American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Carl Linnaeus’s house in Uppsala, Sweden. Burr made a pilgrimage here in August 1809, visiting the room where Linnaeus had died in 1778.

  This temple-like building at the Botanical Garden in Uppsala, known as Linneanum, was dedicated to the study of botany. It opened officially in 1807, the centenary of Linnaeus’s birth, and Burr visited just two years later.

  An 1811 map (detail) created by Hosack’s nephew and botany assistant John Eddy. Eddy indicated significant sites in and around New York, among them the “Botanic Garden” and the spot on the shores of the Hudson where Burr shot Hamilton in the 1804 duel.

  Mary Eddy Hosack with David Hosack Jr. in 1815. Hosack suggested to the painter, Thomas Sully, that three-year-old David be pictured listening to a watch on a chain held by his mother. Hosack thought this pose “brings out all his earnest expression of face.”

  After Mary’s death in 1824, Hosack married the widow Magdalena Coster and helped raise her many children alongside his own. In 1829, with her support, he bought the dramatic Expulsion from the Garden of Eden from the young painter Thomas Cole, who had been unable to sell it for a year after he first exhibited it in New York in May 1828.

  Photograph© 2018, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  EPILOGUE

  AARON BURR DIED ABOUT NINE MONTHS AFTER HOSACK, IN the wake of a stroke that had left his legs paralyzed. With his father gone, it fell to Alexander Hosack to care for Burr during his last illness. A friend of Alexander’s later noted that he had once asked Burr whether he regretted having shot Hamilton. Burr reportedly had told Alexander, “No, sir; I could not regret it. Twice he crossed my path. He brought it on himself.”

  Sometime in 1836, the year Burr died, Alexander Hosack went to Europe. During a tour of the South of France, he stopped in the city of Montpellier. At five in the morning the day after he arrived, Alexander walked from his hotel to Montpellier’s botanical garden—the oldest in France. He went to a house on the grounds and stated his business to a servant, who conducted him to a room where an aged man was bent over a microscope, examining a flower. Hearing them enter, the man turned around and stared at Alexander for a surprised moment. Then he exclaimed, “I know you, sir; you are the son of Dr. Hosack.” It was Alire Raffeneau Delile, Hosack’s former student at Elgin and Columbia. He embraced Alexander in tears.

  After returning to France in 1807, Delile had spent twelve years in Paris, where he had collaborated with François André Michaux, Aimé Bonpland, and Pierre-Joseph Redouté on a series of beautiful botanical volumes. In 1819, he had been appointed a professor of botany at the Montpellier medical school as well as director of the botanical garden—posts he still held when Alexander Hosack arrived in 1836. Delile now took Alexander to a chest in the corner of the room and pulled out stacks of handwritten pages. He had saved the notes he had taken as a young man in Hosack’s lectures in New York, along with the letters he had received from Hosack since then.

  Scholars have sometimes wondered why Delile was an anomaly among French botanists in that he insisted on using Linnaeus’s sexual system of plant classification rather than the prevailing natural system developed by Jussieu. It was likely thanks to Hosack’s influence that Delile continued to use the Linnaean system, and he was also paying tribute to Hosack in another way. When Delile lectured to his medical students, he told them that it was critically important that aspiring doctors learn about plants. Three decades after he had studied in New York, Delile was still telling his students that a doctor “must know his food from his poison.” It had been one of Hosack’s favorite maxims. He had learned it from William Curtis forty years earlier.

  If Hosack’s name was well known in France at the time of his death—he even garnered a mention from Tocqueville—in Britain he was more famous still. In the last two decades of his life, his constant exchange of plants and ideas with British scientists had inspired one tribute after another. The greatest came from David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who had met Hosack in 1823. The following year Douglas had sailed once again from Britain to North America, this time landing on the Pacific coast at the mouth of the Columbia River. There he discovered a majestic tree species he thought was “one of the most striking and truly graceful objects of nature,” a conifer known today as the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). He also discovered a new genus of wildflower with multicolored blooms that he decided to name in honor of his favorite American: Hosackia. It was the greatest possible gesture of respect from one botanist to another, and Douglas thought it was an entirely fitting tribute for David Hosack, to whom “the scientific men of North America owe the same gratitude as those of England did to Sir Joseph Banks.”

  Hosack deserved all the praise and recognition. From founding Elgin, to teaching young botanists, to presiding over the New-York Horticultural Society, to turning his Hyde Park estate into the most inspiring new designed landscape on the continent—Hosack had done more than any man of his generation to foster in his fellow Americans a fascination with plants. He had lost his battle to save Elgin, but his student Amos Eaton later observed that it was Hosack’s work there that ignited “the first spark of zeal for Botany.” As Hosack and his students explained the importance and pleasures of botany in newspapers and in speeches during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans who had previously paid little attention to the scientific study of plants began taking notice. At first, the botany guides available to amateur American botanists were by British naturalists such as Curtis and Smith, but by the 1820s Hosack’s former students and associates from Elgin had joined him in lecturing and publishing on botany, taking their knowledge to audiences in villages and towns around the United States.

  Thanks to Hosack, Eaton, Torrey, and others in the Elgin circle, Americans caught a fever for botany like the one Curtis had helped launch in England fifty years earlier with his Flora Londinensis. Hosack himself had taught only young men, but in the last decade of his life, he called for both boys and girls to be educated in botany, and his students followed suit. Budding botanists began traversing the countryside all over the United States with their new manuals in hand. They attended public lectures and arranged for botany to be taught to their children in the schools. It was not long before the botany craze helped fuel another that continues to this day—small-scale home gardening. Hosack’s head gardeners at Elgin and Hyde Park both published home gardening guides, and in 1846, Andrew Jackson Downing, who had been so inspired by Hosack’s work with André Parmentier on the Hyde Park estate, founded a wildly successful magazine called The Horticulturist. In the decades following the Civil War, new companies such as Burpee and R. H. Shumway began including color lithographs in their seed catalogues. For the first time, Americans could sit indoors in the dead of winter and hold the colors of summer between their hands, thrilling to the promise hidden in the homeliest little seed—just as they do today.

  This national passion has never waned. In American cities today, in fact, interest in gardens seems stronger than ever. Farmers’ markets and the farm-to-table movement are connecting city dwellers with rural farmers, helping the latter survive in an age of factory farming. People are turning abandoned city lots into urban farms to help eradicate “food deserts”—neighborhoods where the best food on offer sits in plastic packaging. Schoolchildren are learning in their classrooms and at botanical gardens how to grow their own food. Hotels and restaurants have begun keeping bees and growing herbs, vegetables, fruits, and flowers on their rooftops. Seed exchanges are helping Americans work together to preserve seeds from nonhybridized species, commonly known as heirlooms, so these species won’t disappear from the world completely—as hundreds or possibly thousands already have.

  Hosack’s name has largely been forgotten, but his influence lingers in these efforts to keep plants at the forefront of city life and to cultivate and treasure every single species on earth. His legacy can also be found in some of the most beautiful public spaces in the United States today. This path of influence runs
from Hosack’s work at Hyde Park with Parmentier to Downing, who in turn launched the landscape architects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted on their brilliant American careers. In 1858, Vaux and Olmsted submitted an early version of what became the winning entry to the competition for Central Park, and Olmsted in particular would go on to design many other stunning landscapes that still shape the lives of American cities. The conversations about nature that Parmentier had with Hosack as they walked through the grounds of Hyde Park still echo, ever so faintly, through these landscapes.

  Hosack had an even greater impact on American science. The year after his death, the New-York Horticultural Society elected John Torrey, the last of his prize students, to its presidency. Torrey was also pursuing another cause long dear to Hosack’s heart. With a young botanist named Asa Gray, he was compiling a Flora of North America, which they published in multiple volumes from 1838 to 1843. It was by far the most ambitious work on American plants ever to appear, and it established Torrey’s and Gray’s international reputations. Gray was hired by Harvard, and over the next decades he assembled an herbarium that remains one of the most important in the world today. He also helped create Boston’s famous Arnold Arboretum. Torrey further honored Hosack’s legacy by advancing botany in New York. Like Hosack before him, he attracted a circle of young men devoted to the study of plants. They got in the habit of holding regular meetings in Torrey’s office at Columbia, calling themselves the Torrey Botanical Club. After Torrey died in 1873, the group continued to meet. They welcomed women members and started a botanical journal that remains in circulation today. Although they had no botanical garden, they tried to make do with dried specimens from Torrey’s herbarium. Then, in the 1880s, two members of the Torrey Botanical Club, Nathaniel Lord Britton and Elizabeth Knight Britton, went to England and toured the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Like Hosack a century before them, they saw beauty and science mingled in an English garden and thought of their beloved New York. It was Elizabeth Britton who suggested to her husband that the city should have a botanical garden as glorious as Kew.

  While Hosack had had to forge ahead at the dawn of the nineteenth century on his own, the Brittons lived in another age entirely. They shared New York with a group of stupendously wealthy Americans who were as interested in founding cultural and scientific institutions as Hosack and his friends had been—people such as the Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts. As Nathaniel Lord Britton took the lead in the campaign for a new botanical garden, he made sure to harness this wealth and civic concern. Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt II each contributed $25,000, and they lobbied their friends and associates to contribute, too. Vanderbilt agreed to serve as the garden’s first president, Carnegie as its first vice president, and Morgan as its first treasurer.

  The New York Botanical Garden was built on two hundred fifty acres of Bronx parkland graced by a virgin hemlock forest and a river. Britton chose Calvert Vaux to lay out winding carriage drives through formal gardens to a palatial conservatory sheltering an entire acre of exotic plants under glass. A huge building was constructed to hold exhibits about medicinal, commercial, and agricultural plants and to allow botanists to work in state-of-the art laboratories. Garden officials began collecting thousands of botanical and horticultural volumes. Among them were more than two hundred from Hosack’s personal library, including those he had brought back from London on the Mohawk a century earlier. Britton persuaded Columbia to donate its herbarium, which contained Torrey’s collections as well as specimens gathered for Elgin by Hosack, Delile, and John and Caspar Eddy.*

  Today, this herbarium contains more than seven million specimens. The New York Botanical Garden recently celebrated its one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary. Its botanical and horticultural achievements place it in the company of only one or two other gardens in the world. In 1897, when the garden was under construction, a local newspaper argued that Hosack deserved to be immortalized with a statue there. Nothing came of the idea, but in a way it doesn’t matter. Hosack’s spirit is visible in every blossom and under every microscope. The love of nature he brought home from Britain and nurtured among generations of his countrymen helped give rise to this national treasure. Today there are more than four hundred botanical gardens and arboreta across the United States.

  In the late nineteenth century, the search for new medicines migrated from botanical gardens to universities and pharmaceutical laboratories. But this search has never ceased to depend on botanists who roam the planet collecting and studying plants in the wild and learning about the uses of medicinal plants from local experts. In the face of an alarming rise in antibiotic resistance, some pioneering medical researchers are now going into the field themselves in a race to identify new plant-based drugs. As they travel back and forth between the laboratory and the field, they are reconnecting the scientific domains between which Hosack once moved so easily.

  We like our heroes to stand alone, so we can easily discern and celebrate their achievements. But Hosack’s greatest legacy is perhaps the one that is the hardest to see. He showed his fellow citizens how to build institutions. Over and over, in the face of criticism and misfortune, he rallied people around him to create the charitable, medical, and cultural institutions that make cities worth inhabiting and that educate a nation for generations to come. Philanthropic work is hard and complex. The daily lives of civic organizations—full of meetings, bylaws, elections, and the like—strike many people as dull and unheroic. Because this work and its results are collective, we can’t easily single out one hero to celebrate. Yet they take just as much patience, ingenuity, and money as any discovery or invention. Perhaps today more than ever, Hosack’s quieter sort of heroism deserves emulation. He dreamed from boyhood about what his generation could do to improve the lives of others. Acting on those generous dreams for half a century, he helped build a new nation.

  * The Linnaean specimens that James Edward Smith gave to Hosack in 1794 are now lost, perhaps destroyed in a fire at the Lyceum of Natural History in 1866. There is a small but tantalizing possibility that they are still out there somewhere, hiding among other uncatalogued specimens in some American museum or botanical garden.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is my effort to bring David Hosack into living relief. For many years now, I have been traveling in his footsteps, seeking to recapture the vanished sights and sounds of the places he frequented—such as the neighborhood in lower Manhattan where he lived just blocks from Hamilton, Jefferson, and Washington, and the cow pastures he coaxed into bloom where Rockefeller Center now rises. There are even a few places remaining today that he would recognize, among them Hamilton’s country house in northern Manhattan and the unspoiled view of the Hudson River from the high bluff at Hyde Park where Hosack’s own mansion once stood. On the northern coast of Scotland, near the town of Elgin, I found the little castle where Hosack stayed with friends for two weeks in the spring of 1793, and I saw why he fell so in love with the wild landscape there that he would later name his American garden for Elgin.

  Above all, though, I found Hosack in the archives; his papers are scattered across more than thirty collections in the United States and Europe. As I worked my way through thousands of pages of letters, plant lists, medical and botanical books and essays, weather diaries, travel diaries, newspapers, and more, my constant companion was Christine Chapman Robbins’s 1964 biography, David Hosack: Citizen of New York. I want to express my admiration for her rigorous scholarship, which provided me with a sort of treasure map as I explored the archives further. I also want to thank Peter Mickulas for his writing about Hosack in his wonderful book about the New York Botanical Garden, Britton’s Botanical Empire. It was when I stumbled across Mickulas’s description of the Elgin Botanic Garden that my fascination with Hosack began.

  Many dozens of curators, archivists, and librarians helped me as I tracked down Hosack’s papers and those of his correspondents and contemporaries, and I’m i
ndebted to each of them. My special thanks to Susan Fraser, Vice President and Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden; Vanessa Sellers, Humanities Research Coordinator at Mertz; Stephen Sinon, Head of Archives; and the entire Mertz staff, all of whom aided me on so many occasions. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Humanities Institute at Mertz for supporting my research with a Mellon Visiting Scholar Fellowship in the summer of 2016. My deep gratitude also to Lisa O’Sullivan, Vice President and Director of the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine, and her staff, especially the inimitable Arlene Shaner; to Tammy Kiter and her colleagues at the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library of the New-York Historical Society, where I always felt Hosack’s presence vividly (and not only because I got to visit the regal bust of him in the lobby); to Elaine Charwat and Lynda Brooks at the Linnean Society of London; to Keith Moore at the Royal Society of London; to Hector Rivera at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office; to Don Pfister, Curator of the Farlow Library and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany and Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany at Harvard University; to Lisa DeCesare and Michaela Schmull of the Harvard University Herbaria; and to Marika Hedin, Director of the Linnaeus Museum in Uppsala, Sweden, and Jesper Kårehed, Scientific Curator of the Linnaean Gardens, Uppsala University. Naomi Kroll Hassebroek, Senior Conservator with the National Park Service, gave a wonderful tour of the Grange and helped me find beautiful photographs of the house; thanks also to Minerva Anderson for those. Archie Drummond gave me a memorable tour of Brodie Castle in Scotland, and on a thrilling day at the BNY Mellon archives in lower Manhattan, Christine McKay showed me Hosack’s subscription certificates to the secret Hamilton family fund.