The Gathering Garden Magazine

National Grandparents Day is older than most people realize and quieter than it should be. A short history of the holiday, and a gift guide built around scent and memory instead of another mug.

Emperors wore it, soldiers were crowned in it, and it still shows up on military insignia today. The oak leaf has meant strength and endurance for thousands of years, and it's finally having a decorating moment too.

A Japanese grass once grown for thatch is now a fixture of New Perennial gardens and dried floral design, prized for coppery plumes that hold their color for years.

The papery bloom Victorians called the immortelle isn't really a flower at all in the way we think of one—and that botanical trick is exactly why it started a 200-year-old dried flower obsession.

Gomphrena carries a name borrowed from an ancient Greek myth about a flower that never existed, and a real history rooted 6,000 miles away in Central America and Southeast Asia. Both stories are worth knowing.

From Bronze Age medicine cabinets to your gin and tonic, juniper has a 5,000-year résumé. Here's the plant's real history — and how to bring its berries indoors.