Ruth Stout is my fav, because she was so relaxed about her gardening. And she was a great proponent of no-till. Gardening from the couch I lie on. Now that's a philosophy.

But Thomas Jefferson is great, too. I bought the published edition of his garden journal when we went to Monticello. A good read. It inspired me to start my own garden journal. And the home he designed is beautiful.

She was sort-of the "Martha Stewart" of her (pre-WWII)generation.

She was active in garden clubs, she was an avant-garde floral arranger, & she even created the menu for Queen Elizabeth's coronation, including Coronation Chicken.
There's still, I think, a Constance Spry Cooking School in London.

But the thing that endears her to my heart is the thing that made David Austin name the first English rose for her:

During the Battle of Britain, when families sent their children away from London for safety, & people never knew if they'd be alive from one day to the next,
Constance Spry collected cuttings from many of England's historic old roses, to safeguard & preserve them for coming generations (us!).

She accomplished a lot with her highway beautification program,
so much that we don't even realize how unsightly the roads once were!

And now we have the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, which does research & education, & even sells seeds & plants,
encouraging people to use our beautiful Texas native flowers as well as other hardy (which in Texas means *heat* tolerant) cultivars.

My favorite Lady Bird story, & please excuse my fuzzy memory if I don't get all the details correct, is about the time she was on a trip down a highway.
She saw a farmer plowing up his field:
acres & acres of buttercups were going under the discs!

She had her driver stop the car, & she got out, walked over, & hailed the farmer.

Unable to convince him that he'd be better off with buttercups than with alfalfa or whatever he had in mind for the field, she *leased the field* from him for the remainder of the season!