Books: The Founding Gardeners You Never Knew

Almost everyone who knows anything at all about the founding fathers knows that Washington, Jefferson and Madison lived on Virginia plantations and that John Adams had a farm in Massachusetts. But probably not very many people would contend that an understanding of horticulture was fundamental to the making of America.

In her latest book, Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) British author Andrea Wulf writes that as they carved their own gardens out of forests, "the Founders understood their agricultural and aesthetic decisions also as political acts, fundamental to their larger task of nation building."

Most of the book is focused on the first four presidesnts -- Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison -- and Wulf fills us in on many things we likely didn't know about them. While in command of the Revolutionary Army, Washington was in constant contact with the manager of his farm at Mount Vernon, giving detailed instructions on which plants to acquire and where to place them on the plantation.

In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both on diplomatic assignment in Europe, traveled together on a grand tour of the English countryside. In particular, writes Wulfe, they visited the gardens of prominent Whigs who, she says, used their gardens to express their political ideas.  As Wulfe explains, "Mirroring their rejection of tyranny, they had turned against the rigid designs, geometrical patterns and clipped shapes associated with Louis XIV's lavish Versailles... and exchanged the artifice of straight canals and immaculately sheared hedges for serpentine lakes and clumps of unpruned trees." For them, she says, the "irregularity of nature had become a symbol of liberty."

During the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, a number of delegates visited the garden of John Bartram, which helped them resolve the political impasse on sharing power among the states. 

I must confess that although the subject is fascinating, I was annoyed by some of the author's contentions:  one delegate had "probably" never before seen a fringe tree; George Mason "must have been excited to see conifers from the northern regions of the Union." Perhaps Mason took note of trees that were new to him, but was he really "excited" by them?

We also learn in the book, according to Wulfe,  that James Madison was the first true American environmentalist.

The book includes some beautiful color plates of American native plants and early gardens, and there are numerous drawings of "plans" of Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and other large estates.

Although you may question some of Wulf's conclusions, the book contains more than 100 pages of notes and bibliography, so you can go directly to the source to check out the facts. It's certainly an entertaining read, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in early American history, colonial era gardens, politics, horticulture, or garden design.  You will not be disappointed.

 

 

Comments

[Solkor]

It is very rare to have this kind of book. It is much related to the real life as it tells the story of landscaping. It’s a story that everybody would find interest to for it tells a story that everybody would be inspired.