieties filled glossy catalogs.

Harry's big old catalog felt from another era.

He had never scaled the live-plant side.

He was a seedsman at heart.

By the early 1970s, Harry was eighty-six.

His eyesight was failing.

He was tired.

In 1973, a young man in California wrote for obscure seed.

Harry sent the catalog.

The order was placed.

The seed did not arrive.

The young man called.

Harry spoke of failing help.

Of going blind.

Of being worn out.

He said he might haul it all to the dump.

The young man and a friend hitchhiked to Dimondale.

They worked three months.

Hoeing weeds.

Digging graves in the cemetery on the farm.

Listening to stories about sixty years in seed.

For $7,500, they bought it all.

The jars.

The files.

The printing press.

The type cabinets.

The seed cleaners.

Even the heavy brass cash register.

Two railroad boxcars went west to California.

From that cargo began the J.L. Hudson Seed Company.

At the end of his life, Harry still ran the cemetery on his farm.

He told a reporter:

"You can't get anyone to dig a grave these days.

No one likes to look at a shovel."

Harry Evan Saier died in 1976.

He was eighty-eight.

He was buried in the cemetery he created in Dimondale.

1901 Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker was born.

Kathleen loved phycology.

The study of algae.

Because it helped her understand how plants live in the ocean.

Kathleen came of age after the First World War.

And she began teaching botany at the University of Manchester in England.

But when she married, the university ended her lectureship.

Married women were barred from teaching.

Luckily, Kathleen was able to continue her work as an unpaid researcher.

She did this for decades.

After the Second World War, Kathleen was still studying algae when she started to focus on a red seaweed called Welsh Porphyra.

Commonly known as laver.

One of the central goals of her research was to figure out how to grow it in the lab.

Because when a researcher cannot grow a plant, it means something about the life cycle remains a mystery.

Kathleen tried again and again.

But nothing held.

She could not get it to grow.

But one day, a few oyster shells slipped into the tank that had the spores of the Welsh Porphyra in it.

She did not think anything of it.

Later, she walked past the tank and froze.

The shells were covered in pink sludge.

Kathleen immediately feared she had contaminated the tank.

But then she looked closer.

And quickly discerned that the pink sludge was actually the first stage of the seaweed's life cycle.

The shells had given the spores something to cling to.

Much like mulch on a forest floor.

The spores needed shelter.

A surface.

And now they were growing.

When Kathleen's discovery was published in a magazine called Nature, a Japanese biologist named Sokichi Segawa took notice.

For centuries, Japan had harvested a sister variety of this red seaweed to make nori.

The thin, dark sheets of seaweed that wrapped around rice for sushi.

But after the war, the seaweed beds were mysteriously failing.

Nori was getting harder and harder to find.

And no one in Japan or the world understood why.

What the scientific community had not realized was how essential shells were to a seaweed's life cycle.

In Japan's case, wartime mines, typhoons, and pollution had stripped the seafloor of oysters, scallops, and mussels.

Without shells.

And without that vibrant ecosystem.

The spores had nowhere to hide.

So they drifted.

And died.

Kathleen's work changed that.

Her research gave seaweed farmers the idea to seed shells intentionally onto the seafloor.

Now they could grow nori with purpose instead of luck.

And almost overnight, the seaweed farms in Japan began to return.

The harvest came back.

Fishermen could feed their families again.

Markets reopened.

And sushi returned.

First as sustenance.

Then as tradition.

Something shared with the world.

It is hard to overstate the impact Kathleen had on the Japanese people and their beloved seaweed.

Japanese fishermen were so grateful that they took up a collection to build a statue in her honor.

But before Kathleen could sit for the artist, she died of cancer in 1957.

She was fifty-five.

Six years later, on Kathleen's birthday.

On this day in 1963.

Her memorial was unveiled in Uto, Japan.

At the Sumiyoshi Shrine.

Overlooking the Ariake Sea.

All of Kathleen's academic achievements, including her scientific papers and graduation robes, were buried there.

Her memorial is a simple slab of granite.

Inset with a metal plaque that bears her likeness.

And ever...