Today, August 14, is Saint Werenfrid's Day.    Werenfrid is the patron saint of vegetable gardens.   He is often portrayed as a priest holding up a ship with a coffin in it or displayed as a priest laid to rest in his ship.   Werenfrid is also invoked for gout and stiff joints; which, if you’re a vegetable gardener, those three sometimes go together.       Brevities #OTD   Today, in 1765, a crowd gathered under a large elm tree in Boston.   The group was there to protest the Stamp Act that was passed by British Parliament.   The act imposed a tax on paper in the American colonies which meant that all the paper had to have a stamp on it. So, if you were publishing a newspaper, or needed a mortgage deed, or court papers, it all had to be printed on paper with a tax stamp on it.   There was an elm tree that became a rallying point for resistance against the British and that tree became known as the Liberty Tree.   The tree had been planted in 1646 - just sixteen years after Boston became a city. As the colonists began rejecting orders from Britain, the tree became a bulletin board of sorts. As it's symbolism grew, protesters would share calls to action on the trunk.   When the stamp act was repealed, the tree was THE place people went to celebrate; hanging flags and streamers, as well as lanterns from its branches.     After the war began, Thomas Paine wrote an ode to the Liberty Tree in the Pennsylvania Gazette.    It said:   "Unmindful of names or distinctions they came For freemen like brothers agree,  With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued, And their temple was Liberty Tree…"   Four months later, in August, British troops and Loyalists descended on the tree. A man named Nathaniel Coffin Jr. cut it down.       #OTD   On this day in 1873, the magazine Forest and Stream debuted.  Forest and Streamfeatured outdoor activities like hunting and fishing. It was dedicated to wildlife conservation and it helped launch the National Audubon Society.   In 1930, the magazine merged with Field & Stream.       #OTD  Today in 1880 for the botanist Ada Hayden was born.   Hayden was the curator of the Iowa State University herbarium.    As a young girl, growing up in Ames, Iowa, she fell in love with the flora surrounding her family’s home. Hayden was a talented photographer, artist, and a writer, and she put all of those skills to good use documenting Iowa’s prairies.   Hayden became the first woman to earn a PhD from Iowa State.   She inherited her grandparents farm and she often brought her botany students there to walk through the Prairie and to take notes on their observations.    Hayden’s life work was to save the vanishing prairie ecosystem.   Hayden loved the Prairie. She wrote,   "Throughout the season, from April to October, the colorful flowers of the grassland flora present a rainbow-hued sequence of bloom. It is identified with the open sky. It is the unprotected battleground of wind and weather.    When Dr. Hayden died, the University named a 240-acre-tract of virgin Prairie, Hayden Prairie, in her honor.       #OTD    On this day, in 1960, FTD had their 50th anniversary convention at Cobo Hall in Detroit.    And there’s a lovely video of the convention that’s available to see on YouTube. I shared it in the The Daily Gardener Community Facebook Groupor you can see a link to it in today show notes.   The video was prepared for those members who could not attend. It is utterly charming.    You get to see 50's fashions. You get to see a revolving floral stage. It was a three-day long extravaganza in Detroit - it it just  so fun to watch.           #OTD    Today is the anniversary of the death of the botanist Edgar Walter Denison, who was an expert on Missouri’s wildflowers.    Denison died in Missouri on this day in 1993. Tennyson had emigrated to the country from Stuttgart, Germany In 1927. He left behind much of his extended family; including a famously brilliant cousin named Albert Einstein.   Denison's book, Missour