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 1819 Birth of Walt Whitman, American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, Walt is remembered as the father of free verse. When Whitman was 54 years old, he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed. He spent the next two years immersed in nature, and he believed that nature had helped to heal him. He wrote, How it all nourishes, lulls me, in the way most needed; the open air, the rye-fields, the apple orchards.   Walt also appreciated flowers. He wrote, A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.   In 1892, Walt wrote one of his most celebrated prose about Wild Flowers in a piece called Specimen Days. This has been and is yet a great season for wild flowers; oceans of them line the roads through the woods, border the edges of the water-runlets, grow all along the old fences, and are scatter'd in profusion over the fields.  An eight-petal'd blossom of gold-yellow clear and bright, with a brown tuft in the middle, nearly as large as a silver half-dollar, is very common; yesterday on a long drive I noticed it thickly lining the borders of the brooks everywhere.  Then there is a beautiful weed cover'd with blue flowers, (the blue of the old Chinese teacups treasur'd by our grand-aunts,) I am continually stopping to admire [it] - [it's] a little larger than a dime, and very plentiful.  White, however, is the prevailing color. The wild carrot I have spoken of; also the fragrant life-everlasting. But there are all hues and beauties, especially on the frequent tracts of half-open scrub-oak and dwarf-cedar hereabout - wild asters of all colors.  Notwithstanding the frost-touch the hardy little chaps maintain themselves in all their bloom.    1840 Birth of Charles McIlvaine, American author, and mycologist. Charles was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He served as a captain in the Pennsylvania Infantry. After the Civil War, he always went by "Captain." When he was 40, Charles moved to West Virginia, where he wrote articles for magazines like Century and Harpers. After the war, food was scarce, and Charles started hunting and eating mushrooms. Charles ate virtually every specimen he encountered and even dabbled in mushrooms said to be poisonous. If he suffered no ill effects, Charles deemed a specimen edible. Before Charles's work, the USDA issued a report in 1885 that claimed there were only twelve edible species of mushrooms in the United States.  Today Charles is best known for his 1896 book called 1,000 American Fungi. Charles was passionate about mycology, and he included his experiences with eating almost every species mentioned in his book. He wrote, I take no man's word for the qualities of a toadstool. I go for it myself. Charles claimed to have eaten over 1,000 mushrooms and toadstools, and he said he enjoyed the flavor of most of them.  His daring ingestion of so many species earned Charles the nickname Old Iron Guts. Charles lived to be 69 and defied the old saying,  There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters. Charles was indeed an old, bold mycologist. Charles's experimentation is all the more impressive given the challenging nature of mushroom identification. If you find plant identification challenging, mushroom identification is much more involved and often requires chemical reagents and microscopic evaluation. In our modern times, DNA sequencing can also definitively establish species. Thanks to his excellent writing skills, Charles wrote about mushrooms in a friendly and conversational manner. Here's what Charles wrote about the Oyster Mushroom: The camel is gratefully called the ship of the desert. The oyster mushroom is the shellfish of the forest. When the tender parts are dipped in egg, rolled in bread crumbs, and