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For Presidents' Day, read Paula Dietz' review of Andrea Wulf's 2011 book, "Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation," originally published in the New York Times.
In 1961, when John F. Kennedy asked Rachel Lambert Mellon to design the Rose Garden at the White House, the commission established a strong link with America’s botanical past. And so, much more recently, has Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable garden, elsewhere on the grounds. As Andrea Wulf reminds us in her illuminating and engrossing new book, “Founding Gardeners,” the first four presidents were passionate botanists whose country seats became laboratories for their grander vision of an independent agrarian republic in the New World.
Perhaps projecting an underlying message to our present leadership, Wulf has written an ecological and historical narrative, revisionist in the best sense, combining the suspense of war and political debate with an intimate view of private lives devoted to the natural sciences and reinforced by long-distance friendships. “Seed boxes” appear to have been the currency of those friendships, exchanged in an international network that defied official hostilities.
Wulf, a British design historian, traveled to America and practically lived at the founders’ country houses, reading their correspondence about their gardens and their hopes for a country of farmers in the tradition of Virgil’s “Georgics.” The reader relives the first decades of the Republic not only through her eloquent and revelatory prose but through the words of the statesmen themselves, written mostly in private. We see, for example, George Washington briefly leaving his generals, just before the British invasion of New York, so he can compose a letter to his estate manager about planting groves of flowering trees at Mount Vernon. Except for one short visit, he would not be home for eight years.
Wulf begins with Benjamin Franklin, in London on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly at the time of the much reviled Stamp Act. Even as catastrophe loomed, he was urgently sending seeds back home to his wife, not just for the enhancement of his own garden but to be distributed to other Philadelphia plantsmen. Agricultural self-sufficiency was, he believed, vital for the increasingly rebellious colonies.
After the Revolutionary War, when Thomas Jefferson, then minister to France, joined John Adams for sluggish trade negotiations in London, they also engaged in the timeless British pleasure of visiting gardens, then dominated by the picturesque landscape movement praised by Alexander Pope, whom both had read. But what they recognized, to their great surprise, at places like Lord Cobham’s famous gardens at Stowe were groves of American trees and shrubs — obtained from the Philadelphia farmer and botanist John Bartram, who had introduced over 200 species to fashionable landowners through his London agents. “The irony,” Wulf notes, “was that the English garden was in fact American.” And as intrepid tourists and revolutionaries, Jefferson and Adams were moved by the classical follies in these English gardens, ornamented with motifs depicting ancient liberty in the face of imperial (or monarchical) tyranny.
According to Wulf, Bartram’s garden on the Schuylkill, overseen after his death in 1777 by his sons John and William, also played a significant role in the Constitutional Convention. At one point, the delegates were deadlocked over the issue of proportional representation in Congress. Farm and garden visits were on the unofficial agenda, so on a cool summer morning a group took carriages from Philadelphia to Bartram’s property, where they were impressed by the splendor of its collection of trees and shrubs from all 13 colonies, “their branches intertwined,” as Wulf puts it, “in a flourishing horticultural union.” This symbolism was not lost on three delegates who changed their votes to “aye,” or on Alexander Hamilton, the proposer of a more urban-centric society and the least interested in botany, who nonetheless planted 13 sweetgum trees at his house in New York, the Grange.
Click here to read the rest of the book review.