June 2, 2026 Charles von Hügel, Joachim Zinner, Vita Sackville-West, The Cook's Garden by Kevin West, and Edwin Way Teale
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Today's Show NotesGertrude Jekyll asked a question once that I think about every June.
Gertrude wrote,
"What is one to say about June — the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade?"
What is one to say about June.
I think about that every year when I walk outside and the garden has finally, fully arrived.
There is nothing tentative about June.
No apologizing.
No hedging.
Just the wood-dove cooing, the butterflies, the sweet earth-scents — and the whole world saying the same thing over and over again.
Gertrude wandered up into her wood and said out loud,
"June is here — June is here; thank God for lovely June!"
I think Gertrude had the right idea.
Go outside today and say it out loud.
Nobody has to hear you.
The garden already knows.
Today's Garden History1870 Baron Charles von Hügel died in Brussels, Belgium.
The Austrian explorer and botanist was seventy-five years old.
Charles was born in 1795 in Regensburg, Germany — the son of a diplomat who filled the house with botanical drawings and dried specimens from foreign posts.
At seventeen, he rode into the Napoleonic Wars as a Hussar officer.
By thirty, he was decorated, a fixture in the Viennese court, and engaged to be married.
Her name was Melanie.
And the man who quietly broke the engagement while he was away was Prince Metternich — the most powerful man in Austria.
Charles came home to a wedding invitation where his future used to be.
Then he left.
Not for a country estate.
Or for a quiet post abroad.
But for six years — through the Punjab, through Kashmir, through the scrublands of Australia — collecting plants from places no European botanist had reached.
When Charles returned to Vienna in 1837, he found a patch of land in Hietzing.
Then, he began to build.
Twenty-three interconnected glasshouses.
Thirty thousand species.
Lilac hibiscus from Western Australia.
Blue lace flower from the Swan River.
Himalayan cedar from Kashmir — the tree Charles loved most.
Visitors came expecting a baron.
They found a man in a leather apron, hands in the soil, crouched over a specimen.
When the heating failed one winter night, Charles didn't send for a servant.
Instead, he went into the glasshouse and covered his most delicate plants with his own military cloaks.
He refused to let anything that had survived the journey die in his care.
The 1848 Revolution ended it.
The Austrian economy collapsed.
The estate had to be sold.
Thirty thousand plants scattered to other collections, other gardens, other hands.
That's when Charles left Vienna for the second time.
He spent his final years in Brussels — in a rented house with a small terrace and a few potted plants where his glasshouses used to be.
His family said Charles never seemed bitter.
Somehow, after all his struggles, he had come to believe that a garden wasn't something you owned.
It was something you set in motion.
In his final weeks, Charles planted bulbs in the small patch of earth behind the house.
He knew he wouldn't see them bloom.
But he planted them anyway.
Charles von Hügel was buried at the Hietzing Cemetery — just down the road from the glasshouses he once kept burning through Viennese winters.
His name still grows.
Alyogyne huegelii — the Lilac Hibiscus — blooms in gardens Charles never lived to see.
1814 Joachim Zinner died in Brussels, Belgium.
The Austrian landscape architect was seventy-two years old.
Joachim was born in Vienna around 1742 — the son of Anton Zinner, court gardener to Prince Eugene of Savoy at the Belvedere.
He grew up inside the most spectacular baroque garden in Europe.
Watching his father command nature the way other men command armies.
His father Anton died when he was twenty-one.
And that's when Joachim was sent to Brussels — capital of the Austrian Netherlands — to manage the forests and parks of a territory he had never seen.
Joachim's first great commission was the Brussels Park — Parc de Bruxelles.
Built on the ruins of a royal palace that had burned and sat empty for forty years.
Joachim and the architect Guimard felled twelve hundred old trees.
They planted thirty-two hundred new ones.
They laid out avenues radiating from a central point — three long lines of sight connecting the Royal Palace to the Parliament with mathematical precision.
Joachim was so proud of it he spent two years building a scale model of the park in miniature.
Every path.
Every tree.
Every building.
Rendered in cork and wood shavings.
Joachim packed the model up and hauled it across Europe to Vienna to show the Emperor.
The Emperor reimbursed him for the trip.
It was the closest thing to praise Joachim ever received.
His second commission was the Sonian Forest — a vast woodland south of Brussels.
The Emperor's instruction was simple.
Grow timber.
Joachim grew a cathedral.
He planted beech trees — tens of thousands of them — in dense rows.
The trunks grew straight and smooth as stone columns.
They rose fifty meters before their branches opened into an interlocking canopy like the vaulted ceiling of a Gothic church.
Joachim knew the trees would take two hundred years to reach their full height.
He planted them anyway.
His private life was quieter.
And harder.
Joachim had secretly married his first cousin in Brussels in 1761.
They had four children.
He outlived all of them.
His wife died in 1802.
Jeanne Marie at five.
Louise Jeanne at twenty-four.
By the end there was no one left.
For more than thirty years, Joachim funneled nearly everything he earned into his uncle's debts.
And although the debts were not his, he paid them in full — out of a stubbornness no one asked for and no one rewarded.
Joachim lived alone at The Swan — La Maison du Cygne — a guildhall on the Grand-Place of Brussels.
His rooms were full of maps and models.
He avoided the theater, the salons, the social machinery of the city he had helped build.
The only person who came regularly was his barber — Corneille Hommelen.
When Joachim died on this day in 1814, he left his barber everything.
His furniture.
His tools.
His drafting maps.
His savings.
Because Hommelen, the records say, had taken good care of him.
The Swan is still standing.
The Brussels Park still follows Joachim's geometry.
And the Sonian Forest is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The beech trees are more than two hundred years old.
Still rising in their columns.
Still holding the light the way Joachim imagined it from a workshop full of cork in a city that never quite knew his name.
There is a street in Brussels called Rue Zinner.
That is what Joachim got.
The barber got the rest.
Unearthed WordsIn today's Unearthed Words, we hear garden thoughts from the English poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West, who died on this day in 1962 at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England.
She was seventy years old.
Vita created the garden at Sissinghurst with her husband Harold Nicolson.
They began with the ruins of an Elizabethan manor.
A tumbledown, nettle-choked wreck.
She fell in love with it on sight.
She spent the rest of her life making it one of the most beloved gardens in the world.
Vita wrote a gardening column for The Observer for years.
Her voice was as distinctive on the page as her garden was on the land.
Precise.
Sensory.
Entirely her own.
On the subject of June, Vita wrote,
"It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June.
Larger than any rose, it has something of the cabbage rose's voluminous quality…
it sheds its petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap."
Vita knew exactly what she was looking at.
And she never tired of saying so.
Vita died on a warm sunny day in the Priest's House at Sissinghurst.
The small tower room she made her own.
Her golden retriever, Glen, nosed the door in her final hours.
Vita looked up and said her final words:
"Oh, Glen."
Book Recommendation
The Cook's Garden by Kevin West
It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: The Cook's Garden by Kevin West.
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.
Kevin West comes from East Tennessee farmers and Smoky Mountain settlers — people who grew food because that was simply what you did.
In The Cook's Garden, he argues that the surest path to a successful garden leads through the kitchen door.
You don't start with the seeds.
You start with the meal.
Here's Kevin West:
"It was black raspberry season when I went to see Talea and Doug Taylor at Montgomery Place Orchards.
They are fruit people, and the extraordinary apples they grow read like poetry: Hidden Rose, Belle de Boskoop, Ashmead's Kernel, Duchess of Oldenberg, Black Twig, Cox's Orange Pippin, and dozens more.
But Talea and Doug also grow vegetables to stock their farm stand until apples come in. Garlic is a reliable crop for them, and their daughter Caroline Olivia upcycles the scapes to make pesto — the recipe for which she generously shared.
On many, many nights it has proven to be the solution to the urgent question: what's for dinner?"
The Cook's Garden by Kevin West — for everyone whose cooking begins in the soil.
Botanic SparkAnd finally, here's something sweet to ignite the little botanic spark in your heart.
1899 Edwin Way Teale was born in Joliet, Illinois.
The American naturalist was the kind of man who rented the insect rights to a two-acre field.
The right to photograph every creature living in it.
Edwin spent whole days crawling through it with a magnifying glass.
Neighbors watched from a distance, trying to figure out what on earth he was doing.
But Edwin was making friends.
He estimated there were eighteen hundred varieties of insects in that field.
He photographed fifteen thousand of them.
Once, Edwin befriended a praying mantis.
He named her Dinah.
Dinah lived in his study for weeks.
Once Edwin took Dinah to New York City.
Dinah escaped from his pocket on Broadway.
There, Edwin — well-dressed, and six feet tall — ran down the street after a bug.
Back home, one afternoon, Dinah devoured her own arm.
He had just enough time to get the picture.
Edwin married Nellie Donovan in 1923.
Nellie became his navigator, his note-taker, his companion in the field.
Every day on the road they wrote things down together.
Birds.
Insects.
Blossoms.
Weather.
The slow movement of the season itself.
Then the war came.
Their son David was killed in Germany.
Edwin and Nellie got in a black Buick and started driving.
Seventeen thousand miles.
Following the advance of spring north.
The season moving up the continent at about fifteen miles a day.
Sweeping up the valleys.
Climbing the hillsides.
They followed it all the way.
That journey became North with the Spring.
Three more books followed.
The last one won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966.
Edwin once wrote —
"How strangely inaccurate it is to measure the length of living by length of life.
The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living."
In 1974, Edwin was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
He did what he had always done.
He kept field notes.
Documenting the progression with the same care he had given to insects in a meadow and spring moving up a continent.
Edwin Way Teale died on October 18, 1980, in Norwich, Connecticut.
He was eighty-one years old.
Final ThoughtsGertrude asked what one could say about June.
And then answered her own question by walking into the wood and saying it out loud.
June doesn't show its hand.
It just gives — fully, without reservation, without a word about what comes next.
That's worth something.
That's worth going outside for.
Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener.
And remember, for a happy, healthy life, garden every day.