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Today's Show Notes

By mid-March, gardeners begin to look outward again.

Not just at the weather, but at the edges of the yard.

At the street.

People start to emerge from their houses.

More neighbors are outside, taking walks as the weather warms.

We step out the front door.

We get in the car.

We look around.

The snow begins to melt, and the things we didn't finish in the fall start to resurface.

A cracked terracotta pot.

A spot along the fence where something tried to burrow through.

Chewed bark on an ornamental tree.

Small signs of winter life that were hidden while the ground was blanketed in white.

We're not really in the garden yet.

The work hasn't begun.

But the looking has.

A quiet nod exchanged across the street.

A shared recognition: something has been happening here.

Today's stories live in that moment, when gardening begins to move out of solitude and into view.

Today's Garden History

1969 Harriet Barnes Pratt died.

She was ninety years old.

Harriet was born in Rockford, Illinois, far from the grand estates she would later be associated with.

When she married Harold Pratt, an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, Harriet entered a world of real money, the kind that can build walls around gardens.

But Harriet wasn't interested in living selfishly, especially when it came to green spaces.

For more than thirty years, she worked with the New York Botanical Garden, helping shape its buildings and its exhibitions, creating spaces designed to draw people in, not keep them out.

In 1939, Harriet brought that same instinct to the New York World's Fair.

Her Gardens on Parade spread across acres of ground, giving the public a series of garden rooms they could move through and experience.

For many visitors, it was their first encounter with gardening on that scale.

Immersive.

Generous.

Transformative.

And if Gardens on Parade was a spectacle, it was but a mere glimpse of what Harriet and Harold had created for themselves at Welwyn, their estate in Glen Cove, New York, on Long Island's Gold Coast.

The name Welwyn comes from an old English word, welig, meaning at the willows.

Harriet loved the name because it fit the place.

The land around their home had been shaped by water, by trees, and by time.

It was the kind of ground willows would have loved, moisture-holding soil, slow edges, a sense of depth and shadow.

Willows have a kind of presence.

A softness.

A gravity.

Welwyn had that same presence.

An estate that took its name from the willow and carried its character, expansive without sharpness, grand without hardness, a place shaped to receive rather than repel.

Welwyn was not simply a private garden.

It was one of the most magnificent gardens ever created in the United States.

One observer wrote,

"Mrs. Pratt did not merely have a garden. She directed a botanical institution."

More than fifty gardeners and staff worked the grounds, maintaining garden rooms designed with the Olmsted Brothers, rooms devoted, one by one, to roses, to peonies, to lilacs.

A visitor in the 1930s recalled standing on the library terrace:

"To look down was to see a tapestry of colors so dense that the earth itself was invisible, and the scent of five thousand roses rose up like a physical presence."

Today, much of that magnificence is gone.

The rose garden is lost.

The greenhouses fell silent.

What remains of Welwyn's gardens lives mostly in photographs, color images taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, offering a brief lens back to a moment when the land was at its most deliberate.

After Harriet's death, Welwyn did not pass into private hands.

The land was given over.

Today, it is a public preserve, forest reclaiming former garden rooms, trails where beds once stood.

The house itself now holds a different kind of memory, serving as the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center.

What Harriet built did not remain fixed.

But the gates stayed open.

And the land, shaped by water, by trees, by time, continues to receive.

1988 Percy Thrower died from Hodgkins lymphoma.

He was seventy-five years old.

Percy began his career as a working gardener long before anyone put a microphone in front of his face.

He apprenticed under his father, who was also a gardener, and the two worked side by side on English estates.

That's where Percy learned the work of professional gardening, from the soil up, through seasons, through setbacks, and through the patience it takes to get things wrong before you get them right.

When Percy later appeared on television, he didn't change who he was.

He wasn't performing gardening.

He was simply doing it.

In a way, he was allowing the public to become his apprentice.

On British programs like Gardening Club and later Gardeners' World, Percy arrived dressed much as he always did, a shirt and tie, sometimes a pipe in hand.

There was nothing casual about it.

It wasn't stiffness.

It was professionalism.

Percy had learned gardening in places where the work mattered, where it was skilled, demanding, and deeply respected.

Estate gardening taught him that nothing was accidental.

Even something as simple as planting a tree required judgment, where it stood, how it faced the light, how its branches moved through space.

That way of seeing never left him.

So when Percy spoke, he spoke plainly, about winter preparation, about soil, about mistakes that couldn't be rushed past.

He insisted, again and again, that he was a gardener first and a presenter second.

To Percy, presenting was incidental.

The garden was the point.

He didn't simplify the work.

He didn't talk down.

He didn't pretend it was easy.

He trusted his audience of gardeners to stay with it, to try, to fail, to adjust, and then to return.

Through television, through radio, through books, Percy reached millions not by elevating himself, but by standing alongside.

He brought extraordinary garden experience into ordinary lives without letting it go to his head.

With Percy Thrower, gardening entered public life as a shared practice, steady, respectful, and deeply human.

Unearthed Words

1906 A short letter was published in Gardening World Illustrated.

The letter was written anonymously by a gardener living on the western edge of Scotland, in a small hamlet called Ardarroch, near the quiet waters of Loch Kishorn.

The letter describes one of the earliest signs of spring in the garden, not a bloom, but the careful watching of a bird beginning to build a nest.

The letter begins this way.

"On March 18 a blackbird entered our greenhouse by the ventilator in quest of a place to build its nest. After a few enquiring 'tuck, tucks' it found a suitable place in the centre of a Himalayan Rhododendron growing in a flower pot."

The letter goes on to follow the work closely, the gathering of roots and ferns, the careful shaping from the inside, mud pressed and beaten smooth with breast and wings.

The writer even included a photograph, the blackbird settled into the finished nest, waiting.

The letter ends this way.

"We are looking forward to the time when the eggs will be hatched and the young birds have to be fed, when an opportunity will be had to note the different kinds of garden pests that will be carried to the nest for food."

Birdwatching asks for the same patience the garden does, not just for bloom, but for balance.

And this small letter from Scotland, written more than a century ago, reminds us that while every spring is different, some signs stay the same.

Birds return.

Nests appear.

And gardeners notice, and quietly say to themselves, spring is here.

Book Recommendation

A Little History of British Gardening by Jenny Uglow

As we continue British Gardens Week here on The Daily Gardener, this book gives us the ...