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 1803 Birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American transcendentalist, essayist, philosopher, and poet. After graduating from Harvard, Ralph decided to go by his middle name, Waldo. He was beloved by his fellow Harvard classmates, and many became his lifelong friends. Waldo served as his class poet.  Waldo met his first wife, Ellen, on Christmas Day six years later. Two years later, he lost her to tuberculosis. Her death eventually made him a wealthy man — although Waldo had to sue his inlaws to get his inheritance. After losing Ellen, Waldo traveled to Europe and visited the Royal Botanical Garden while he was in Paris. The experience was a revelation to him. There Waldo began to see connections between different plant species thanks to Jussieu's natural way of organizing the garden. The American historian and biographer Robert D. Richardson wrote about this period of heightened awareness for Waldo. He wrote, Emerson's moment of insight into the interconnectedness of things in the Jardin des Plantes was a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him away from theology and toward science.   When he returned to the states, Waldo became friends with other forward thinkers and writers of his time: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. In 1835, Waldo married again. His second wife was named Lydia Jackson. Waldo changed her name to Lidian, and he also had many pet names for her, like Queenie and Asia - but she always called him "Mr. Emerson." Around that time, Waldo began to think differently about the world and his perspective on life. As the son of a minister, his move away from religion and societal beliefs was quite impressive. In 1836, Waldo published his philosophy of transcendentalism in an essay he titled "Nature." He wrote: Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word;  but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but [a] language put together into a most significant and universal sense.  I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.   Waldo also advised, Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.   As Waldo grew older, he immensely enjoyed gardening. His time in the garden also proved revelatory. Waldo had hired workers to help him in the landscape as a younger man. As a mature man, he recognized the benefits of exercise and a feeling of satisfaction from doing garden work all by himself. Waldo wrote, When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and [good] health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.   He also quipped, All my hurts my garden spade can heal. In the twilight of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to join a group of nine intellectuals on a camping trip in the Adirondacks. The trip had one mission: to connect with nature. Waldo's traveling companions included Harvard's naturalist Louis Agassiz, the great botanist James Russell Lowell, and the American naturalist Jeffries Wyman. They had a marvelous time. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote, The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it.   And another Waldo quote is a personal favorite, The Earth laughs in flowers.   Finally, here's a little prayer Waldo wrote to thank God for the gifts of nature. For flowers that bloom about our feet; For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet; For song of bird, and hum of bee; For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!   1909 On this day, Miss Amanda Palmer, a teacher at Wilmington Normal School in Wilmington, North Carolina, shared her experience of taking her students on nature-based field trips. Her repo