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The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community
 
Historical Events
1791 On this day, Martha Ballard recorded her work as an herbalist and midwife.
For 27 years, Martha kept a journal of her work as the town healer and midwife for Hallowell, Maine. In all, Martha assisted with 816 births.
Today, Martha's marvelous journal gives us a glimpse into the plants she regularly used and how she applied them medicinally. As for how Martha sourced her plants, she raised them in her garden or foraged them in the wild. As the village apothecary, Martha found her ingredients and personally made all of her herbal remedies.
Two hundred twenty-nine years ago today, Martha recorded her work to help her sick daughter.
She wrote,
My daughter Hannah is very unwell this evening. I gave her some Chamomile & Camphor.
 
Today we know that Chamomile has a calming effect, and Camphor can help treat skin conditions, improve respiratory function, and relieve pain.
 
1835 Birth of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (known by his pen name Mark Twain), American writer and humorist.
Samuel used the garden and garden imagery to convey his wit and satire. In 1874, Samuel's sister, Susan, and her husband built a shed for him to write in. They surprised him
with it when Samuel visited their farm in upstate New York. The garden shed was ideally situated on a hilltop overlooking the Chemung ("Sha-mung") River Valley.
Like Roald Dahl, Samuel smoked as he wrote, and his sister despised his incessant pipe smoking.
In this little octagonal garden/writing shed, Samuel wrote significant sections of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, A Tramp Abroad, and many other short works.
And in 1952, Samuel's octagonal shed was relocated to Elmira College ("EI-MEER-ah") campus in Elmira, New York. Today, people can visit the garden shed with student guides daily throughout the summer and by appointment in the off-season.
Here are some garden-related thoughts by Mark Twain.
Climate is what we expect; the weather is what we get.
It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream and as lonesome as Sunday.
To get the full value of joy
You must have someone to divide it with.
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve
in the beginning; it is better to live outside the garden
with her than inside it without her.
 
1874 Birth of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canadian writer and author of the Anne of Green Gables series.
Lucy was born on Prince Edward Island and was almost two years old when her mother died. Like her character in Ann of Green Gables, Lucy had an unconventional upbringing when her
father left her to be raised by her grandparents.
Despite being a Canadian literary icon and loved worldwide, Lucy's personal life was marred by loneliness, death, and depression. Historians now believe she may have ended her own life. Yet we know that flowers and gardening were a balm to Lucy. She grew lettuce, peas, carrots, radish, and herbs in her kitchen garden. And Lucy had a habit of going to the garden after finishing her writing and chores about the house.
Today in Norval, a place Lucy lived in her adult life, the Lucy Maud Montgomery Sensory Garden is next to the public school. The Landscape Architect, Eileen Foley, created the garden, which features an analemmatic (horizontal sundial), a butterfly and bird garden, a children's vegetable garden, a log bridge, and a
woodland trail.
It was Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote,
I love my garden, and I love working in it. To potter with green growing things, watching each day to see the dear, new sprouts come up, is like taking a hand in creation, I think. Just now, my garden is like faith, the substance of things hoped for.
 
1875 Birth of Frank Nicholas Meyer, Dutch-American plant explorer.
Frank worked as an intrepid explorer for the USDA, and he traveled to Asia to find and collect new plant specimens. His work netted 2,500 new plants, including the beautiful Korean Lilac, Soybeans, Asparagus, Chinese Horse Chestnut, Water Chestnut, Oats, Wild Pears, Ginkgo Biloba, and Persimmons, to name a few.
Today, Frank is most remembered for a bit of fruit named in his honor - the Meyer Lemon. Frank found it growing in the doorway to a family home in Peking. The Lemon is suspected to be a hybrid of a standard lemon and mandarin orange.
Early on in his career, Frank was known as a rambler and a bit of a loner. 
Frank once confessed in an October 11, 1901, letter to a friend,
I am pessimistic by nature and have not found a road which leads to relaxation. I withdraw from humanity and try to find
relaxation with plants.
 
Frank was indeed more enthusiastic about plants than his fellow humans. He even named his plants and talked to them.
Once he arrived in China, Frank was overwhelmed by the flora. A believer in reincarnation, Frank wrote to David Fairchild in May 1907:
[One] short life will never be long enough to find out all about this mighty land. When I think about all these unexplored
areas, I get fairly dazzled... I will have to roam around in my next life.
 
While China offered a dazzling landscape of new plant discoveries, the risks and realities of exploration were hazardous. Edward B. Clark spoke of Frank's difficulties in Technical World in July 1911. He said,
Frank has frozen and melted alternately as the altitudes have changed. He has encountered wild beasts and men nearly
as wild. He has scaled glaciers and crossed chasms of dizzying depths. He has been the subject of the always-alert
suspicions of government officials and strange peoples - jealous of intrusions into their land, but he has found what he
was sent for.
 
Frank improved the diversity and quality of American crops with his exceptional ability to source plants that would grow in the various growing regions of the United States. He was known for his incredible stamina. Unlike many of his peers who were carried in sedan chairs, Frank walked on his own accord for tens of miles daily. And his ability to walk for long distances allowed him to access many of the most treacherous and inaccessible parts of interior Asia - including China, Korea, Manchuria, and Russia.
Frank died on his trip home to America. He had boarded a steamer and sailed down the Yangtze River. His body was found days later floating in the river. To this day, his death remains a mystery. But his final letters home expressed loneliness, sadness, and exhaustion. He wrote that his responsibilities seemed "heavier and heavier."
The life of a Plant Explorer was anything but easy.
 
Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation
The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel 
This book came out in 2019, and the subtitle is The Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood.
John Lewis-Stempel is a farmer and a countryside writer - he prefers that title to 'nature writer.' The Times calls him Britain's finest living nature writer. Country Life calls him "one of the best nature writers of his generation.' His books include the Sunday Times bestsellers The Running Hare and The Wood. He is the only person to have won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing twice, with Meadowland and Where Poppies Blow. In 2016 he was Magazine Columnist of the Year for his column in Country Life. He lives in Herefordshire ("heh-ruh-frd-shr") with his wife and two children. And The Wood was a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' 
The Wood is written in diary format, making the whole reading experience more intimate and lyrical. John shares his take on all four seasons in the English woodlands, along with lots of wonderful nuggets culled from history and experience. And I might add that John is a kindred spirit in his love of poetry and folklore.
John spent four years managing Cockshutt wood