Is your garden new to you this year?   Recently at a garden center, I ran into a woman who had just moved. She was tentatively buying just a few plants - curious to see what would work in her new space.    One of the things we ended up talking about was the micro-climate she had enjoyed living in an inner-ring suburb of the twin cities - one with milder temperatures thanks to the heat island from the buildings but also helped greatly by the older, dense tree canopy.   Even little moves can be big moves when it comes to a new garden space. Just as with the interior spaces, figuring out what you want to do with your exterior space - your garden - takes time.    Remember - it's a garden.   There's no rush.       Brevities   #OTD  It's the anniversary of the death of the botanist and Scottish explorer Sir John Richardson who died on this day in 1865.     Richardson explored with his friend, John Franklin. Their first expedition to Northern Coast of Canada was disastrous. After they were shipwrecked, the men split into groups, attempting to get back to civilization. Richardsons group were forced to survive by eating lichen from rocks and even the leather of their boots.    After hearing a gun shot, Richardson and others found one of the men, named Terohaute, standing over the dead body of another group member.  Terohaute claimed the other man had accidentally shot himself ... Richardson didn't buy it after examining the man. He'd been shot in the back of the head. Even worse, the men believed that Terohaute had resorted to cannibalization to help keep them alive. Convinced Terohaute was about to kill the rest of the group, Richardson shot Terohaute dead.  Richardson is commemorated in the names of numerous plants, fish, birds, and mammals (including Richardson’s ground squirrel and Richardson's owl). In his work as a naval physician, he collaborated with Florence Nightingale. As his biographer David A. Stewart said: "[Richardson] ....was perhaps a life of industry more than a life of genius, but it was a full, good life, and in many ways a great life. It is not every day that we meet in one person - surgeon, physician, sailor, soldier, administrator, explorer, naturalist, author, and scholar, who has been eminent in some roles and commendable in all."       #OTD  It's the birthday of British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume born on this day in 1829.   Hume had worked in India for more than three decades.   Hume said, "I look upon myself as a Native of India.”   Hume was a lifelong naturalist.   In his late twenties, Hume began to accumulate materials for his dream: a masterwork on the bird of the Indian Empire. Hume's job with the Customs Department of India provided exceptional opportunities of collecting birds. called the ‘Pope of Indian Ornithology’.   Hume had set up enthusiastic ornithology assistants all over India. As his team of volunteers collected specimens, they were thoroughly debriefed. Hume recorded decades of data and interviews in notebooks and journals in his home, called Rothney Castle, at Shimla.     When Hume was 55 years old, he experienced a devastating loss that would spell the immediate end of his work in ornithology. Over the winter, Hume had left Shimla only to return in the Spring to find Rothney Castle ransacked by a disaffected servant who stole and destroyed all of his written manuscripts.   Just like that, his dream was gone. All of it. A Lifetime of work. It took the starch right out of him. There would be no master book by Hume on the birds of India.   Thankfully, Hume’s specimens were spared. But his passion for ornithology had vanished with his papers. Heartbroken, Hume offered his entire collection of over 82,000 birds and eggs to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The Museum's curator Richard Bowdler Sharpe went to personally pack up the collection. He was blown away by Hume and his staggering collection.   He wrote, "It did not take me many hours to find out that Mr. Hume was