An Eden Made

by

Nicki Leone

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. 
     Thomas Jefferson

In the sweltering month of July in 1787, fifty-five men were gathered in the East Room of the State House in Philadelphia, arguing stubbornly over how to fix the crumbling foundation of their new country. The United States of America had been in existence for exactly eleven years and already it was clear that squabbles between the colonies-turned-states were threatening the future of the newborn nation.

They had been arguing for days. Weeks. Men stepped up to grandstand for hours at a time, and sometimes for a whole day. The delegates from the most populated states favored representation based on population. Quel surprise. The delegates from smaller, less populated states favored equal representation for each state in the Union. Plans were proposed, and shot down. Tempers were as high as the heat, which in the East Room—where the windows were kept shut, the doors barred and guarded to preserve the secrecy of the deliberations—was stifling. By the 10th of July George Washington—at the end of his rope—was writing frustrated “wish you were here” notes to Alexander Hamilton in New York.  The new nation looked like it would collapse before it had really begun.

Then one of the delegates mentioned he planned to visit the nearby garden of John Bartram, the “first botanist” of the New World, who had made a life-long study of American species and supplied seeds to most of the great estates in both the Colonies and England. On impulse, a group of the other delegates decided to join him, and the following morning about a dozen men took a much-needed break from the acrimonious debates to stroll around one of the most unique gardens and nurseries in existence.

Already, in 1787, the garden was sixty years old, and although John Bartram himself had died ten years earlier, the grounds were in the capable and talented hands of his sons, John and William. Specializing in American plants and trees, the garden was remarkable for the variety of species represented, from all of the thirteen states in the Union:

America’s entire flora, it seemed, was assembled here—from the trees that John Bartram had collected far north new Lake Ontario to the flowering shrubs that William had brought from Florida. Some were rare; others were common. There was Pinus pungens, a pine that grew only in the Appalachian mountains, as well as aspen, the most widespread of all North American trees. Live oak from the Deep South was side by side with tamarack, one of the northernmost trees in America.

That description comes from Andrea Wulf, who gives an amusing account of this little episode of sober men playing hooky from the responsibilities of nation-building in her book Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation. For several hours the delegates strolled the grounds, guided by William Bartram, and asking questions about unfamiliar species. The southern delegates no doubt recognized the Carolina silverbells, but would never have seen a balsam fir. The northern delegates would have been arrested by the fringe tree. All would have been intrigued by Franklinia alatamaha—a small flowering tree named after Benjamin Franklin that William Bartram had saved from extinction. When they returned to their duties, refreshed by the beauty of the garden and inspired by what it represented, something had changed. Compromise, hitherto so illusive, was suddenly within reach. On Monday, July 16th, the delegates voted on whether or not to adopt the “Connecticut Compromise” plan—which proposed a two-house legislature, one where representatives were determined by population, and one where all states were represented equally.  Up until this moment, the larger, populated states like Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina had refused to budge on their opposition to this plan. But that morning, several delegates switched their votes, and the Connecticut Compromise passed. The delegates who reversed their positions had all been on the outing to Bartram’s garden.

In recounting this brief interlude, Andrea Wulf doesn’t quite state, but implies pretty strongly, that it was their brief walk in Bartram’s park that convinced some of the delegates to change their position, and that thus we may have Mr. Bartram’s garden to thank for our current form of government. “In Bartram’s Garden,” she writes, “the delegates could see how the manifold flora of each state thrived together, their branches intertwined in a flourishing horticultural union.”:

Never in their entire lives had they seen so many different species of trees and shrubs. The plants had arrived in Philadelphia from across the thirteen states where they had all thrived in their native habitats, but here they flourished together. The graciously bowing branches of eastern hemlock from the northern states protected southern shrubs. Beautyberry, which John Bartram had brought from South Carolina and which would parade its clusters of bright purple berries on its naked branches in autumn, flourished under the spreading canopy of pink oak that grew as far north as Vermont.

Wulf tends to wax eloquent on the subject of trees.

The connection she draws between the success of the 1787 Continental Congress and an impromptu field trip to Bartram’s garden is as speculative as it is beguiling. It also illustrates one of Wulf’s underlying themes in Founding Gardeners—that in the gardens and estates of the men behind the American Revolution and the Constitution one can see a mirror of their philosophy, their sense of patriotism, their developing revolutionary ideals. Rather in the same way that we are inclined to judge the character of a man by the books we find upon his bookshelf, Wulf draws conclusions from the trees and shrubs he prefers to plant.

The book focuses primarily on the estates George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well the farm (it could not be called an “estate”) where John Adams lived, partly because they were each at the forefront of events and primarily responsible for the shape of the American government as we know it today, but also because these men were of a botanical bent, interested in agricultural improvements, curious about new plants and species, and scientifically inclined. Also, three of the four owned the most famous plantations in Virginia, each in its own way a showcase for it’s master’s philosophy of “gardening.” Wulf uses the terms “garden” and “gardener” in a very broad sense that encompasses everything from a kitchen plot to the landscape architecture of an entire estate, and from a man kneeling in the dirt pulling weeds to a squire drawing up plans for new beds in consultation with his farm manager.

It’s an ambitious task, although not beyond the capabilities of Wulf, who has already won wide acclaim for an earlier work, Brother Gardeners, that follows the rising interest in botany in the eighteenth century and the way Enlightenment principals changed the face of the English garden. Still, there is quite a lot of ground to cover, so to speak. It is immediately apparent about two pages into the section describing Washington’s changing attitudes and development of Mount Vernon, that the topic could be a book in itself.  As could the section on Adams, and Madison’s Montpelier. While Thomas Jefferson’s estate at Monticello surely deserves several books.

Since Wulf’s publisher would probably have baulked had she turned in a six volume set of “Landscape architecture of the Leading Men of the American Revolution,” she was forced to narrow her focus, and as a result combs the letters and diaries of these founding fathers for any mention of agriculture, plants, botany, and horticulture. (“Plant crab apples,” Washington wrote in a letter to his estate manager on the eve of the Battle of Staten Island, while some 32,000 British troops amassed to attack in the morning). Overlaid against the notes, letters, seed orders, farm accounts and diary entries are the events of the American Revolution itself, the creation of the Constitution, the rise of the first four presidencies and the building of the new country’s capital in a hitherto unwanted swamp along the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.

The result is that the botany, landscape and plant talk is specific and detailed (and immensely engaging), but the history is generalized and sometimes simplistic. Viewing early American history through a horticultural lens has a tendency to make events look a little rose-colored. Washington may have been writing to his manager about flowering trees on the eve of a battle, and he may have indeed advised that the enlisted men of the Continental Army maintain “regimental gardens” to both supplement their own rations and improve their temperament (tending a garden is relaxing), but he also was a stern disciplinarian and punishments for offences in the Army were not pretty.

Nowhere is the strange dichotomy between the beauty of the gardener’s vision and the realities of the society he lived in more evident than in the section on Madison’s Montpelier, with its showcased “model village” for a few hand-picked slaves in the middle of the grounds. The thorny issue of slavery, the fact that the “gardens” of three of the four men in the book required slave labor to create and maintain, is acknowledged by the author but easily obscured by the many new trees being planted on the grounds. In an earlier section of Founding Gardeners Wulf described a particular landscape innovation called a ha-ha, which was basically a deep and wide ditch used to separate fields used for grazing cattle or sheep, and more ornamental flowerbeds, orchards, or other cultivated areas. By using a ditch, instead of a wall, to divide parts of the estate, a landscape architect could preserve unbroken views, create the illusion of livestock grazing peacefully among more beautiful beds, and allow the natural features of the land to remain paramount. Wulf’s perspective of American history feels shot through with ha-has. Unseen and unremarked, but unavoidable if you want to actually stroll through the landscape.

But what a landscape. If for no other reason, Founding Gardeners is worth reading for the descriptions of how George Washington converted his failing tobacco plantation into a practical working farm that experimented with crops and manures, embraced agricultural innovation, and applied scientific methods to the profession of farming. His transformation of the immediate grounds surrounding the house is also riveting—a story filled with all the enthusiasm of a gardener with a new idea that he can’t wait to see enacted:

Fresh from revolutionary triumph, he resolved to tear up the driveway, pull down the walls and dig up the hedges to liberate his garden from its claustrophobic corset of geometry, just as he had freed his country from Britain’s imperial yoke. As he returned victoriously from the battlefield to the plough, Washington would transform Mount Vernon once again. This time it wouldn’t just be the estate of a Virginia planter—it would be the landscape garden of a revolutionary.

Stirring words. Seized with a desire to have only American trees and shrubs in the wide vistas of the plantation house grounds, Washington organized parties to forage the woods on his own extensive lands, bringing back dozens of trees to be planted in the new grounds he was designing. Like many eager gardeners, he jumped the gun, tried to replant trees too early in the season, and lost everything to a late ice storm.

There isn’t a gardener alive who can’t identify with that story, who doesn’t have their own tale of a struggle to turn an idea in your head into a reality growing in the garden. Or with the feelings of John Adams, who sought refuge from politics at his own farm in Quincy, called Peacefield for how it made him feel to walk its fields, and who wrote after his own ice storm, “I have seen the Queen of France with eighteen millions of Livres of diamonds upon her person, [but] all the glitter of her jewels, did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub.” The history is remote, but feeling evoked by the garden are always familiar.

Each section of the book goes into great detail as the farms and plantations were transformed under the eager hands of their curious, visionary and sometimes spendthrift masters, and readers will have no trouble following the transformations of Mount Vernon and Monticello as the ideas of their owners crystallized. Rife with maps, drawings, botanical illustrations and many color plates featuring contemporary paintings and portraits, it is easy to visualize the changing view as hedges are pulled down, orchards planted, flower beds laid out, and scenic drives sculpted into the hills. Wulf knows how to describe a landscape. Serious plant collectors may find her practice of using common names for plants, rather than their proper Latin ones, a little frustrating—especially if a particular plant description kindles your interest and you want to go looking for a source for your own back yard. But the author solves this problem by including both common and Latin names in the book’s extensive index, as well as a long list of primary and secondary sources, links to online archives, and a bibliography that would make a garden historian weep with envy.

Washington, the pragmatic planter who expected his farm to be a success and his garden to reflect his Revolutionary ideals. Adams, the part-time farmer who found peace in the absorption that comes from working the soil with his own hands (he was a great fan of manure). Jefferson, the idealist who turned his highly impractical estate grounds—he built his house on a mountain—into a showpiece of naturalized landscaping and created one of the greatest experimental kitchen gardens on either side of the Atlantic. Madison, whose gardens did not even pretend to any “practical” or productive use, but were designed instead to evoke elegance and serenity, and took the unusual step of leaving the nearby forest as its main feature to create a tame “wilderness.” Wulf creates a kind of “profile in plants” of each man, and thus brings out his character and his nature in unexpected but tangible ways. From the staid Washington’s ill-advised and impulsive planting spree to the mercurial Jefferson’s meticulous notes on the hundreds of failures in his experimental vegetable plots, we find men who are as complex as their environment and their era. And if Wulf’s American history is a little facile, her sense of their sense of the land, of the country they fought for, is marvelously rich and deep.  The odds are, the moment you finish the book you will go outside and plant something, just to be able to feel yourself a part of what they each strove for, and to appreciate, with Washington, the joys of being able to sit “under my own Vine & my own Fig tree.”

Books mentioned in this column:
Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2011)
The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2009)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.