Hi there and welcome to the Daily Gardener and Almanac of Garden History, Literature, and Small Botanical Joyce. I'm Jennifer Eblin, and today is April 30th. Well, it's finally the last day of April, and if you've been waiting for the right moment to tuck pansies into a pot or a border, this is it. pansies love a cool spring.
They want these exact mornings, bright but not hot, damp but not heavy. Give them a little shade by afternoon, and they will bloom their hearts out four weeks. The word pansy comes from the French, Ponce, meaning thought. The rock musician Bruce Springsteen once left pansies at the grave of the 19th century order, Robert Ingersoll.
Bruce left a note that read, I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of free thought, and memory of the great agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas, and free lives against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. So think of a pansy as a thought or an idea. Here is worth a little pause, because sometimes a simple thought is the start of something bigger. Here's today's garden history.
It was on this day in 1873 that the American botanist William Starling Sullivan died in Columbus, Ohio. William is remembered today as the father of American biology, or the study of mosses. While many botanists chased orchids or towering conifers, William crouched low, peering through a lens at the tiny plants most people stepped over. What William discovered there was an entire world.
Over the course of his life, William described nearly 300 species of mosses and liverworts. William wrote the BrioFite sections for Asa Gray's Manual of Botany, the Essential Guide for Identifying American Plants. Then came his great work, Iconis Muscorum, published in 1864 with 129 copper plates of North American mosses drawn with what one botanist called scrupulous accuracy. Relief, every spore capsule, work so precise it is still consulted today.
Personally speaking, William's life was not an easy one. His first wife Jane died only months after their wedding. And when he was 20, William left his studies abruptly when his father died unexpectedly, and he spent years running the family business. That's when William met Eliza Griscomb Wheeler.
She was 14 years younger than him and as devoted to plants as he was. The two collected and studied together, Eliza even discovered a new species of plant, all on her own. The genus Sullivania now bears William's name, but it was Eliza who first found those delicate, cliff-dwelling plants in the Saxa Fridge family. William honored her discovery after she died of cholera in 1850 by having a wreath of Sullivania carved into her headstone.
After the loss of Eliza, William returned to his mosses to the quiet green world that brought him solace. Sullivan's milkweed, that smooth rosepink asclepias, beloved by monarch butterflies, now bears William's name. And Rudbeckia Fulgeta variety, a Levantii, or the Black Eyed Susan, sold as gold storm, is another quiet tribute to the man who spent his life looking closely at the smallest plants. And it was on this day in 1827 that the Scottish botanist David Douglas reached the summit of Athabasca Pass in the Canadian Rockies, trudging waist deep in snow, David carried a heavy load, seeds, dried plant specimens, and journals soaked through with meltwater.
All the while, his moccasins were rotting and his eyesight was already failing. Incredibly, at the time, David was only 28 years old. The indigenous peoples that David traveled among, the Chinook and the Calipuya, called David the Grassman. They watched David wander through forests and valleys, utterly fixed on plants that everyone else ignored.
In his journey on this day, all those years ago, through the Athabasca Pass, David wrote, "...the snow being very soft and the weather warm, we were often waist deep. The view from the top is most terrific. I was so much struck with the beauty of the scenery. I ascended a mountain on the north side.
This I named Mount Brown in honor of Robert Brown Esquire, the illustrious botanist." Over the course of his expeditions, David introduced roughly 240 species to Western gardens, the Douglas fir, the sickest bruce, and the flowering current are just a few of them. The Royal Horticultural Society once said that the current alone was worth the cost of David's entire expedition. But he also gathered California Poppies, Lupins, Pinstamans, and Oregon Grape. Sadly, David died just seven years after crossing Athabasca Pass.
He was 35 years old, and he was in Hawaii when he mysteriously fell into a cattle trap and was killed by a bull. Yet every seed David sent home is a badge of honor earned through danger, hardship, and a relentless desire to see what plants the world contained. In today's unearthed words, we hear an excerpt from the American writer Annie Dillard, born on this day, April 30th in 1945. Annie won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, Pilgrim, at Tinker Creek.
In it, Annie spends a year beside a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. What Annie finds there is not gentle nature, but extravagance, a world overflowing with life. Annie wrote, all the green in the planted world consists of these whole rounded chloroplasts winding their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll, what you get is 136 atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring.
At the ring center is a single atom of magnesium. Now, if you remove the atom of magnesium and put in its place in the atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin, the streaming red dots, and the goldfish's tail. Annie wrote those words in 1974 beside a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge. Annie was just 29 years old, turning a molecule of green until the colors swapped.
I keep thinking about that single atom. Everything else stays the same. Magnesium, or iron. Green or red.
And every time I'm in the garden now, hands in the soil, pulling something up, I think about what I'm actually touching. How close it all is? Just one atom apart. This time you grow that garden library with today's book, Burg Style, by Peter Berg.
This book is part of Modern Masters Week here on The Daily Gardener, and that means all this week's book recommendations feature contemporary voices who have shaped how we design and plant our gardens today. Peter is a landscape designer who understands drama but uses it carefully. As a result, Peter's work leans into structure, strong lines, sculptural plantings, and clear geometry. But Peter is equally attentive to how people move through the space.
As become journeys, and water features become punctuation. In his book, Peter draws inspiration from a number of designers, including Count Herman von Pückler-Muschau, a 19th century German landscape designer who approached garden design like music. In this section, one of Peter's most intriguing ideas is what he calls the Beethoven principle. Peter writes, Just as Beethoven, use this technique to immediately create great tension.
Pückler-Muschau also deploys it as a motif in his plantings. And he achieves the da-da-da-da-um by planting three trees relatively close together and then placing a fourth one of the same species further away. The scene moves most often from front right to back left with the solitary tree striking the final note as it draws the eye deeper into the distance. Well, it's little gems like this one that make this book unforgettable.
And I love that Peter, a one-man repository on garden design, has poured out his wisdom and life experience for us in this very generous and useful book. And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart. It was on this day in 1966 that the American botanist Roland McMillan Harper died in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Roland was 87.
Although he was born in Farmington, Maine, when Roland was 10, his family moved south to Georgia, hoping the warmer air would help his tuberculosis. Instead, it changed his life. For the next 60 years, Roland traveled through the long-leaf pine forests of the American South, nearly 100,000 miles on foot or by train. What Roland understood about forests was something few scientists believed at the time.
They needed fire. And it's important to know that young, long-leaf pines begin life in what botanists call the grass stage. For years, they look exactly like grass, a low-tuffed of needles flat against the soil. The growing bud hides at ground level, so when fire sweeps across the land, the flames pass harmlessly overhead.
That's how, when fire clears the forest floor, it removes hardwood competitors and leaves open ground for the next generation of long-leaf pines. Thus, without fire, a forest would slowly suffocate. Roland wrote as much when he said, �Fire is as much a part of the environment of the long-leaf pine as is the soil or the rain.� Still, many scientists and peers dismissed Roland out of hand, even ridiculing his thinking. But Roland never stopped documenting his findings and beliefs on healthy forest practices and insights.
As for his personal life, Roland married late in life at 65 to Mary Susan Wiggley. After Roland died, it was Mary who devoted herself to preserving his work, including over 7,000 photographs and hundreds of boxes of field notes. Today, the wildflower, Harper O'Callous Flava, bears the name of Roland McMillan Harper. It's often simply called Harper's Beauty.
What stays with me about Roland is that he was right all along. The forests need fire. They always have. Sometimes, the thing that looks like destruction is just the ground clearing the way for what comes next.
As we close the show today, remember the pansy was named for a thought, ponze, the French word for both the flower and the thinking alike. Not a lesson, not a plan. Just a thought, sitting in the spring garden, waiting to see what it becomes. Take a chance and see where it leads you.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener, and remember for a happy, healthy life. Garden every day.