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Summary
Summary
A groundbreaking look at the Founding Fathers and their obsession with gardening, agriculture, and botany by the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. * "Illuminating and engrossing." -- The New York Times Book Review
For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation.
Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson's and John Adams's faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.
Author Notes
Andrea Wulf is an English historian and writer, born in New Delhi, India in 1972. She studied design at the Royal College of Art. She is a public speaker and has lectured in the UK and USA. Her books include This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History; Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation; and Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Her award winning book, The Brother Gardeners, received a CBHL Annual Literature Award in 2010. The Invention of Nature: How Alexander Von Humboldt Revolutionized Our World, received the 2015 Costa Book Award in the biography category, and the 2016 Royal Society Science Book Prize for 'outstanding popular science books' written for a non-specialist audience.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Not only did Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison operate farms, all believed agriculture was the noblest occupation and the foundation of democracy. All loved to talk about it, write about it, and spend leisure time (between building a nation) inspecting local farms. Scholars have not ignored this, but British design historian Wulf (The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession) focuses on the agricultural passion that also reflected the political convictions of America's founders. Even while fighting the Revolution and governing the nation, Washington bombarded the manager of his beloved Mount Vernon with detailed instructions and insisted on prompt replies. During years of diplomatic service overseas, Adams and Jefferson toured private gardens and studied the latest agricultural techniques. This obsession went beyond the personal, influencing the design of Washington, D.C., and the White House, where Jefferson wanted only native shrubs and trees. Detailed botanical descriptions, garden layouts, and crop yields of their estates may appeal more to fans of horticulture than of history, but Wulf offers a delightful new perspective on the men we usually associate more with politics than with plants. 16 pages of color illus.; 19 b&w illus. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The fresh and bountiful premise on which Wulf has built her second book of lively, biographical horticultural history (after The Brother Gardeners, 2009) is her conviction that to understand the making of America, one must view the Founding Fathers as farmers and gardeners. The love for indigenous trees and plants and the passion for cultivation shared by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison profoundly influenced the shape of American governance a claim Wulf substantiates through discerning study of their correspondence and close examination of the beloved plantations of Washington (Mount Vernon), Jefferson (Monticello), and Madison (Montpelier) as well as Adams' modest Massachusetts farm (Peacefield). Relishing political conflicts as much as gardening lore, Wulf parses the founders' belief in farming as both the most honorable way of life and the key to the new nation's self-sufficiency. She then confronts the great paradox of this agrarian dream, that slaves made possible Washington's, Jefferson's, and Madison's revolutionary landscape designs. Wulf's delectable anecdotal approach (backed by 100-plus pages of notes) Washington planning his garden while at Valley Forge, Jefferson's horticultural espionage, Adams' joyful digging in the good earth, Madison's prescient call to preserve the environment reveals each founder's personality and perspective, while her dynamic analysis results in a paradigm-altering vision of how the balance of nature underlies our founding principles.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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. John Adams was the first president to live in what was soon to be called the White House, which was then, like most of Washington, surrounded by mud flats. The city was emerging from Pierre Charles L'Enfant's grandiose plan in which, harking back to British landscape gardens, wide avenues were terminated with real classical "metaphors of liberty" - the Capitol and the White House. Oddly enough, the next president, Jefferson, did little to cultivate the White House grounds, despite his constant improvements at Monticello. Yet Jefferson's contribution was on a far grander scale: having doubled the country's territory with the Louisiana Purchase, he sent his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, along with William Clark, on the expedition to the far West that would begin to study the natural history of the American wilderness. THROUGHOUT her narrative, Wulf squarely faces the institution of slavery, which made fertile and exemplary estates possible in the South. In one passage, she describes, in detail the way an arboretum was transplanted from the surrounding woodland by Washington's slaves in the midst of a freezing winter. After James Madison's term as president, he retired to his Virginia estate, Montpelier, and devoted himself to the preservation of the environment by conserving timber resources and once-fertile land that had been depleted from overuse. In 1818, as the first president of the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, he made a prescient speech on the subject, filled with advice for living off the land without destroying it. His garden, like those of others laid out by the founding fathers, remains today as proof of his dedication to the natural world. In many ways, these gardens are among the greatest aspects of our heritage. George Washington directing field workers at Mount Vernon. Paula Deitz is the editor of The Hudson Review and the author of the essay collection "Of Gardens."
Choice Review
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison are the main subjects of this lively book by design historian Wulf (The Brother Gardeners, CH, Sep'09, 47-0269). These are the gardener-farmers who put their imprint on the US in its early years. The thesis is that their orientation toward the land and, to a large extent, its cultivation directly and indirectly influenced the course of political history. Their farms, plantations, and gardens offered escape from the tumult around them, but also, in Wulf's view, informed the ideology that guided the American Revolution. Tours of gardens in the US and abroad allowed the founders to share experiences, build friendships, and carve alliances. The founders created an America in which agriculture, through necessity, was based on introduced plants and animals, but also a place with native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers that were sought for European gardens. The country and its politics grew from a mix of native and foreign and of wild and exotic. Wulf's stories provide a glimpse of the founders' less-well-known personal characteristics. A companion work might be Aaron Sachs's The Humboldt Current (CH, Jun'07, 44-5841), which provides a parallel view of the change and revolution that was in the air during this exciting period. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates and above. D. H. Pfister Harvard University
Kirkus Review
Design historian Wulf (The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession, 2009, etc.) explains how the Founders brought a new nation and their own gardens simultaneously to fruition.Surely, the author goes too far to say that "it's impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners." Yet, by the time she concludes her brilliant discussion of plants and politics, how the Founders' enthusiasm for nature and agriculture, for gardening expansively defined, influenced and reflected their notions about government, readers will happily succumb to her boldness. Although she occasionally discusses Franklin, Hamilton and Benjamin Rush, Wulf focuses on the first four presidents, offering artfully composed, set-piece chapters on Washington's intentional "horticultural union at Mount Vernon...the first truly American garden"; Adams and Jefferson's educational, inspiring 1786 English garden tour; the model of harmonious, thriving plants from each state at Bartram's Garden, nearby Philadelphia, which may have assuaged Constitutional Convention delegates, over half of whom were farmers or planters; Madison and Jefferson's sly mix of botany and politics during their 1791 New England journey; and the portentous summer of '96, which found each man tending his garden, pretending not to care about politics. As they carved gardens out of the American forest, the Founders understood their agricultural and aesthetic decisions also as political acts, fundamental to their larger task of nation building. Whether she's addressing Washington's plans for the new federal city, Jefferson's unceasing renovations of his Monticello grounds, Adams' obsession with manure, Jefferson's ongoing argument with European naturalists over the merits of American flora and fauna or Madison's pioneering concern for conservation and natural balance, Wulf's scholarship, passion and pleasing prose make for a happy combination: a history book for gardeners, a gardening book for historians.A fresh look at the Founders that charms even as it irresistibly convinces.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue My first impressions of America were shaped when I went as a young woman on a seven- week road trip across the States, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. We drove hundreds of miles on roads that never curved, along a grid that mankind had imposed on nature. Some days we passed sprawling factories that were pumping out clouds of billowing smoke; other days we saw vast fields that seemed to go on forever. Everything differed in scale from Europe, even suburban America, where rows and rows of painted clapboard houses sit proudly on large open plots of immaculately shorn lawns. America exuded a confidence that seemed to be rooted in its power to harness nature to man's will and I thought of it as an industrial, larger- than- life country. I certainly never thought of it in terms of gardening-- whereas in Britain, everybody seems to be obsessed with their herbaceous borders and vegetable plots. In America, I believed, I was more likely to see someone driving a riding mower than pruning roses. Then, in 2006, I went to visit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's mountaintop home in Virginia, and began to understand how wrong I had been. On a sunny October morning, I stood on Jefferson's vegetable terrace, with straight lines of cabbages and squashes at my feet, and saw man and nature in perfect harmony. In the distance the horizon seemed to stretch into infinity; behind me was a manicured lawn lined with ribbons of flowers and, below, a romantic forest that crept into the gardens. The magnificent view from the terrace across the arboreal sea of autumnal reds and oranges of red maples, oaks, hickories and tulip poplars brought together Jefferson's neat plots of cultivated vegetables and sublime scenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jefferson had combined beauty with utility, the untamed wilderness of the forest with the orderly lines of apples, pears and cherries in the orchard, and colorful native and exotic flowers with a sweeping panorama across Virginia's spectacular landscape. If nature had been dominated by man, it seemed it was only in order to celebrate it. Later, I couldn't put Monticello out of my mind. I was in the midst of writing about the eighteenth- century American farmer and plant collector John Bartram, the British obsession with gardens and the introduction of non-native plants into the English landscape--many of which had been sent by Bartram from the American colonies. The more I learned about Bartram, the more fascinated I became by the American relationship to nature during the eighteenth century. I pored over the correspondence between John Bartram and Benjamin Franklin, and after my visit to Monticello, I learned that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had also ordered plants from Bartram, and that James Madison had visited Bartram's garden just before the Great Compromise of the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787. I read in John Adams's diaries how much he enjoyed working in his garden, fork in hand. Slowly, through records, letters and diaries, I came to see how vegetable plots, ornamental plants, landscapes and forests had played a crucial role in America's struggle for national identity and in the lives of the founding fathers. Golden cornfields and endless rows of cotton plants became symbols for America's economic independence from Britain; towering trees became a reflection of a strong and vigorous nation; native species were imbued with patriotism and proudly planted in gardens, while metaphors drawn from the natural world brought plants and gardening into politics. The founding fathers' passion for nature, plants, gardens and agriculture is woven deeply into the fabric of America and aligned with their political thought, both reflecting and influencing it. In fact, I believe, it's impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners. Founding Gardeners examines the creation of the American nation and the lives of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison through the lens of gardens, landscapes, nature and agriculture. Part of this is played out in Washington's Mount Vernon, Jefferson's Monticello and Madison's Montpelier-- all large plantations in Virginia-- as well as Adams's much smaller farm, Peacefield, in Quincy near Boston. But it was Benjamin Franklin who was the first of the revolutionaries to place plants at the heart of the country's struggle. In response to the tensions between Britain and America, Franklin turned to plants and agriculture. In his "Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth," Franklin listed in 1769 the three ways by which a nation might acquire wealth, and gave his opinion on each: "The first is by War . . . This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way. " Eleven years before the thirteen colonies threw off the yoke of Britain's rule in 1776, the controversial Stamp Act had been given Royal Assent by King George III. This tax on paper affected almost every colonist, for it was applied to newspapers, legal documents, liquor licenses, books and every deck of cards. It was a desperate attempt to fill Britain's depleted coffers, run low by the Seven Years' War, which had seen Britain fight against the French on North American soil. When the war had come to an end in 1763, the British economy lay in crisis, riddled with war debts and plagued by a series of bad harvests. Britain's solution was to make the colonists pay. As news of the ratification of the Stamp Act reached America, colonists rallied together to protest against Parliament's rule. The Virginia House of Burgesses-- the legislative assembly of colonial Virginia--declared the tax illegal. Throughout the colonies, riots broke out. The protesters burned effigies and raided the houses of British officials-- on the way drinking their wine cellars dry--insisting that the British had no right to levy such taxes on the colonies. In Boston, an effigy of Andrew Oliver (the man who collected the stamp duty) and of the devil holding a copy of the Stamp Act were hung from an ancient elm tree near the town common. In the evening, 3,000 people marched through the streets, smashing the windows of Oliver's house before beheading and burning his effigy on a bonfire made from his furniture. Franklin was in London at the time, having arrived in December 1764 on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly. His mission was to change the governance of Pennsylvania which was controlled by the so- called "proprietors," the heirs of William Penn, who had founded the colony in the seventeenth century. It was his third visit to the British capital, a place he loved for the intellectual stimulation and sociability. But during this visit, his relationship with Britain underwent a seismic shift-- a shift that not only led to his assured signature on the Declaration of Independence, but that is also mirrored in his changing attitude toward seeds and crops. Indeed, his involvement with plants can be seen as a kind of barometer of his political convictions. For a long time Franklin had been interested in plants, both for their scientific and economic value. Part of a lively network of letter- writers who exchanged seeds with each other, he corresponded with farmers, gardeners and botanists in America and Europe, and experimented in his Philadelphia garden with different vegetables and crops. From London, he regularly sent seeds home to his wife, Deborah, helped by his British scientific and gardening friends. When one of them couldn't procure a new species of grain that Franklin wanted, another offered the entire produce of the previous year (clearly realizing how keen Franklin was). Franklin sent a new kind of oat and barley to Deborah to distribute among the plantsmen in Philadelphia, as well as sending vegetable seeds and Chinese rhubarb, which was valued for its medicinal properties. As the political troubles intensified, so did Franklin's agricultural interest. The outbreak of the anti--Stamp Act protests in America had forced Franklin to become the unofficial ambassador for the colonies in Britain. He met the Lord Treasurer, Lord Grenville, in an attempt to persuade him to abandon the scheme but to no avail. Grenville, Franklin said, was "besotted" with it. Yet, though Franklin thought the Act to be unconstitutional and believed that the colonies had to be represented in Parliament, he did not, at this point, contemplate the possibility of independence. A "faithful Adherence to the Government of this Nation," Franklin insisted as houses were burned in Philadelphia, "will always be the wisest Course." But he misjudged how much his fellow colonists hated the impositions. In Pennsylvania, Franklin's steadfast defense of Britain was held against him and in late September 1765, furious rioters threatened to destroy his house in Philadelphia. Britain had always nurtured the colonies as her greatest export market-- paper, nails, glass, clothes and linen were all produced in Britain's burgeoning manufacturing sector and sold in American markets. In addition to staples, luxury products such as silverware, porcelain, carpets and silk became an important British export. The trade of hundreds of ships connected London, Bristol and Liverpool with Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Between 1730 and 1760, exports to the North American colonies quadrupled, filling the purses of British merchants and manufacturers. At the same time laws, regulations and duties imposed by the British and a lack of labor prevented the colonists from developing their own manufacturing sector. With plenty of fertile soil, the colonies instead became the fields of the mother- country-- shipping grain, corn and tobacco to Britain. Consequently almost all colonists lived off the land. They fought against the wilderness, draining swampy soil and snatching plots from the rugged embrace of the forest. As they wrested their fields from the forest, trees fell in the thousands, clearing the way for cash crops such as tobacco, rice and indigo. Franklin believed that the colonists' reliance on agriculture for their main income, combined with the seemingly endless resources of land, could be turned to their advantage. America could be self- sufficient. And as tension over the Stamp Act grew, Franklin argued that the colonies would be able to pressure the British by boycotting their goods. "I do not know a single article," Franklin told MPs, that the colonies couldn't either "do without or make themselves." It was his four- hour testimony in front of Parliament, many believed, that led to the repeal of the Stamp Act a few weeks later. But it soon became clear that the British had no intention of offering the colonies representation in Parliament. Instead, more duties were imposed, including on tea, paint and glass-- all imported products that the colonists were only allowed to buy from Britain. For the next three years Franklin tried to persuade both the colonists and the British politicians to reach a compromise. In essays and letters in newspapers, he was constantly explaining, moderating, smoothing and arguing. But when the government refused to compromise, he finally had to admit that words were no longer enough. In January 1769, he rallied behind the colonists' call for a sweeping boycott of British goods. The boycott made Franklin's seed collecting all the more urgent. Not only was he sending larger amounts of seeds and more varieties home, but these were now for America's profit alone, not for Britain's. Every time someone told Franklin about a new edible plant, he was thrilled by the possibility of its economic potential. "I wish it may be found of Use with us," he told one correspondent when he forwarded seeds for a new crop, and when he heard of tofu, it so excited his curiosity, he said, that he procured a recipe from China, dispatching it together with chickpeas to a friend in Philadelphia. These dried seeds carried the possibility of a new world and political freedom. In the coming years he sent upland rice and tallow tree† from China and seeds of "useful Plants" from India and Turkey, as well as introducing kohlrabi and Scottish kale, among many others, to America. Franklin, who had been the "chairman of British Colonies" of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufacturers and Commerce in London, now rarely went to the Society's meetings. The Society had tried to encourage colonists to grow commercial crops by paying premiums and awards, but by 1770 Franklin accused the Society of betraying the new nation, claiming that the "true Spirit of all your Bounties" were in the interest of Britain, not America. No longer was America to be a colonial grain store, or a market for Britain's goods. America, Franklin was convinced, could provide all the necessaries herself and they would just have to renounce the luxuries they couldn't produce. He echoed what John Adams had written in Boston's newspapers under the rustic pseudonym Humphrey Ploughjogger. In response to the Stamp Act, Adams had suggested that colonists should wear coats made of the hides of their own oxen rather than woollen ones from Britain. Adams promised that he would not buy "one shilling worth of any thing that comes from old England." As such, self- sufficiency became a weapon in the fight for parliamentary representation and against British economic restrictions. Slowly colonists began to equate home production and agriculture with the upholding of domestic liberty. To Franklin's regret, the boycott did not pressure Parliament into relinquishing authority over the colonies. Nothing was achieved, and in May 1771 Franklin wrote that "the seeds [are] sown of a total disunion of the two countries," while at the same time urging patience in order to postpone "this catastrophe." Franklin continued to plead for moderation, but it became clear that Britain would never accept an empire that would give the colonial assemblies the same rights as Parliament. As the clashes between Britain and her colonies escalated, Franklin became the voice of American rights in Britain and the scapegoat for the troubles. At the end of January 1774, six weeks after a group of colonists dumped more than three hundred chests of tea into Boston's harbor in protest against the tax on tea--known as the Boston Tea Party-- Franklin was questioned and attacked in the Privy Council about the colonial affairs. As the abuse was hurled at him, the sixty- eight- year- old Franklin, dressed in a blue suit made of Manchester velvet, stood motionless and with his head held high before the British accusers. Three days later he wrote to his son William that "my Office of Deputy- Postmaster is taken from me." The British government had stripped him of the post that he had held for almost twenty years, severing their connection with Franklin. In this briefest of letters, Franklin then advised William, who was the royal governor of New Jersey, to give up his position in order to become a farmer: "I wish you were well settled in your Farm. 'Tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent Employment." It was a turning point for Franklin, who for so long had clung to the idea that Britain would recognize the rights of the colonists. Farmers, he now believed, held the key to America's future because they, not the henchmen of the British empire, would create a new nation. For one more year Franklin tried to facilitate a compromise, but then he realized that it was time to return home. With no reason to stay any longer in "this old rotten State," he boarded an American ship in March 1775, never to return to Britain. When he arrived in Philadelphia a little more than six weeks later, the Second Continental Congress was convening and the following day Franklin was made a delegate. "We should be prepared to repel force by force, which I think, united, we are well able to do," Franklin wrote to a gardening friend shortly after his arrival. He described the atmosphere in Philadelphia as one of mounting belligerence, containing "all Ranks of People in Arms." The next day George Washington, with his military uniform packed in his trunks, arrived in the city. The colonists were preparing to fight the British. Franklin believed firmly in America's ability to survive. America would rise, Franklin wrote to an old friend in Britain in September 1775, because "it will itself by its Fertility enable us to defend it. Agriculture is the great Source of Wealth and Plenty. By cutting off our Trade you have thrown us to the Earth, whence like Antaeus we shall rise yearly with fresh Strength and Vigour." The other founding fathers shared his belief. Agriculture and the independent small- scale farmer were, in their eyes, the building blocks of the new nation. Ploughing, planting and vegetable gardening were more than profitable and enjoyable occupations: they were political acts, bringing freedom and independence. When, after the War of Independence in 1783, the former colonies had to mature from being a war alliance to being a united nation, nature also became a unifying force. It was the Constitution that welded them together politically, legally and economically, but it was nature that provided a transcendent feeling of nationhood. America's endless horizons, fertile soil and floral abundance became the perfect articulation of a distinct national identity-- of a country that was young and strong. The founding fathers' passion for nature and plants can still be seen today for it shaped America in all its contradictions-- from the rise of industrial agriculture in the Midwest to the protected wilderness in the national parks. America's most revered patriotic songs revel in images drawn from nature: the "amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!" in "America the Beautiful"; in "God Bless America," "From the mountains, to the prairies, / To the oceans, white with foam"; and in Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," with its chorus of "From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters / This land was made for you and me." Today's slowly changing attitude toward local produce, home- grown vegetables and inner- city gardening in the United States are part of the same endeavor. The new "food movements" (accompanied by a flurry of books and initiatives)--ranging from the promotion of urban agriculture to the preservation of farmland, from the first lady's vegetable garden at the White House to the returning interest of native species in ornamental gardens--can be placed in the context of the founding fathers' legacy. For me, one of the greatest surprises was that the cradle of the environmental movement did not lie in the mid- nineteenth century with men like Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, but that it could be traced back to the birth of the nation and the founding fathers. The protection of the environment, James Madison had already said in a widely circulated speech in 1818, was essential for the survival of the United States. The founding fathers might not have romanticized nature as later generations did, but they were equally passionate about it. Madison did not suggest living in misty- eyed harmony with nature but living off it in the long term. He condemned the Virginians for their ruthless exploitation of the soil and the forests, fearing that nature's equilibrium would be unbalanced. Humankind, Madison said, could not expect nature to be "made subservient to the use of man." Man, he believed, has to find a place within the "symmetry of nature" without destroying it-- words that remain as important today as they were when he spoke them. In politics, the founding fathers have been evoked by almost every politician across a wide spectrum. This book offers a window into a new and important aspect of the lives of the founding fathers. It is significant that the old elm in Boston, from which the effigy of the loathed stamp distributor had dangled, was renamed the Liberty Tree. America's landscape, soil and plants played a crucial role in the creation of the nation and became steeped with political ideology but also with hope for the future. Jefferson, for example, crafted the grounds at Monticello as carefully as his words-- it became a living tapestry of the themes that made America after the revolution. Every time I visit Monticello now, I go first to the vegetable terrace. Each time, no matter how often I see it, the contrast between the breathtaking view and the orderly rows of vegetables stirs me. I pick up a handful of the red soil and let it run through my fingers and I feel a visceral connection to the founding fathers and to their vision for this country. Excerpted from Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. XI |
Prologue | p. 3 |
1 "The Cincinnatus of the West" George Washington's American Garden at Mount Vernon | p. 13 |
2 "Gardens, peculiarly worth the attention of an American" Thomas Jefferson's and John Adams's English Garden Tour | p. 35 |
3 "A Nursery of American Statesmen" The Constitutional Convention in 1787 and a Garden Visit | p. 58 |
4 "Parties and Politicks" James Madison's and Thomas Jefferson's Tour of New England | p. 81 |
5 "Political Plants grow in the Shade" The Summer of 1796 | p. 100 |
6 "City of Magnificent Intentions" The Creation of Washington, D.C., and the White House | p. 124 |
7 "Empire of Liberty" Jefferson's Western Expansion | p. 154 |
8 "Tho' an old man, I am but a young gardener" Thomas Jefferson at Monticello | p. 173 |
9 "Balance of Nature" James Madison at Montpelier | p. 190 |
Epilogue | p. 213 |
Appendix: Maps of Mount Vernon, Peacefield, Monticello and Montpelier | p. 215 |
Notes | p. 221 |
Selected Bibliography | p. 303 |
Illustration Credits | p. 323 |
Acknowledgments | p. 327 |
Index | p. 331 |