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 1868 Birth of Tsar Nicholas II (books about this person), the last Emperor of Russia, King of Congress Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland, ruling from 1 November 1894 until his abdication on 15 March 1917. On his fiftieth birthday on this day in 1918, he was essentially under house arrest by the Bolsheviks along with the rest of his family, the Romanovs (books about this family), in Yekaterinburg "Yek-ah-teerin- borg" (the fourth largest city in Russia) in a private home called Ipatiev ("ee-pah-tee-iv") or the "House of Special Purpose." It would be Nicholas's last birthday. In June, he wrote in his diary "It was unbearable to sit that way, locked up, and not be in a position to go out into the garden when you wanted and spend a fine evening outside." That same month, his wife, Alexandra, wrote, "Out in the garden, fearfully hot, sat under the bushes. They have given us. . . half an hour more for being out. Heat, airlessness in the rooms intense." By the 23rd of June, Alexandra noted the wonder of breathing in the fresh summer air. She wrote, Two of the soldiers came and took out one window in our room. Such joy, delicious air at last, and one window no longer whitewashed. The air in the room became clean and by evening, cool. Nicholas observed, The fragrance from all the town's gardens is amazing. This moment would be one of the family's last happy times.   On July 17, 1918, the entire family, including their children and most faithful servants, were brought to the basement and executed. Today there is nothing left of the Ipatiev house. It was demolished in September of 1977, and the land was given to the Russian Orthodox Church. The altar inside a church called the Church on the Blood is on the very spot where the Romanovs died. The beautiful church honors Nicholas and his family, now regarded as saints in the Russian Orthodox Church.   1926 On this day, Ralph Waldo Emerson (books by this author) wrote in his journal: My garden is an honest place.  Every tree and every vine are incapable of concealment and tell after two or three months exactly what sort of treatment they have had.  The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly: the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.   1944 Birth of Winfried Georg Sebald ("Say-bald") (books by this author), who went by Max and wrote as W. G. Sebald, German writer and academic. When Max died at 57, he was regarded as one of the greatest authors of his time. His 2001 novel Austerlitz was Sebald's final novel. The book was honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Here's an excerpt: In the warmer months of the year, one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way since if you do not put them out again carefully, they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies. Indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.  Sometimes, seeing one of these moths that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and pain they feel while they are lost.   1955 Death of Mary McLeod Bethune (books about this person), American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Mary was the fifteenth child - and the first baby born free - to her newly freed parents, who were enslaved before the Civil War and owned by a different master. Mary's father, Samuel, had wor