June 3, 2026 Katherine Bashford, Patrick Blanc, Kliment Timiryazev, Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari, and Margaret Gatty

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Today's Show Notes

How does Annette Wynne's poem go?

Why was June made?
Can you guess?
June was made for happiness!

Even the trees
Know this, and the breeze
That loves to play
Outside all day,
And never is too bold or rough,
Like March's wind,
but just a tiny blow's enough;
June was made for happiness.

I believe that.

And June was also made for garden-adjacent chores — the ones that don't add to the gardening to-do list, but make the garden more worth being in.

String up those cafe lights.

Clean the outdoor fixtures.

Add a cushion to that chair you keep meaning to sit in.

The garden is already doing its part.

This week, do yours.

Today's Garden History

1953 Katherine Bashford died at her home in Pasadena, California.

The American landscape architect was sixty-seven years old.

Her grandfather Levi came around the Horn to California on the Argonaut in 1849.

Her father Coles built the family into one of the most prominent households in Los Angeles.

And Katherine, born in 1885, grew up knowing that the West was still being made — and someone would have to decide what it would look like.

She graduated from the Marlborough School for Girls and then did what the women of her era with the means to do it did:

Katherine went to Europe.

She spent a summer moving through the famous gardens of Italy, Spain, France, and England — not as a tourist, but as a student.

She came home a landscape architect.

There were no formal programs for women in the West at the time.

So in 1921, she apprenticed under Florence Yoch — the most formidable woman in Southern California landscape design.

Two years later, she opened her own firm in Pasadena.

The architect Myron Hunt, who watched her work for years, said Katherine had an "inborn interest" in the planting and yearly renewal of the annuals and perennials whose blending colors make the jewels of the garden.

But she was not a romantic.

Rather, she was an engineer of atmosphere.

Katherine believed a garden should contain only plants that could grow freely in the place where they were planted — that no plant flourishes in unnatural localities.

She carried clinker bricks in her purse — the ugly, over-fired cast-offs nobody wanted — so she could thump one on a linen tablecloth and show a client how its burnt-umber color matched the bark of a Sycamore.

At a 1929 dinner honoring young architects, the Los Angeles Times noted Katherine's presence — "the lone exhibitor of her sex in the profession."

There were two hundred men in the room.

And Katherine Bashford.

She designed terraced rock gardens and sandstone fountains for the grand estates of the wealthy.

She designed the grounds of the Palm Springs Woman's Club — desert verbena and bougainvillea and rows of manzanita and olive trees.

Katherine worked with Wallace Neff and with the architects who built the showplaces of Southern California's golden age.

And she designed Ramona Gardens — the first public housing project completed in Los Angeles, finished in 1941.

The same eye.

The same standards.

Whether the client was a millionaire or a family in Boyle Heights.

By 1943, Katherine's health forced her into early retirement.

She spent her final decade at home on Virginia Road in Pasadena, with her sister beside her.

She never married.

She wrote no book.

But she left behind many terraced stone gardens, and courtyards built to last, in a city that she filled with gardens that looked like they had always belonged there.

Katherine's obituary in the Los Angeles Times ran just four lines:

A Fellow of the Landscape Architects Society.

Who designed many Southland gardens.

Survived by a sister.

And the places Katherine created still stand.

1953 Patrick Blanc was born in the suburbs of Paris.

The French botanist was around ten years old when his mother took him to a large flower exhibition in Paris.

Most children looked at the colors.

Patrick looked at the rocks.

Beside the exhibition waterfalls, orchids and ferns were growing straight out of wet stone — no soil, no one tending them, just clinging and alive.

Patrick said later, "Nobody was taking care of the plants growing on the waterfalls. I was impressed by this freedom."

At twelve, Patrick had an aquarium in his bedroom.

Patrick fixed a board above it, rigged a small pump to carry water up from the tank, and trained plants to grow along the wall.

The roots dangled into the water.

The plants thrived.

Patrick had built his first vertical garden in his childhood bedroom before he had a name for it.

In 1972, at nineteen, Patrick traveled to Thailand and Malaysia and found the same thing he had seen at the flower show — but wild, and vast, and everywhere.

Ferns and orchids covering cliff faces and waterfalls.

The earth, irrelevant.

Patrick spent the next decade at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, perfecting a system — a metal frame, a layer of PVC, a polyamide felt that wicked water to the roots the way moss holds rain on a cliff.

Patrick patented it in 1988.

In 1986, Patrick installed his first public wall at the Cité des Sciences in Paris.

Engineers had said the roots would rot the masonry.

The wall thrived.

That same year, Patrick and his partner Pascal Héni decided to dye their hair.

Pascal chose blue.

Patrick chose green.

Pascal lasted one week.

Patrick has never changed it back.

Patrick covered the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris — hundreds of species at once, ferns and mosses and epiphytes clinging to felt the way they once clung to stone.

Patrick once called his walls "a kind of redemption — a way of going back to Eden."

In the Philippines, Patrick found a tiny dark-leaved plant on a wet rock face in Palawan.

It was a new species.

In 2011, botanists named it Begonia blancii in Patrick's honor.

Patrick still works.

At seventy-two, Patrick still travels the world half the year — looking for plants that grow where they're not supposed to.

Patrick still wakes each morning in his home in Ivry-sur-Seine, where the floor is glass and beneath it, twenty-one thousand liters of water, fish, and the dangling roots of his indoor jungle.

Patrick looks down before he starts his day and sees exactly what he saw at ten years old:

Plants that don't need the earth to keep themselves alive.

Unearthed Words

In today's Unearthed Words, we hear a passage about plants and sunlight from the Russian plant physiologist Kliment Timiryazev, born on this day in 1843.

Kliment's mother, Adelaide, was English.

Adelaide taught him at home.

In her language.

Adelaide gave Kliment — he would say later — his boundless love for truth.

Kliment spent decades studying the green leaf.

What happened when sunlight touched it.

What the leaf was actually doing in all that light.

Kliment visited Darwin at Down House.

Kliment defended Darwin's ideas in Russia for years.

And Kliment never stopped going back to the leaf.

In 1903, Kliment stood before the Royal Society of London.

Thirty-five years into his work.

Kliment gave the lecture in Adelaide's language.

Kliment said,

"A plant is a mediator
between heaven and earth.
It is the true Prometheus,
who stole fire from heaven."

Near the end of his life, Kliment wrote his final book dedication.

His hand was trembling.

Kliment sent the book to Lenin.

But Kliment dedicated it to his mother.

Adelaide had given him, Kliment wrote, his boundless love for truth.

The book went to Lenin.

The dedication went to Adelaide.

Kliment knew the difference.

Book Recommendation

Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari

It's time to Grow That Garden Library, with today's book: Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari.

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.

Luay Ghafari is an urban gardener in Toronto who has spent more than a decade figuring out how to grow abundant food in small spaces — and how to cook it the moment it comes out of the ground.

Here's Luay Ghafari:

"Garden-to-table borrows from the farm-to-table movement and shrinks that radius down to one's own backyard. You are the chef, the farmer, and the consumer. You are invested in every step of the process."

And this:

"Ask any gardener and they will tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that a vine-ripened tomato is the stuff dreams are made of. There is simply no comparison to store-bought.

Seasonality matters."

And this:

"Walking into my garden with a basket in hand and harvesting homegrown fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness — that is what I love about having a garden.

Taking what my garden provides and creating seasonal recipes is what garden-to-table living is all about."

Seed to Table by Luay Ghafari — for everyone who has ever wanted to close the distance between the ground and the plate.

Botanic Spark

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

1809 Margaret Gatty was born in Burnham, Essex.

The English writer and naturalist married a Yorkshire vicar and settled into a quiet life in a country parsonage.

Margaret had children — eventually ten of them.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, Margaret's body began to fail her.

By 1848, after the birth of her seventh child, Margaret was sent to the seaside town of Hastings to recover.

Margaret was thirty-nine years old, and she had seven months ahead of her with almost nothing to do.

So Margaret looked down.

At the shore, where the tide pulled back, Margaret found what she would later call the unseen flowers of the sea — seaweeds, clinging to rocks, delicate and strange and completely ignored by everyone walking past.

Margaret was smitten.

Margaret spent those seven months collecting, pressing, studying.

And when Margaret came home to Yorkshire, she didn't stop.

Margaret kept going for fourteen years.

By then, Margaret's illness had crept into her arms.

Eventually Margaret could no longer hold a pen.

So Margaret dictated her scientific notes to her daughters while they wrote.

Margaret called seaweed collecting her "consolation of consolations."

In 1863, Margaret published British Sea-weeds — a book that stayed in use for nearly a century.

Margaret died on October 4, 1873.

She was sixty-four years old.

After Margaret was gone, a memorial tablet was placed in her church.

It wasn't funded by a scientific institution.

It was funded by more than a thousand children from across the country — children who had read Margaret's stories and her nature parables — who each sent in small coins.

A thousand small offerings for the woman who had taught them to look down.

Final Thoughts

June was made for happiness.

Not the dramatic kind.

The quiet kind.

The kind that lives in a garden chair with a cushion on it, under a string of lights you finally hung.

The garden has been working all spring.

It's June now.

Go enjoy what it made.

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