June 1, 2026 Johann Sebastian Müller, William Bull, Henry Beston, The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom, and Mary Beal

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Today's Show Notes

Let's talk about rhubarb — one of the spring garden's greatest gifts.

I grew up with a big rhubarb patch right by the back fence.

Those enormous, celery-like stalks just took over that corner of the yard.

My mom would cut them and mix them with strawberries for the most delightful crumble.

She'd dish it up and serve it with Schwan's vanilla ice cream.

I still make it.

Rhubarb is one of those plants that keeps coming back no matter what.

It dies back at the end of the season, disappears completely, and then — right when you've almost given up — there it is again.

That's a good thing to remember on the first day of June.

Some of the garden's best gifts keep coming back.

Today's Garden History

1792 Johann Sebastian Müller died in Lambeth, London.

The German-born botanical illustrator was seventy-seven years old.

Johann was born in 1715 in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of a Kunstgärtner — a professional art-gardener who tended the private gardens of the noble Stromer family.

That's how Johann knew plants so well.

Because he lived beside them day after day.

But while Johann loved plants, he didn't want a spade to work the land.

Instead, he wanted to capture it — artistically, with engraving tools and paintbrushes.

And so in 1744, after apprenticing for nearly a decade, Johann packed his portfolio and crossed the Channel with his brother Tobias, headed for London.

Somewhere in that crossing, Johann Sebastian Müller became John Miller.

Not a lie.

Just a way to make his name legible in a city that would not have met him halfway.

John settled in Westminster.

And whenever he needed a specimen, he walked three miles down to the Chelsea Physic Garden.

He refused to draw from dried herbarium sheets.

Instead, John found his inspiration exclusively among living plants, where he took a very matter-of-fact approach and didn't hide what was right before him.

He painted not only the beautiful blossoms, but also the stamens and the pistils — the husbands and the wives, as Linnaeus called them — classifying plants by their reproductive parts.

Critics called all of that material lewd and morally suspect.

But John just kept working.

Over the course of seven years, he self-published his masterwork — the Illustratio Systematis Sexualis Linnaei, An Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus — in twenty installments.

Eighty-five subscribers supported him, including a fellow transplant from Germany and garden lover, Queen Charlotte, who ordered two copies.

In July of 1775, a letter arrived from Carl Linnaeus himself.

It was about John's engraving of the sunflower — a plate so precise it showed the flower from every angle, its seeds, its stem, its reproductive parts — nothing omitted, nothing softened.

Linnaeus wrote that it was "more beautiful and more accurate than any seen since the beginning of the world."

The father of modern botany had looked at John Miller's sunflower and said: no one has ever seen a plant more clearly.

John worked until the very end.

He fathered twenty-seven children and trained two of his sons, John Frederick and James, to follow in his footsteps.

They both went on to illustrate the voyages of Captain Cook.

John died on this day in 1792 and was buried at St. Mary's Church in Lambeth — which, as it turns out, was the most fitting place imaginable, because that church is now the Garden Museum.

And John is still there — under the floor, beneath a building devoted entirely to the history of gardening.

John Miller gave the living world its most precise, most honest portraits of plants — no apologies, no prettifying, and no hiding what was actually there.

1902 William Bull died in Chelsea, London.

The English nurseryman and plant collector was seventy-four years old.

William was born in Winchester, England, and lost his father young.

He was raised by his grandfather in Shirley, near Southampton — a comfortably off household that expected him to do something sensible with his life.

At fourteen, he chose gardening.

And to their credit, his family supported his choice.

William spent the rest of his life proving it wasn't a mistake.

He apprenticed first in Winchester, then made his way to London to join Henderson's nursery in St. John's Wood — one of the finest establishments in the city.

By twenty, William was traveling the country as a representative, carrying delicate plant specimens to private estates, walking the last miles himself so nothing shifted in transit.

When a later employer refused him a partnership, William took over the nursery of John Weeks on King's Road in Chelsea — a world-class establishment with state-of-the-art glasshouses and a seventy-foot winter garden.

William was thirty-three years old and couldn't afford the purchase price, so he negotiated an annuity instead — three hundred pounds a year — and spent the next thirteen years building his dream on borrowed ground.

William called his establishment Bull's Establishment for New and Rare Plants.

His peers called it something else.

Fellow nurseryman Benjamin Williams declared that Bull's nursery was "Horticulture in Excelsis" — horticulture at its absolute highest.

As the business grew, William paid to send plant hunters to Colombia, Liberia, Panama, and the Eastern Archipelago — the most dangerous corners of the globe — to bring back species no European greenhouse had ever held.

Some of those men didn't come home.

Richard Pearce, one of the finest plant collectors of his generation, died of yellow fever in Panama at thirty-three years old, looking for orchids for William's collection.

Beginning in 1883, William held annual orchid exhibitions at his King's Road nursery.

For fifteen years, it was one of the great sights of the London season — visited by the King of Siam, the Prince of Wales, and what felt like every duke and earl in England.

The Morning Post declared it "a sight that could be seen nowhere else in the world."

1878 A disease called coffee rust swept through the plantations of Ceylon — modern-day Sri Lanka — and wiped out the coffee crop entirely.

An entire island's economy collapsed overnight.

William had been quietly growing a Liberian coffee variety that was immune to the blight.

He called the ruined planters his "suffering brethren of the soil," and he sent them everything he had — thousands of seedlings, packed into his specially patented plant cases, germinated to exactly the right height to survive the journey.

The plantations recovered.

The island found its footing again.

In 1897, the Royal Horticultural Society named William one of the first sixty recipients of the Victoria Medal of Honour — the highest honor the botanical world could offer.

The following year, William sold some of his grounds and stepped back from the grand exhibitions.

But still, he kept working — with a smaller operation, and thirteen employees — until a short illness took him in the spring of 1902.

William died on this day and was buried at Brompton Cemetery in London.

His sons carried William Bull & Sons fourteen more years after he was gone.

And somewhere in a botanical garden today, beside a plant that arrived in England because a young man walked into a jungle and didn't come back — a label still reads W. Bull.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a passage from The Outermost House by the American writer Henry Beston, born on this day in 1888.

In 1926, Henry went to Cape Cod for a two-week vacation — at a small cottage he had built on the sand dunes near Nauset Beach.

He never left.

Instead, he stayed a full year — alone with the tides, the shorebirds, the winter storms, and his journal.

That year became The Outermost House — one of the great works of American nature writing.

In it, he wrote about gardens.

Henry wrote,

"A garden is the mirror of a mind.

It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year,

and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms."

Henry stayed with me after I read that.

I think about it every time I walk into the garden for just a few minutes — and stay until my husband comes to get me.

Book Recommendation

The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom

It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom.

This book is part of Garden Cookbooks Week, which means all this week's book recommendations celebrate the connection between the garden and the table.

There is a quote on the cover of this book by Alys Fowler, and it says everything:

"The minute I finished reading this book, I went outside and sowed some lettuce."

That is exactly what Joy Larkcom does to you.

Joy spent years traveling through Europe in a caravan with her husband and two young children, collecting the seeds of local vegetable varieties that were quietly vanishing from the world.

Here she is, from the introduction:

"Finding these plants and learning how to grow them has been a long and wonderful voyage of discovery. Its first leg was what we fondly call our grand vegetable tour.

In August of 1976, my husband Don Pollard and I, with our children Brendan and Kirsten, who were then seven and five years old, left Montrose Farm for a year to travel around Europe in a caravan.

Our main purpose was to learn about traditional and modern methods of vegetable growing — and to collect the seed of local varieties of vegetables which, as a handful of far-sighted people had begun to appreciate, were an invaluable genetic heritage that was vanishing fast."

And this is what she did with everything she learned:

"To get height — a key element in potagers — I train tomatoes up an attractive spiral steel support, sometimes intermingling them with ornamental climbers.

I always leave a few clumps of chicory to run to seed in their second season. They grow over seven feet high and produce fresh flushes of sky blue edible flowers every morning over many weeks.

The giant winter radishes will do the same, making glorious pink or white flowered clumps in their second spring and seemingly endless crops of delectable edible seed pods.

To make the most impact with colorful plants, I almost always plant in groups at equidistant spacing rather than in traditional rows.

Bull blood beetroot is a favorite with its scarlet leaves — red cabbage, ornamental cabbages and kales — and for textured effects, I add the ground-hugging ice plant, glossy-leaved purslanes, dill, and fennel.

And every year I succumb to the temptation to make patterns with the many salad plants grown as cut-and-come-again seedlings."

The Salad Garden by Joy Larkcom — the book that will send you straight outside the minute you finish it.

Botanic Spark

And finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.

1964 Mary Beal died in Daggett, California.

The American botanist and painter was eighty-five years old.

In 1910, Mary was working as a librarian in Riverside, California, when pneumonia stopped her cold.

Her friend — the naturalist John Burroughs — knew someone who might help.

John Muir's daughter Helen had moved to a ranch in the Mojave Desert for her own health, and Muir arranged for Mary to come and stay.

That's why she pitched a tent on the Van Dyke Ranch in Daggett.

And although she planned to stay a year or two, she ended up staying fifty-four years.

Friends would stop on train layovers and bring her flowers and their sympathy.

They called it a desolate place.

But Mary looked at the sand and saw a universe.

She taught herself botany from Jepson's manual.

Each morning, she mounted her horse, Dolly Varden, and rode out into the canyons with a camera and a notebook and a pocketful of chia seeds for lunch.

Mary's friend Harold Weight described her this way:

"If you should come upon a small active woman

in some isolated corner of the Mojave,

wrapped about with photographic equipment

and clinging to the canyon wall

with fingers and toes —

it will be quite safe to say:

Hello, Mary Beal."

For years, Mary searched for a flower called the Samija — the stick-leaf — that she had photographed once on Ord Mountain and never found again.

A decade passed.

The memory grew hazy.

And Mary began to doubt her own eyes.

Mary wrote:

"If it had not been for the photograph

I had taken

of that Ord mountain specimen,

I would have doubted

my memory

of finding it."

Then one spring, a small box of tagged flowers arrived to be identified.

Number one was Mary's elusive Samija.

Two days later, she rode out to the Bullion Mountains.

Mary wrote:

"One small winding canyon held

treasure-trove

beyond my most wishful dreams.

Even today

I have a vivid memory

of one gorgeous specimen

that was truly

the queen

of the desert garden."

Mary Beal arrived in the Mojave to survive.

She stayed to learn every plant by name, paint them by hand, and send their scent to botanists who had never seen them.

Mary died on this day in the desert she had chosen.

And a trail at Mojave National Preserve still carries her name.

Final Thoughts

If you have a rhubarb plant, go easy on it.

Never take more than a third of the stalks at once.

Leave the rest and let it grow back.

Then come back in a couple of weeks and it will have more for you.

And if your rhubarb hasn't been quite right — fewer stalks than usual, a little sluggish — try a handful of lime worked into the soil around the base.

Sometimes that will do the trick.

Rhubarb is generous.

And it's a great gardener gift.

Divide it every so often and give some to a friend.

That's how the best things travel: one gardener to the next, roots and all.

Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.