I ran across a fascinating old journal as I was researching this show - what I especially loved about it was the layout.     If you want to copy it here's what you do:   Dedicate a page of your journal to each type of plant in your garden. Make some notes about the characteristics of the plant. (Maybe what you like about it as well) Then leave room to chart the major events with the plant.   For instance, after describing Kalmia Angustifolia, it says this:  June 7, 1908  First Flowers June 15th  Generally comes into bloom July 13  Still in flower Rarely any flowers in the autumn.   Doesn't that make for a very handy and personal reference guide for your garden?       Brevities #OTD  It's the anniversary of the death of one of the most eminent botanists of his age: Louis Claude Richard who died on this day in 1821.  His great grandfather had been in charge of the menagerie at Versailles.   His grandfather had been charge of the botanic gardens at Trianon.   Even his own father was placed in charge of the King's Garden.   A biography of Richard was featured in international Gazette in 1831. It said:   "Louis Claude Richard was therefore born in the midst of plants; he learnt to know them sooner than the letter of the alphabet; and before he he was able to write correctly, he could draw flowers, or plans of gardens... He did not recollect a moment of his life in which be had not been a botanist; and if he ever engaged in other studies, botany was always the object of them." In 1781, he was the naturalist to the king.   Richard sailed from France to French Guyana. Eight years later, when he returned to France, he brought his herbarium; which contained over 1000 plants.         #OTD  It was on this day in 1769, that Daniel Boone first laid eyes on the forests of present-day Kentucky.   Boone wrote in his journal:   "Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below."   30 years later, Boone left Kentucky and followed his son to Missouri.   He was often asked why he left Kentucky.  He always answered the same way:   “Too crowded! too crowded! I want elbow-room!”         #OTD  It's the birthday of Fletcher Steele; an American landscape architect who designed over 700 gardens. He was born on this day in 1885.   His most iconic work was nestled into the Hillside in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.   It's called The Blue Staircase at Naumkeag.   Steele designed the staircase for Mable Choate in 1926. She would become his most important client. She was 56 and he was 41.   Choate had a history of working with designers and she knew how to collaborate with them.   Steele was one of the first landscape architects to speak of plant material as one of the elements in a composition.   It was Fletcher Steele who said "Gardening seems to be the most ephemeral of the arts."       #OTD It's the birthday of the botanist Jack Harlan, born on this day in 1917.   Harlan followed in the footsteps of his botanists father Harry Harland. He loved going on plant collecting expeditions - mainly in search of new genetic material for the USDA's crop breeding programs.   Harlan was worried about genetic vulnerability and genetic wipeout   Harlan said: "We  MUST collect and study wild and weedy relatives of our cultivated plants... we cannot afford to ignore any source of useable genes.”   Harlan wrote those words in 1970.   And one of his final works contain these words:   "We will not and cannot find a time or place where agriculture originated. We will not and cannot because it did not happen that way. Agriculture is not the result of a happening, an idea, an invention, discovery or instruction by a god or goddess. It emerged as a result of long periods of intimate coevolution between plants and man. Animals are not essential; plants supply over 90% of the food consumed by humans."     Unearthed Words H