March 18, 2026 Harriet Barnes Pratt, Percy Thrower, Jean Ingelow, A Little History of British Gar... скачать в хорошем качестве

March 18, 2026 Harriet Barnes Pratt, Percy Thrower, Jean Ingelow, A Little History of British Gar...

Subscribe Apple (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/t...) | Google (https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com...) | Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ODID57...) | Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=387618) | iHeart (https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-th...) Support The Daily Gardener Patreon (  / thedailygardener  ) Buy Me A Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DailyGar...) Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter (https://thedailygardener.us3.list-man...) | Daily Gardener Community (  / thedailygardener  ) Today's Show Notes By mid-March, gardeners begin to look outward again. Not just at the weather, but at the edges of the yard. At the street. People start to emerge from their houses. More neighbors are outside, taking walks as the weather warms. We step out the front door. We get in the car. We look around. The snow begins to melt, and the things we didn't finish in the fall start to resurface. A cracked terracotta pot. A spot along the fence where something tried to burrow through. Chewed bark on an ornamental tree. Small signs of winter life that were hidden while the ground was blanketed in white. We're not really in the garden yet. The work hasn't begun. But the looking has. A quiet nod exchanged across the street. A shared recognition: something has been happening here. Today's stories live in that moment, when gardening begins to move out of solitude and into view. Today's Garden History 1969 Harriet Barnes Pratt died. She was ninety years old. Harriet was born in Rockford, Illinois, far from the grand estates she would later be associated with. When she married Harold Pratt, an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, Harriet entered a world of real money, the kind that can build walls around gardens. But Harriet wasn't interested in living selfishly, especially when it came to green spaces. For more than thirty years, she worked with the New York Botanical Garden, helping shape its buildings and its exhibitions, creating spaces designed to draw people in, not keep them out. In 1939, Harriet brought that same instinct to the New York World's Fair. Her Gardens on Parade spread across acres of ground, giving the public a series of garden rooms they could move through and experience. For many visitors, it was their first encounter with gardening on that scale. Immersive. Generous. Transformative. And if Gardens on Parade was a spectacle, it was but a mere glimpse of what Harriet and Harold had created for themselves at Welwyn, their estate in Glen Cove, New York, on Long Island's Gold Coast. The name Welwyn comes from an old English word, welig, meaning at the willows. Harriet loved the name because it fit the place. The land around their home had been shaped by water, by trees, and by time. It was the kind of ground willows would have loved, moisture-holding soil, slow edges, a sense of depth and shadow. Willows have a kind of presence. A softness. A gravity. Welwyn had that same presence. An estate that took its name from the willow and carried its character, expansive without sharpness, grand without hardness, a place shaped to receive rather than repel. Welwyn was not simply a private garden. It was one of the most magnificent gardens ever created in the United States. One observer wrote, "Mrs. Pratt did not merely have a garden. She directed a botanical institution." More than fifty gardeners and staff worked the grounds, maintaining garden rooms designed with the Olmsted Brothers, rooms devoted, one by one, to roses, to peonies, to lilacs. A visitor in the 1930s recalled standing on the library terrace: "To look down was to see a tapestry of colors so dense that the earth itself was invisible, and the scent of five thousand roses rose up like a physical presence." Today, much of that magnificence is gone. The rose garden is lost. The greenhouses fell silent. What remains of Welwyn's gardens lives mostly in photographs, color images taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, offering a brief lens back to a moment when the land was at its most deliberate. After Harriet's death, Welwyn did not pass into private hands. The land was given over. Today, it is a public preserve, forest reclaiming former garden rooms, trails where beds once stood. The house itself now holds a different kind of memory, serving as the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center. What Harriet built did not remain fixed. But the gates stayed open. And t...