As an avid gardener, I am always interested in the history of gardening, whether it be the immediate past history of my friends’ gardens, or the history of some of the first gardens of America.
As a teenager, I followed my mother around Williamsburg, Virginia, studying the formal English based gardens of the Virginia planters. She later used that research to plan her own formal Williamsburg garden with its four boxwood points focusing on a marble sundial, which I have been fortunate to inherit for my own cottage style garden.
In Founding Gardeners author Andrea Wulf explores the development and history of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, John Adams’ Peacefield (see below), and James Madison’s Montpelier. In the appendix, the reader can explore the actual maps of these great estates and locate the placement of all plants, trees, flowers, and vegetables.
Some of the interesting chapter titles, such as “Gardens, peculiarly worth the attention of an American,” “A Nursery of American Statesmen,” “The Constitutional Convention in 1787 and a Garden Visit” as well as “Political Plants Grow in the Shade,” get the reader’s attention immediately.
Wulf notes, “For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating.”
Founding Gardeners is a beautiful, as well as informative book off the beaten track. For gardeners and history lovers, this is a noteworthy book to have on a reference shelf in a home library.
Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf (Random House, 2011).
-Nan
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