Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee   Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1756 Birth of the handsome and tall Swedish botanist, Pehr Loefling. Pehr met Carl Linnaeus at the University of Uppsala, where Carl was his professor. Early on, Carl dubbed Pehr his "most beloved pupil," and he started calling Pehr "the Vulture." Carl came up with the moniker after observing that Pehr had an intuitive way of finding plants and observing the most minute details of plant specimens. After graduating, Carl recommended Pehr for an opportunity in Madrid. Pehr landed the position, learned Spanish, and was soon called Pedro by his friends. In short order, Pehr joined a Royal Spanish Expedition to South America. His mission was to find and learn about an improved cinnamon species. Two years into the trip, Pehr was botanizing in Venezuela when he died of malaria on the banks of the Caroní River. He was buried beneath an orange tree. He was 27 years old. By the end of the year, over half of the expedition's men would be dead from disease compounded by hunger and fatigue. When Linnaeus heard the news about Pehr, he wrote to a friend, The great Vulture is dead.   1801 Birth of William Barnes (books about this person), English polymath, writer, and inventor. He wrote over 800 poems and had familiarity with over 70 different languages. The English writers Thomas Hardy and Edmund Gosse visited William on his deathbed. Edmund later wrote that William was dying as picturesquely as he lived... We found him in bed in his study, his face turned to the window, where the light came streaming in through flowering plants, his brown books on all sides of him save one, the wall behind him being hung with old green tapestry.   Any gardener who loves their garden has likely thought about the day they'll have to say goodbye. William wrote about that moment in a little poem called To a Garden—On Leaving It. Sweet garden! peaceful spot! no more in thee Shall I ever while away the sunny hour. Farewell each blooming shrub, and lofty tree; Farewell, the mossy path and nodding flower: I shall not hear again from yonder bower The song of birds, or humming of the bee, Nor listen to the waterfall, nor see The clouds float on behind the lofty tower. My eyes no more may see, this peaceful scene. But still, sweet spot, wherever I may be, My love-led soul will wander back to thee.   1870 Birth of Adolph G. Rosengarten, Sr., American businessman. His family pharmaceutical company would become part of Merck in the 1920s. In 1913, Adolph and his wife Christine wanted to escape the heat of Philadelphia and find a place suitable for a country home. They settled on a piece of land in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and commissioned their former friend and classmate Charles Borie to design the house and Landscape architect Thomas Sears to work on the terraces. After 1924, the family lived there year-round. Adolph named the estate Chanticleer as a tongue-in-cheek nod to "Chanticlere" in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Newcomes (1855), wherein the estate was "mortgaged up to the very castle windows." Adolph always said he sympathized with the fictional Chanticlere owner from the novel. The etymology of Chanticleer means rooster, and that's why there are so many rooster motifs at Chanticleer (books about this garden). Today the public garden at Chanticleer is among the best in the United States. The grounds occupy 35 of the 50 acres owned by the foundation. The garden opened to the public in 1993. The job of maintaining and designing Chanticleer now falls to seven full-time horticulturists who strive to preserve and improve a garden that's been called America's most romantic and creative garden.   1939 Birth of Phyllis Theroux (books by this author), American writer and journalist. She grew up in San Francisco following World War II. She once wrote, I think this is what hooks one t