Podcast appearances and mentions of jim endersby

Today we celebrate a writer and avid gardener who, as an adult, gardened beside her mother for decades. We'll also learn about a botanist and prolific plant collector who traveled along with her minister husband as he worked in the Philippines. We hear some thoughts about how quickly spring goes by. We Grow That Garden Library™ with a book about Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker. And then we’ll wrap things up with International Plant Appreciation Day.   Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart To listen to the show while you're at home, just ask Alexa or Google to “Play the latest episode of The Daily Gardener Podcast.” And she will. It's just that easy.   The Daily Gardener Friday Newsletter Sign up for the FREE Friday Newsletter featuring: A personal update from me Garden-related items for your calendar The Grow That Garden Library™ featured books for the week Gardener gift ideas Garden-inspired recipes Exclusive updates regarding the show Plus, each week, one lucky subscriber wins a book from the Grow That Garden Library™ bookshelf.   Gardener Greetings Send your garden pics, stories, birthday wishes, and so forth to Jennifer@theDailyGardener.org   Curated News An introduction to the gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement | House & Garden | Judith B. Tankard   Facebook Group If you'd like to check out my curated news articles and original blog posts for yourself, you're in luck. I share all of it with the Listener Community in the Free Facebook Group - The Daily Gardener Community. So, there’s no need to take notes or search for links. The next time you're on Facebook, search for Daily Gardener Community, where you’d search for a friend... and request to join. I'd love to meet you in the group.

Darwin's Descent of Man was dominated by the theory of sexual selection, which Darwin used to explain peacock's tails, but also to argue that white people were as superior to black ones as men were to women. For Darwin and his contemporaries, inequality between races and the sexes was one of the facts that science had to explain. Ever since Darwin, biology has been used to support racial prejudice and gender inequality, but - happily - has also been used to challenge both in the 150 years since the Descent.A lecture by Jim Endersby 22 MarchThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/darwin-legacyGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Despite the controversy, evolution was widely accepted by many naturalists within a few years of the Origin's appearance. An important reason for this rapid triumph was Darwin's botanical works. Seen through evolutionary eyes, plants proved to be mobile, carnivorous, sensitive - even crafty. As Darwin "exalted" his favourite flowers, the orchids, he also narrowed the once-unimaginably wide gap between plants and animals, thus making it easier for his readers to imaginatively bridge the much smaller distance between humans and apes.A lecture by Jim Endersby 8 FebruaryThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/darwin-greenhouseGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

When Darwin finally published the On the Origin of Species, he tried to avoid controversy by ignoring human origins. Yet evolution was soon being attacked as the godless 'monkey theory'. However, while some condemned Darwin's book, others found a form of consolation in it, an alternative to an orthodox Christian faith some found hard to maintain. As Darwin tried to make sense of the death of his favourite daughter, Annie, many of his readers found unexpected consolation for their own losses in Darwin's words.A lecture by Jim Endersby 30 NovemberThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/darwin-monkeyGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Following the Beagle voyage, Darwin settled down to a quiet married life, relying on correspondence to gather facts. He wrote thousands of letters as he gathered facts to support his still-secret theory. Long before anyone had heard of evolution, Darwin produced four enormous books on barnacles, which helped establish his credentials (even his most committed opponents acknowledged that he couldn't be ignored). And the books were also Darwin's attempts to answer some complex questions about sex that will recur throughout the lectures.A lecture by Jim Endersby 5 OctoberThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/darwin-barnaclesGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege A lecture by Joanna Bourke 8 OctoberThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/evil-eveGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Are humans fit to be gardeners of this planet? Today's biotechnology companies promote themselves in distinctly utopian ways, but increasing numbers of people find their claims difficult to reconcile with the daily evidence of the damage that technologies like intensive agriculture have done to this planet. This lecture explores these notions through an examination of the film Silent Running (1972), which imagined gardens in space, in which the last remnants of Earth's vegetation are preserved aboard gigantic spaceships.A lecture by Jim Endersby 23 MarchThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/gardeners-planet-earthGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order. It also looks at the early twentieth-century 'Station for Experimental Evolution' in New York, and at the utopian vision of Charlotte Gilman Perkins' Herland (1915), a novel describing a lost world populated by women that took the form of a perfect garden, whose wonderful plants and lack of men were both explained by de Vries' theory of mutation.A lecture by Jim Endersby 10 FebruaryThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/making-new-plantsGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Sydney's botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire. Such plans had varying degrees of success, leaving botanists to question why specific plants would only grow in particular places. This lecture looks at how Kew addressed such questions, and the tensions between its role in the advancement of science, and as a public park.A lecture by Jim Endersby, Visiting Professor of the History of Science 2 DecemberThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/gardens-of-empireGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) imagined a utopian island including an experimental garden, where plants could be made "greater much than their nature". These new plants were central to Bacon's dream of a better world, where hunger - and even death itself - might be conquered. Robert Sharrock's History of the improvement and propagation of vegetables (1660) attempted to apply Bacon's new learning and improve humanity's food supply. This lecture will begin with Bacon's imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today's biotechnologies.A lecture by Jim Endersby, Visiting Professor of the History of Science 7 October 2019The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/experimental-gardensGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Prof Kathy Willis concludes her major new history series by asking how much plant biodiversity is worth, and examines new research into securing the future of our staple crops. Understanding the distribution, diversity and potential of plants for food, lay at the heart of the 18th century botanical impresario Joseph Banks' vision to "improve Britain's estates of the world". To secure future resilience of crops in today's world there's a growing need to conserve the closest wild relatives of our staple crops. Kathy Willis discovers, given climatic threats to some of our most substantial crops such as coffee - for which the industry currently depends on a single species, the economic value of wild relatives of today's domestic crops is considerable. And as we hear, some important future crops are still to be found from previously overlooked plants. With contributions from Richard Thompson, Business valuations partner at Price-Waterhouse Cooper; historian Jim Endersby; head of coffee research at Kew, Aaron Davis; Kew's head of yams Paul Wilkin. Producer Adrian Washbourne Music for the series was composed by Mark Russell.

At a glance, Arabidopsis thaliana (Mouse ear cress) looks little more than a tiny flowering weed. But this nondescript plant became a Rosetta stone for understanding the molecular processes underpinning many plant traits when in 2000 it became the first plant to have its genome fully sequenced. Professor Kathy Willis hears how Arabidopsis bagged the role in plant genetics research similar to that played by mice and fruit flies in animal research, and how amidst arguments for and against the technique of modification, it became a key to introducing new characteristics in a quicker and more targeted way than traditional plant breeding. The overall size of the Arabidopsis genome however, is not typical of many plants. We hear how a new understanding of the surprisingly diverse range of genome sizes within the plant kingdom is shedding light on the speed of a plant's ability to reproduce and adapt in changing conditions, which could play a fundamental role in decoding the patterns of plant distribution we see around the world. With contributions from historian Jim Endersby, plant scientist Prof Liam Dolan and cytogeneticist Ilia Leitch. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

When in 1934 botanist Kenneth Thimann isolated the plant hormone auxin, he put an end to one of the great botanical mysteries - how plants move and respond to their surroundings. For decades plant scientists had been mystified as to how plants, without any apparent nervous system, bent towards light, flowered at the right time of year, or grew away from other plants. Professor Kathy Willis hears from historian Jim Endersby on how the discovery of plant hormones was the culmination of a journey that had involved Charles Darwin and a series of probing experiments published in his book "The Power of Movement in Plants". They discuss how new technologies enabled successful isolation of what we now have come to recognise as a suite of hormones regulating a whole series of plant responses from stem growth to fruiting. We hear how another hormone during the 1950s went on to steal the limelight - gibberellin whose discovery owes much to Japanese rice crops that grew so tall they would simply fall over, rendering them useless. The race to harness the power of gibberellin would lead to dwarf varieties of key crops that transformed global production in what became known as the Green Revolution. Professor Nick Harberd, a plant geneticist at Oxford University, has been researching the molecular basis of plants' response to this powerful hormone and he sheds light on developing crops suitable for harsher environments in future. Producer: Adrian Washbourne

In 1903 a cluster of evening primrose in an abandoned potato field outside the Dutch town of Hilversum caught the eye of German botanist Hugo de Vries. Its huge blooms and large leaves appeared to suggest the sudden development of a new species. Around the same time in Kew Gardens a mysterious primula hybrid appeared. The new discipline of plant genetics soon revealed that this curious trick was being driven by multiplication of chromosomes inside the plant cell nucleus. Professor Kathy Willis examines this phenomenon - known as polyploidy ( "multiple forms") - and how insights into this peculiarity can contribute to the evolutionary success of plants. It may also hold the answer to one of the botanical world's greatest mysteries - why so soon after appearing in the fossil record did the flowering plants suddenly explode into the bewildering range of species we see today. With contributions from historian Jim Endersby, Keeper of Kew's Jodrell Lab Mark Chase, and Jodrell Laboratory geneticist Illia Leitch. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

The Nobel prize for Chemistry was awarded to German scientist Richard Willstatter in 1915 for his analysis of the green plant pigment chlorophyll. It marked a significant moment in the long history of piecing together the many elements that contribute to photosynthesis - the process by which plants draw in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and together with light and water can generate their own glucose and release oxygen back into the air. The limits of this process were now clear Kathy Willis hears from historian Jim Endersby about defining moments in photosynthesis' long history and from Kew's Head of Conservation Biotechnology about how artificially elevating levels of carbon dioxide in the air,a technique long developed by horticulturists to produce bigger fruit and vegetable crops, is now having dramatic effects on successful reintroduction of cultivated endangered plants back into the wild. And as scientists understand the different methods that plants use to photosynthesise, Kathy Willis hears from Oxford plant scientist Jane Langdale who's part of a network of international scientists who are attempting to mend a fundamental flaw in the process of photosynthesis which could improve future rice yields by 50% Producer Adrian Washbourne.

In 1900 three papers by three botanists, unknown to each other, appeared in the same scientific journal. Each had independently "rediscovered" the rules of inheritance that Gregor Mendel had found four decades earlier in his solitary investigations of pea plants. Kathy Willis reassesses Mendel's famous pea experiments in the light of his attempts to uncover what happens over several generations when hybrid plants are created. As historian Jim Endersby explains, Mendel's initial results may have stunned him and shown what plant breeders might have suspected for decades, but science now had mathematical laws to create new varieties. Historian Greg Radick sheds light on how Mendelism, in the years leading up to the First World War, became heavily promoted by Cambridge botanist William Bateson and was put into action by the first Professor of Agricultural Botany, Roland Biffen. His success in creating new wheat hybrids is explained by a unique international assembly of wheat ears from the early 1900s, curated by Mark Nesbitt, Head of Kew's economic botany collection. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

The Victorians' pride at the effortless movement of plants around the world during the late 19th century was having an unwelcome side effect. Invasive species were beginning to wipe out native populations of plants. With no natural predators to control them, one man's flower was turning into another man's weed. Prof Kathy Willis hears how during the late 1800s, many invasive species from Japanese knot weed to Himalayan balsam to water hyacinth came from deliberate introductions and asks if today, trying to control them is ultimately futile? As historian Jim Endersby explains both Charles Darwin and Kew's director Joseph Hooker were the first to examine the impact of invasives, having noticed on the island of St Helena and Ascension Island the effect on native plants. One of the current biggest invaders is lantana, familiar to British gardeners as a small pot plant. As Shonil Baghwat of the Open University reveals, since its introduction to Kolkata Botanical garden in the 1870s it decimated native teak plantations. But today opportunities exist to exploit its presence for the wood, basketry and paper industries. And Kathy Willis hears from Kew conservationist Colin Clubbe on the extent to which we should view invasive plants in our ecosystems as part of a strategy to maintain resilience to environmental change in the future. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Orchids are big business. Today over £5m of orchid hybrids are imported as cut flowers into the UK each year. For the Victorians orchids were the chosen ornaments of royalty and captured the 19th century fascination with scientific oddity and imperial conquest. Prof Kathy Willis explores how orchids, one of the planet's most diverse family of plants, mesmerised Victorian devotees and became not only trophy plants of the rich but also a scientific tool to promote a new theory of evolution. The study of orchids also paved the way for cultivation of exotics for all. Lara Jewitt tours the orchid glasshouses at Kew where over 3000 species are cultivated, and explains the biology unique to orchids that fuels interest for both scientists and plant lovers. Darwin was fascinated with these rare and precious plants. Their unique pollination mechanisms helped back up his new evolutionary theory based upon natural selection. As historian Jim Endersby reveals, the delicate orchid was to play a part in getting botany a seat at the top table of scientific respectability. Even in the 1850s, Kew's director Joseph Hooker had expressed concern about the damage orchid hunters were inflicting on the wild population. Whilst today many species remain endangered, V Sarasan, head of Kew's Conservation Biotechnology Unit, reveals how new conservation efforts in some of the most orchid species-rich areas of Madagascar are helping to successfully reintroduce endangered members of this vast but vulnerable flowering family back into the wild. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

To the Victorians the Amazonian water lily was more than just a plant. The adventure of finding this exotic piece of the Empire and getting it to grow on home soil involved horticultural ambition, scientific vision and fierce competition amongst the country's wealthy landowners. Prof Kathy Willis hears about the race during the 1840s between Kew's director William Hooker and the Duke of Derbyshire's gardener Joseph Paxton to get the aquatic lily to flower. Historian and biographer Kate Colquhoun examines how the plant's exacting requirements demanded an entirely new approach to horticultural architecture, engineering and management of water and heat. Lara Jewett, manager of Kew's tropical house, and Greg Redwood, head of Kew's glasshouses, explain why this voracious feeder and aquatic beauty still proves a challenge to cultivate today. But botanists were quick to make the connection between repeating modular-like structures on the underside of the lily's leaf and the possibilities of new engineering design, which as Jim Endersby explains, was to inspire the use of essential giant greenhouses to cultivate food in soot laden cities, and for Joseph Paxton to ultimately create the greatest glasshouse ever built - Crystal Palace. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

By 1850 identifying and classifying plants had become far more important than mere list making. Establishing the global laws of botany - what grew where and why - occupied the well travelled naturalist Joseph Hooker - son of Kew's director William Hooker and close friend of Charles Darwin. Kathy Willis hears from historian Jim Endersby on how Hooker was to acquire species from all over the world to build up the first accurate maps of the world's flora. Mark Nesbitt, curator of Kew's economic botany collection, reveals how gifts to Hooker in the collection reveal the relationship between the amateur collector in the field and Hooker back at Kew was one built on trust and mutual understanding. But, as Jim Endersby explains, the relationships were frought with tension when it came to naming new plants. Arguments between those claiming they had found new species (often called "splitters") versus cautious botanists, such as Hooker, who would often "lump" together species as variants of the same, raised new debates about what constitutes a new species. And as Mark Chase, Keeper of Kew's Jodrell Laboratory reveals, the arguments continue today. Producer: Adrian Washbourne Presenter: Kathy Willis is director of science at Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She is also professor of long-term ecology and a fellow of Merton College, both at Oxford University. Winner of several awards, she has spent over 20 years researching and teaching biodiversity and conservation at Oxford and Cambridge.

The Victorians realised that preserving the structural features of a plant was essential to classifying it, placing it on a plant family tree and building up an overall understanding of the relationships between plants. Central to this was the herbarium - a collection of dried plants documented, pressed and mounted onto identical sheets of paper. Kathy Willis examines the genesis of this process at Kew which plays host today to over 7 million specimens, and is now one of a network of herbaria around the world. If you want to know what a plant is, the herbarium is where you come. But how was the Kew collection established? Kathy Willis hears from historian Jim Endersby on the influence of William Jackson Hooker whose private plant collection forms the basis of the collection. Historian Anne Secord of Cambridge University examines the delicate relationship between artisan collectors in the field and gentlemen botanists which defied the rigid social divide to enable specimens to be gathered from far afield to advance botanical knowledge. Kathy Willis learns from Kew botanist, Bill Baker, how patterns now emerge in the herbarium that enable changing patterns of plant behaviour from flowering times to plant distribution to feed into wider questions about the effect of changing climate and land use. And in an age when the Empire was aiming to show everything to its best advantage researcher Caroline Cornish reveals how plants could be effectively displayed to a curious Victorian public through Britain's first Museum of Economic Botany. Producer: Adrian Washbourne Presenter: Kathy Willis is director of science at Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She is also professor of long-term ecology and a fellow of Merton College, both at Oxford University. Winner of several awards, she has spent over 20 years researching and teaching biodiversity and conservation at Oxford and Cambridge.

The 18th-century's age of travel and enlightenment meant that a vast influx of newly discovered plants into Europe was creating a botanical tower of Babel. No common language for plants and a wealth of long and localised names made communication about plant species often impossible. Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dedicated his life to developing a proper system of naming and placing plants into a new ordered hierarchy. Professor Kathy Willis launches the series by talking to Jim Endersby, historian at Sussex University, who argues that Linnaeus' system of plant classification established the roots of botany as we now know it and revolutionised the economics and movement of plant species and their riches across the globe, and how they are referred to. She speaks with Linnaean archivist Gina Douglas and learns how in 1753 his System Naturae placed plants into a hierarchy of relationships based on the number of reproductive organs, in the hope of uncovering the machinery of nature. Whilst much of what Linnaeus developed has now been superseded by a more natural system of classification, his method of naming still dominates today. Producer: Adrian Washbourne Presenter: Kathy Willis is director of science at Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She is also professor of long-term ecology and a fellow of Merton College, both at Oxford University. Winner of several awards, she has spent over 20 years researching and teaching biodiversity and conservation at Oxford and Cambridge.

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker's lifetime. This will be required reading for scholars of Victorian science, of natural history, and of the history of imperial science, but it will also reward any reader interested in a compelling story written by a writer's writer. It was a pleasure to read, and equally a pleasure to talk with Jim about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker’s lifetime. This will be required reading for scholars of Victorian science, of natural history, and of the history of imperial science, but it will also reward any reader interested in a compelling story written by a writer’s writer. It was a pleasure to read, and equally a pleasure to talk with Jim about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices