You know the saying bad things come in threes?   The dishwasher stops working. You get in a car accident. Your credit card gets stolen.   Well, when it comes to our plants; like us, they can be experiencing a constellation of problems as well.   Yet, we often see plants as far less complex; minimizing their needs to a singular solution.   "It just needs more sun."   "Better drainage will do the trick."   Instead of just trying one solution, consider that maybe multiple changes are needed.         Brevities #OTD On this day in 1820, President James Monroe signed a bill granting “a tract of public land in the City of Washington, not exceeding five acres" for the America's botanic garden. Monroe genuinely liked the idea and he agreed to let them place the botanic garden on property adjacent to the Capitol on the west. Work was started to clear and drain the soggy land, and trees were planted. By 1827, Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush circulated a letter to foreign dignitaries calling for, "all such trees and plants from other countries not heretofore known in the United States, as may give promise, under proper cultivation, of flourishing and becoming useful... .” The letter included detailed instructions for preparing seeds and plants for travel so that they couldbe propagated in the Botanic Garden. In 1856, Congress officially named the United States Botanic Garden and established regular funding to nurture its growth.   #OTD It's the birthday of botanistEmil Christian Hansen, born today in 1842.     Prior to Hansen, brewing was a volatileexperiment and batches could easily get infected with disease. Hansen forever changed the brewingindustry with his discovery of way to separate pure yeast cells from wild yeast cells.     Hansen's method was created while he was working for the Carlsberg Laboratory.  Carlsberg Labs did not patent the process.  instead, they decided to publish it.  They shared a detailed explanation so that brewers anywhere could build propagation equipment and use the method.   Hansen named the yeast after the lab– Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis – and samples of Carlsberg No. 1 (as it was called) were sent to breweries around the world by request and free of charge.  Within 5 years, most European breweries were using Carlsberg No. 1.  By 1892, American breweries, Pabst, Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch, were manufacturing their beers with pure yeast strains.   Hansen was a renaissance man. At various points in his life, he attempted careers an actor, a portrait artist, a teacher, an author, (he wrote under a pseudonym). And it was Emil Hansen who made the first Danish translation of Charles Darwin’s Voyage of The Beagle.     #OTD On this day in 1904 botanist Paul J. Kremer was born. Kremer spent his childhood on a farm in Ohio and he got his advanced degrees atOhio State getting his M.S. (1929) and Ph.D. (1931) degrees in plant physiology. At Ohio State he learned ofthe importance of the relationship between plants and water relations. After graduating, Dr. Kramer joined the faculty of Duke University. He taught at Duke his entire career until his retirement in 1974. Kremer served as the James B. Duke Professor of Botany. Kramer influenced the careers of more than 40 graduate students and authored more than 200 publications. Building on his studies at Ohio State, Kramer developed a leading research center on plant water relations and tree physiology. Kramer recognized the difficulty of studying environmental stresses on plants because the variables are so interconnected Light, temperature, and humidity being so interdependent that a change in one affects the others. This lead Kramer to establish a controlled-environment laboratory to study and quantify plant responses. He set up labs for this purpose atthe University of Wisconsin and at Duke and North Carolina State University. Kramer's efforts were part of a growing trend in curiosityabout theeffects of environmental stresses on plants - an ongoing c