Joel’s Wisdom in the Garden: Remembered by Mandy Katz

In fond memory of Curator Joel T. Fry (February 22, 1957–March 21, 2023)

Almost one year past the date of Joel’s surprising illness and death, I still find myself in a state of confusion as I try to carry on the work he provided so much guidance for. Increasingly, I learn to turn towards the body of work Joel left behind for us all. It is a wealth of research, a deep well to draw from. His impact on me personally as a friend and mentor continues to reveal itself to me on a daily basis. I’d like to offer some words to begin to describe just some of the ways Joel generously shared his perspective and knowledge with me and so many I have worked with over the years.

For those who are not necessarily plant nerds, I ask you to be patient with me here as I will be using many binomial names of plants. It is the language I spoke with Joel.

I remember my first experience of a Joel email, sent on November 14, 2007: I was a third-year seasonal garden intern here at Bartram’s Garden and I had asked for his thoughts on planting goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) under the Sassafras trees near the entrance to the botanical garden from the meadow. He returned with this extraordinary response:

Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis would be very appropriate for the bed under the sassafras by the meadow. Todd [Greenberg] and I walked over and talked a bit about this planting area today. The shade and needle mulch from the white pine and hemlock adjacent seems ideal for a number of interesting dry woodland plants the Bartrams grew.

There is quite a bit of correspondence from John Bartram about what he called “yellow root” which is goldenseal. Bartram sent roots to Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physick Garden in the fall of 1756, and these were perhaps the earliest plants of Hydrastis canadensis in England. William Bartram also drew the plant for Peter Collinson, around 1758, and the drawing survives in the Earl of Derby’s library near Liverpool.

I have put together a list of other possible plants for the area under the sassafras. A few of John Bartram’s medicinal plants which are not in the other medicinal beds might also do well:

American ginseng, Panax quinquefolium
dwarf ginseng, Panax trifolius
wild sarsparilla, Aralia nudicaulis
robin’s plantain, Erigeron pulchellus
puttyroot, Adam-and-Eve, Aplectrum hyemale
ground pine, Lycopodium complanatum (and/or other Lycopodium species)
pearly everlasting, Anaphalis margaritacea (may need more sun)
Seneca snakeroot, Polygala senega
perfoliate bellwort, Uvularia perfoliata
blazing star, devil’s bit, Chamaelirium luteum

Other possible orchids:
pink lady’s-slipper, Cypripedium acule
yellow lady’s slipper, Cypripedium parviflorum
large twayblade, Liparis liliifolia
downy rattlesnake plantain, Goodyera pubescens

Other herbaceous plants with important Bartram connections:
wood lily, Lilium philadelphicum
American wintergreen, Pyrola Americana
pipsissewa, Chimaphila umbellata
striped prince’s pine,Chimaphila maculata
Also, any dry-adapted ferns

Possible Shrubs:
New Jersey tea, redroot, Ceanothus americanus—if there is enough sun.

Vines, possibly on the fence:
Alleghany vine, climbing fumatory, Adlumia fungosa
American bittersweet, Celastrusscandens

Joel

Over the years I’ve tried growing many of the plants on this list in different places in the Garden, to greater and lesser degrees of success. All my efforts and experiments were noticed and followed with interest and encouragement by Joel. This first email I have from him, I would find out later, is characteristic of the way he encouraged everyone in their curiosity, no matter who they were: zero consideration given to whether a person had impressive credentials or whatever.

Joel noticed every plant that grew on the land here. His extremely consistent practice of observation was a great teacher to me––and in particular, combined with the generosity with which he shared all he learned, is one of the best demonstrations of love in action that I have encountered in my life.

Most days, toward the end of the day, Joel would emerge from the archive for a late afternoon walk through the garden to look at stuff. I still expect to see him toward the end of my workday walking around with his camera around his neck, checking everything out.  On my luckier days, his walk would pass by wherever in the garden I was working, and we would have a chat. These chats consisted almost exclusively of gossip about the plants in the garden: how everything is doing, what’s in bloom, what has seeds, what is struggling and why, what plants would be good to collect from various places, interesting tidbits about this or that plant, how to grow them, where they are found in the wild, varying relationships to specific plants in different cultures, etc. But in particular,  Joel would communicate his very strong opinions about how and what we were growing around the garden, always with suggestions of what would be good to add. Always, always encouraging every gardener to continue experimenting with the plants listed in the Bartram family catalogues and restore the garden here to the bastion of diversity and deep horticultural prowess and botanical research that it was during the period when the Bartrams tended it.

I was lucky enough to be allowed to accompany Joel and other botanist friends on plant adventures: days of going out and about to observe the intricate details about the way plants relate to various soils and to each other. This is how he showed me how to think about the garden here at Bartram’s Garden and how to embody the spirit of an ecological gardener.

Another way that Joel embodied the botanical curiosity of the Bartram-era Garden was how he would collect seeds during his time out studying various landscapes. Any time he traveled to give a lecture or attend a conference, he brought seeds back for the gardeners here to grow: plastic baggies with the scientific name of the plant and the place where he collected them. He wanted us to try to grow everything and anything.

A couple of the very special plants that we have in the garden here that are a result of this relationship are Hibiscus laevis and Oenothera grandiflora, which Joel collected in the Tensaw River Valley on a trip to the Bartram Trail Conference in 2007.

Joel collected the Hibiscus laevis, or Halberd-Leaved Hibiscus, seed we grow here at the Garden near the Tensaw River, where he saw the plant growing in a bald cypress swamp. He was very excited for us to bring it back to the Garden, as he knew that a seed packet of this plant from 1800 was found in the Woodlands mansion, identified in William Bartram’s handwriting. The plant had been offered for sale through the Bartram nursery as early as 1807 under the name Hibiscus militaris so it is cool to offer fresh seed of the plant each year in our Welcome Center today.

Of Oenothera grandiflora, he wrote in 2008 in The Traveller:

a plant of William Bartram’s “most pompous and brilliant herbaceous plant,” the golden evening-primrose or Oenothera grandiflora, was brought from near Stockton, Alabama, to Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia. The root quite happily survived the winter and has been growing immense all summer. There are now probably a dozen stems, five to six feet tall. In spite of the luxuriant growth, only in the last week of August has it begun to form flower buds, with the first opening on August 27th. With the stock of developing buds, it looks like it will soon be flowering in abundance. I’m not sure if the rather late bloom time is natural for this species, or the result of drought from mid-summer onward, or repeated attacks by Japanese beetles. During July it was possible to pull handfuls of beetles off the plant daily. The plant survived the period with riddled leaves, but continued to grow.

He further wrote, “What we are most hoping is that it will produce a lot of seed so we can be sure to continue William’s evening primrose here in future and distribute some seed.” Joel wrote an essay about this plant, and in particular William Bartram’s first encounter with it in 1775 and his enraptured interest in it, in Fields of Vision: Essays on the Travels of William Bartram edited by Kathryn Braund and Charlotte Porter. We still grow the offspring of the specimen Joel collected in the Garden today and offer its seeds for sale through the Welcome Center.

Another example of how Joel championed the sharing of seeds was the Franklinia altamaha. Especially in this day and age, when most people are starting to grow the much more easily cultivated Gordlinia hybrid, Joel adamantly encouraged us to commit ourselves to embracing the mysteries of cultivating Franklinia. He watched carefully the many failures and few successes people had with this shrub and formed a hypothesis that Franklinia is reliant on some particular mycorrhizal association. Joel followed up for many years with people interested in a one-year Franklinia census made in 2000 by Longwood Garden that tracked those who were cultivating the plant. The census attracts attention even to this day, and Joel often sent seeds from the garden here to many people who get in touch seeking information on how to grow the mysterious plant, once again, encouraging all curious seekers.

In recent years, Joel was sending the immature embryos from the fruit of Franklinias at Bartram’s Garden to PhD candidate Heather Gladfelter at the University of Georgia for her use putting them into tissue culture for propagation and studying their genetic diversity. He also encouraged me to send her the immature seeds of the Franklinias at Horticultural Hall in West Fairmount Park, as he pointed out that these trees, being planted by the Meehan brothers in that location for the Centennial Exhibition, are likely the most direct living descendants of the plants propagated from wild seed by the Bartrams.

At the time of his illness, I asked Joel what writing he is most proud of and he said it was the new chapter on Franklinia he had published in 2022 in The Attention of a Traveller edited by Kathryn Braund. It is indeed a beautifully detailed piece of research and an in-depth view of the history of the Franklinia tree. I believe this bit of writing is a taste of the deep writing about plants, building on his decades of research, that Joel would have continued if he had been given the time.

Another piece of research that resulted in publication was Joel’s intense study of Narcissus in the Garden. He tracked and studied the different varieties of Narcissus here over years, eventually creating a map of their locations in the garden in 2013, which was contributed to the 2015 book, Daffodils in American Gardens, 1733-1940 by Sara L. Van Beck. Through his research and the long correspondence with Sara Van Beck, Joel identified several very old cultivars of Narcissus here, potentially dating their planting to the antebellum period of the garden when Andrew Eastwick employed Thomas Meehan here as his Head Gardener, and perhaps some varieties from even earlier.

Joel’s study of the Narcissus varieties in the garden led him to encourage our proper cultivation of these relics. He encouraged us to transplant the overgrown clumps to encourage better flowering and to continue the theme of daffodil-lined paths from the Meehan-period garden, observable in photographs. Joel emailed me care manuals, encouraging me to collect wood ash for their proper fertilization. All of this, and his staunch insistence on delaying the mowing of spring lawns until the decay of the bulb foliage, has resulted in definitively more spectacular bloom displays in the spring––weather permitting!

Joel did extensive research into the plant catalogs published by the Bartram nursery throughout its history and into the letters, writings, and notes of the literate family members to create an extensive plant list spanning their three generations that we still use as the curated plant list that guides our collections in the botanical garden here. Each of these plants of course can be considered and studied from so many perspectives: ecological, economic, and cultural. Though the plant list is derived from the limited source of the Bartram family’s writings, that limitation only spurs a curious gardener on to numerous and infinite stories that one could tell about any particular plant. Joel was interested in all of that.

I could go on and on about Joel’s expansive research into particular plants related to the history here. I could spend multiple lifetimes horticulturally interpreting Joel’s  emails and articles regarding innumerable plants: mosses, rhododendrons, tea, hawthorne, rhubarb, his work with Nancy Wygant on indexing plant names in John Bartram’s correspondence, their work on William Bartram’s list of agricultural crops from this region, their research exploring dahlia cultivars of the Ann Bartram Carr period, their study of illustrations from Lodigge’s Botanical Cabinet to identify specific Camellia varieties for the re-establishment of the Ann Bartram Carr Garden, Joel’s writing on North American medicinal plants as written about by John Bartram, and so much more. All this as well as Joel’s extensive work on interpretive plans for the Garden can all be referred to over the long run. I believe that Joel’s research can and will inspire many generations of gardeners here at Bartram’s Garden and beyond.

I’m so grateful to my colleague Aseel Rasheed for taking decisive action to bring Joel to the hospital during his short illness. It allowed many of us to have final conversations with Joel. My last conversations with him are very special to me: and keeping with the theme of our relationship, we mostly discussed plants and the Garden during those visits. The most remarkable thing I take away from those visits was his candor, which was relatively unfazed by what must have been incredible physical discomfort. Joel seemed to be observing the experience almost objectively and with detached interest, a true scientist to the last.

And he seemed to really enjoy chatting about the Garden at that time. At the time of these visits, spring was opening up, and it seemed impossible to me that he was not able to be in the Garden for the ritual parade of phenology which marked our days in common. I decided to bring him bouquets of whatever was blooming on the day of the hospital visit. I loved how he could look through the bouquet and could say where each bloom had come from: one sweet example was a bloom from a strange crabapple that randomly placed itself deep in the border along the back path of the Wilderness Garden that always surprises me there with its spectacular early blooms. He said, “Is this that weird crabapple from the back path?”

He repeatedly asked for hyacinths, as he was a great lover of fragrance in gardens, though the hyacinths didn’t bloom in earnest until the days following his death.

During my last visit before Joel’s death, I asked him about what plants he would want for a new garden in his memory––“Joel’s evergreen grove” was the prompt I suggested. With almost no hesitation, here is the plant list he rattled off for the garden: two- and three-needle pines, loblolly pines, rhododendrons, kalmia, bear oak, blackjack oak, lilies lady slippers, wintergreen, trailing arbutus, grasses, and dwarf conifers. He also added, “Plant two of everything because one will die”––an interesting Joel-like adaptation of John Bartram’s quest to collect two of everything!

I am looking forward to planting this garden in Joel’s memory in the coming years, though in truth, the entire Garden for me is touched with his memory. I think of his words and observation––his careful noticing––in every corner of the land here.

Recently, the folks at the Woodlands wrote to ask if we had any opinions about bulbs that would be appropriate for planting at Joel’s gravesite. I’m so much looking forward to collaborations with Robin Rick, the gardener over at the Woodlands, to find ways to recall Joel’s story through plants. I suggested it would be special if we could dig some of the very old daffodil bulbs from Bartram’s Garden to transplant them at Joel’s gravesite as he was so intensely interested in the daffodils here. Robin also suggested that bulbs might be used to mark areas of Joel’s archeological research at the Woodlands, where there is a little more sun.

A small group of the Garden’s staff joined our friends at the Woodlands to plant bulbs for Joel at his gravesite in Fall 2023. We had a long list of possible favorites to include: some of the double ‘Telemonious Plenus’, the double ‘Sulphur Pheonix’, and ‘Emperor’ daffodils, and he also really looked forward to Narcissus poeticus recurvus each year. But then other possibilities kept emerging, like Claytonia tuberosus (spring beauty), Eranthis hyemale (winter aconite), Galanthus nivalis ‘flore pleno’ (double snowdrops), Sanguinarea canadensis (bloodroot), Hepatica nobilis var japonica ‘flore pleno’ (double Japanese hepatica) to honor Joel’s Japanophilia, fragrant hyacinths, and the species tulip, Tullipa sylvestris, because it’s long-lived without any maintenance, strange and twisty, and still grows in the vacant lot near where John Bartram is buried.

Mandy Katz is Lead Gardener and Land Manager at Bartram’s Garden.