Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community Historical Events 1714 Birth of William Shenstone, English poet, and landscape gardener. In the early 1740s, Shenstone inherited his family's dairy farm, which he transformed into the Leasowes (pronounced 'lezzoes'). The transfer of ownership lit a fire under Shenstone, and he immediately started changing the land into a wild landscape - something he referred to as an ornamented farm. Shenstone wisely bucked the trend of his time, which called for formal garden design (he didn't have the money to do that anyway.) Yet, what Shenstone accomplished was quite extraordinary. His picturesque natural landscape included water features like cascades and pools and structures like temples and ruins. What I love most about Shenstone is that he was a consummate host. He considered the garden's comfort and perspective from his visitors' standpoint. When he created a walk around his estate, Shenstone wanted to control the experience. So, Shenstone added seating every so often along the path to cause folks to stop and admire the views that Shenstone found it most appealing. Then, he incorporated signage with beautiful classical verses and poems, even adding some of his own - which elevated the Leasowes experience for his guests. After his death, his garden, the Leasowes, became a popular destination - attracting the likes of William Pitt, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. It was William Shenstone who said, Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former. 1806 Birth of Charles Leo Lesquereux, Swiss botanist. Leo was born with a naturalist's heart. A self-described dreamer, Leo loved going out into the forest, collecting all kinds of flowers and specimens for his mother. Sadly, when Leo was seven years old, he fell off the top of a mountain. He was carried back to his home completely unconscious, with multiple injuries to his body and head trauma. He remained motionless and unconscious for two weeks. His survival was a miracle, yet the fall resulted in hearing loss that would eventually leave Leo utterly deaf by the time he was a young man. Despite the fall, nature still ruled Leo's heart. As Leo matured, he tried to provide for his family as a watchmaker. But, he found himself returning again and again to the outdoors. Eventually, Leo began to focus his efforts on peat bogs, and his early work protecting peat bogs attracted the attention of Louis Agassiz of Harvard, who invited Leo to bring his family to America. When he arrived, Leo classified the plants that Agassiz had discovered on his expedition to Lake Superior. Then, on Christmas Eve, 1848, Asa Gray summoned Leo to help William Starling Sullivant. Asa predicted the collaboration would be successful, and he wrote to his friend and fellow botanist John Torrey: They will do up bryology at a great rate. Lesquereux says that the collection and library of Sullivant in muscology are magnifique, superbe,and the best he ever saw. So, Leo packed up his family, traveled to Columbus, Ohio, and settled near the bryologist, William Starling Sullivant. Bryology is the study of mosses. The root, bryos, is a Greek verb meaning to swell and is the etymology of the word embryo. Bryology will be easier to remember if you think of the ability of moss to expand as it takes on water. Mosses suited Leo and Sullivant's strengths. They require patience and close observation, scrupulous accuracy, and discrimination. Together, Leo and Sullivant wrote the book on American mosses. Sullivant funded the endeavor and generously allowed Leo to share in the proceeds. In 1873, Sullivant contracted pneumonia - ironically, an illness where your lungs fill or swell with fluid - and died on April 30, 1873. Leo lived for another 16 years before dying at the age of 83. It was Leo Lesquereux who said, My deafness cut me off from everything that lay outside of science. I have lived with Nature, the rocks, the trees, the flowers. They know me. I know them. 1810 Birth of Asa Gray, American botanist. As a professor of botany at Harvard University, Asa interacted with the top scientific minds of his time, including Charles Darwin. In 1857, Asa Gray received a confidential letter from Charles Darwin. In the letter, Darwin confided: I will enclose the briefest abstract of my notions on the means by which nature makes her species....[but] I ask you not to mention my doctrine. Darwin revealed his concept of natural selection two years later in his book, On the Origin of Species. Asa and Darwin mutually admired each other. Although Asa's masterwork, Darwiniana, deviated from Darwin's because Asa purported that religion and science were not mutually exclusive. Asa was a prolific writer. His most famous work was his Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, from New England to Wisconsin and South to Ohio and Pennsylvania Inclusive, known today simply as Gray's Manual. During his long tenure at Harvard, Gray established the science of botany and guided American botany into the international arena. He also co-authored 'Flora of North America' with John Torrey. When the botanist Joseph Trimble Rothrock arrived at Harvard, he worked every day in the private herbarium of Asa Gray. And, of Dr. Gray, Rothrock said, [He] was kindness personified, though a strict disciplinarian and a most merciless critic of a student's work. I owe more to him than to any other man, and I never think of him without veneration. 1939 Birth of Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. In Bluebeard's Egg (1986), Margaret wrote, Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing the tarmac is merely pallid vestigial remnant. In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich This book came out in 1942 (a 2007 reprint), and the subtitle is Simple Ideas For Small Outdoor Spaces. Louise Dickinson Rich (14 June 1903 - 9 April 1991) was a writer known for fiction and nonfiction works about the New England region of the United States, particularly Massachusetts and Maine. This autobiographical book was her first and is regarded as her most famous and well-known work. Louise once wrote, I feel displaced in towns and cities; although have never found myself in an uninhabited place where I did not at once feel perfectly at home. We Took to the Woods is set in the 1930s when she and her husband Ralph, and her friend and hired help Gerrish, lived in a remote cabin near Umbagog Lake. It was described as "a witty account of Thoreau-like existence in a wilderness home." In a 1942 review of the book in The Boston Globe, the story of how Louise met her husband Ralph came to light. [Louise] taught school. She went on a holiday canoe trip to Maine and saw a man cutting wood. He saw her, too, for he asked the girls to stay and eat. Wasn't it lucky the wood lasted that long, for that is how Miss Dickinson met Mr. Rich. Back in Massachusetts, she couldn't bear the distance between them. Neither could he, and pretty soon she was married and setting up housekeeping in a neighborhood of deer and bear and wildcats, a clearing on the Rapid River, a carry between two lakes. The nearest community is Middle Dam, five miles away. A 1987 review of We Took to the Woods shared the daily life of Louise and her younger sister Alice, When other girls were spending cold winter afternoons stewing in the house, we were down at the pond skating, or out in the woods tracking rabbits ...or on hot summer afternoons, we were in the sun-drenched fields or shadowy woods, looking, listening, tasting, smelling. [To be part of the natural world is] a thousand times more thrilling and beautiful than watching the most elaborate man-made spectacle on the biggest stage in the world. A 1942 review in the Hattiesburg American revealed [Louise] (who speaks of herself as an "obscure Dickinson' because she is distantly related to the late and famous Emily) has found content in the Maine woods. She describes herself, her family and her contentment in 'We Took to the Woods." ...she is so deep in the Maine woods that strangers practically never reach her house. And she likes it. T...