by Andrea Wulf
Painting with his trees, Washington contrasted the smooth white bark of the aspen against the furrowed trunk of black gum, and set the fluttering large leaves of maples against the tiny droplet-like leaves of honey locust. The rigid conical shape of young red cedars provided vertical brushstrokes, while the mountain laurels spread in looser, more horizontal lines. In autumn the buttery yellow of the tulip poplar and aspen would make a wonderful background to the fiery reds of black gum and maples. All his life Washington had observed the landscape around him and now this intimate horticultural knowledge helped him to place the trees and shrubs in groups that would show off their beauty in the most effective way.
If the plants provided the colors and shapes with which Washington was creating his floral painting, the garden books he had studied over the past months instructed him how to sketch. In addition to the Dictionary (because “Miller … seems to understand the culture of Trees equal to any other writer I have met with”), Washington also admired Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening, a book he had bought years earlier, in 1759. Langley, like Miller, advocated gardens “after Nature’s own Manner.” Following their instructions, Washington created two “shrubberies”—plantations of ornamental shrubs and trees—between the bowling green and the walled gardens. Like the seats in an amphitheater, the lowest specimens were placed at the front and the tallest at the back. “The Trees should rise gradually one above another,” as well as trailing the twisting shape of the walks, Miller advised in his Dictionary. Some of the larger trees such as the maples and tulip poplars Washington placed on the bowling green itself, almost as if the densely planted shrubbery was tapering out into single trees on the lawn—once again taking Miller’s word as inspiration, for in the Dictionary it said trees should be planted “forwarder upon the lawn than others, whereby the regularity of the lawn will be broken.”
Unlike other gardeners, Washington did not distinguish between the rare and the common. He did not care, for instance, that tulip poplars grew in almost every forest of the thirteen states. He cherished their upright white-orange flowers as much as the rarer satin blossom of the Magnolia grandiflora, which was native to the Southern states only. The plants were American and that was all that counted because this part of the garden celebrated America, irrespective of the rarity of the plants.
Every day Washington could be found outside marking his trees and overseeing the planting. It seemed his persistence reached near-obsessive levels. Too often, however, he was interrupted with requests for letters of introduction and certificates for servicemen, or his army accounts. He longed to be “relieved from the drudgery of the pen” so that he could give his full attention to these cherished gardening amusements. The “raising of shrubberies &c” was now his favorite occupation but instead every “Dick, Tom, and Harry” pestered him with “references of a thousand old matters with which I ought not to be troubled, more than the Great Mogul.” But even when he was not holed up in his study, he was distracted by the stream of visitors who arrived from across the United States and Europe to see the hero of the revolution.
Eighteenth-century hospitality demanded that he welcome and feed such strangers. His house, he complained to his mother, “may be compared to a well resorted tavern, as scarcely any strangers who are going from north to south, or from south to north do not spend a day or two at it.” Sometimes even his sleep was disturbed when strangers knocked on the door in the middle of the night3 or when he considerately served cups of tea to ill guests. So many people came to Mount Vernon that one and a half years after his return Washington wrote in amazement in his diary that he: “dined with only Mrs. Washington which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.”
Mount Vernon had become the most visited private house in the country. “No pilgrim ever approached Mecca with deeper enthusiasm,” one visitor said, while another marveled that so many people turned up “from all parts of the world; hardly a day passes without.” At the end of February 1785, as Washington was laying out the Serpentine Walk, he suffered yet another typical day of interruptions: “first by the coming in of Mr. Michael Stone about 10 oclock (who went away before noon)—then by the arrival of Colo. Hooe, Mr. Chas. Alexander, & Mr. Chs. Lee before dinner and Mr. Crawford, his Bride & sister after it.” The following morning Washington decided he had had enough of the continuous entertainment he was expected to perform and went outside to mark the ground at the bowling green, which was “hard froze,” instructing his slaves to dig holes for the trees no matter how difficult it was. Washington did not just oversee the planting and digging, he often worked alongside his men, stripping off his coat and laboring “like a common man,” visitors noted in surprise. He talked proudly of the trees “which my hands have planted.”
Throughout these cold winter weeks, Washington continued the work in the Serpentine Walk, noting every detail in his diary. He planted many more clumps of native trees and asked his former general and chief of artillery, Henry Knox, to inquire about the design of “public walks” in Boston because he wasn’t sure if gravel would “resist the impression of the wheels.” If there was “a better composition,” Washington wrote, he would like to use them for his Serpentine Walk. And as his slaves and gardeners created an American garden, Washington trailed them with his knife eagerly poised, “pruning and shaping the young plantation.” Yet within a week his impatience had been punished, as heavy sleet encrusted the branches of the trees and shrubs in half-inch-thick “tubes of Ice.” As he looked outside, he saw that most of the young trees were bent, many with broken branches. His enthusiasm had, on this occasion, gotten the better of him, having harmed rather than nurtured the young trees.
In the middle of the shrubberies on each side of the bowling green Washington built a “necessary”—an outside toilet. Each looked like a little octagonal temple, painted white with a red bell-shaped roof. Following the advice of British garden writers, Washington laid out narrow gravel paths winding past the trees and bushes. But by terminating the path with a toilet instead of a pavilion or a statue as was fashionable in Britain, he combined beauty with utility in a fresh and original way, which would become typical in America’s gardens.
Along the paths toward the two necessaries, Washington planted his most scented flowers, which included a few non-native species. In early summer, he hoped, two different species of lilacs (Syringa vulgaris and Syringa x persica)—one from Europe and one from Asia—would spread their perfume, their mauve blossoms competing with the white pompoms of English guelder rose and the fragrant white blossom of mock orange. The reason Washington used some non-native species in this small area had a practical purpose, because their scent would mask the smell. But he also planted the native trumpet honeysuckle, so that the twining climber would scramble up the white walls. Not only would sweet-smelling red flowers cover any unpleasant odors but their prime attraction to Washington may well have been Langley’s romantic assertion that they were “a Plant of Liberty.”
By mid-March, the main planting of the two shrubberies was finished. Snaking along each side of the bulging outline of the bowling green that stretched away from the house, the shrubberies framed the long vista toward the West Gate. Only the round end of the bowling green where the two sides met had remained empty, because Washington did not envisage this as an area planted with flowering species. Here to the left and right of the entrance to the bowling green he wanted a “wilderness.” Instead of plants that spread color and perfume across the garden, he chose only conifers to create a more shaded space.
This would be part of Washington’s carefully orchestrated one-mile approach to the house, which led along a meandering road. The route was a theatrical masterpiece of hide-and-seek by which the mansion tantalizingly appeared and disappeared as the road dipped in and out of the forest. The wilderness and shrubbery was a continuation of the approach that led from the dense forest through thickets with occasional openings to the entrance of the sinuous bowling gree
n. From here visitors would first pass the shady plantation of conifers and then the flowering shrubs, which—once mature—would be tinged in brilliant hues. The wilderness provided the link between the forest outside the garden and the ornamental trees and bushes near the house—it was the transition between dark and light, the wild and the domestic.
Unlike the two shrubberies through which the Serpentine Walk wove, each wilderness featured separate twisting gravel paths where family and visitors would be able to find refuge from the scorching Virginian sun. It was a manicured and dwarf version of an American pine forest, highly stylized into two “Pine labyrinths,” as Washington called the area, or the “Miniature Labyrinth” as another of his visitors later described it. The idea was a combination of Langley’s designs, which showed many varieties of groves laid out as labyrinths, and Miller’s instructions that deciduous and evergreen species should not be mixed in a wilderness.
Once again Washington searched his estate for trees, and three days after he had laid out the twisting walks, he marked three wagonloads of pines and had them immediately planted, undeterred as ever by an icy March rain. The next day the weather worsened and many of the pines, Washington noticed in the morning, “yielded to the Wind & Wet, and required propping.” But this was not the only problem. As he was staking the flattened trees, Washington was called back to public duty.
During the War of Independence, Virginia and Maryland had temporarily suspended their dispute over the navigation rights of the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac. But now that the common enemy, Britain, had been defeated, the two states had returned to their old conflict. Despite their union during the war, in the wake of victory the thirteen states began to act more as independent countries rather than as one nation. People across America regarded themselves as belonging foremost to their own state, not so much as Americans—just as Washington considered trees from New York as “exoticks” because they were not from his Virginia.
Maryland and Virginia had authorized three and four commissioners respectively to deal with the claims, and Washington invited the agents from both parties to meet at Mount Vernon for the negotiations. One of the commissioners was his old friend George Mason, who lived some twenty miles away in Gunston Hall. Like Washington, Mason was passionate about plants and, knowing how delighted his host would be, brought some along. Washington had rushed the work in his garden so that it would be finished before the commissioners arrived, but on inspecting his new wilderness on 24 March 1785, the day he expected Mason, he decided to double the number of pines because he found them “rather too thin.”
Over the next few days the men discussed and settled the jurisdiction of the navigation and fishing rights, signing their final agreement on 28 March. The success of the so-called Mount Vernon Conference was more than the end of a parochial conflict. For some it also heralded the possibility of a broader solution between the thirteen states—if Maryland and Virginia were able to find an arrangement, maybe the other states would too. As he presided over the negotiations in Mount Vernon, Washington as always found time to talk about matters of planting. So passionate had Washington been about his new garden that several of the commissioners dispatched trees to Mount Vernon once they had returned to their estates. Mason traveled home to Gunston Hall in Washington’s carriage and sent it back filled with cuttings from his gardens, and Maryland representative Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer sent several hundred fruit trees later that year.
As spring slowly arrived, Washington strolled along his new trees and bushes, noting every change, reveling in the rebirth of his plants. “All nature seemed alive,” he mused while looking at his creation. Washington was not a man of many words, even when writing his diary, which hardly contained more than a line about the weather or the name of a guest who had joined him for dinner. But during the spring of 1785, inspired by the new plants, the color, scent and beauty of his garden filled its pages. “The tender leaves of many had unfolded,” he wrote, “the Dogwood had swelled into buttons” while another tree was “shedding its fragrant perfume.” Since the end of the war the glory of his plants had only been in his imagination, but now Washington admired the different hues of maple blossom—“some being of a deep scarlet, bordering upon Crimson—others of a pale red, approaching yellow.” The vibrant spring colors were everywhere—on the bare branches of sassafras clung delicate yellow flowers, which Washington thought “would look very pretty” mixed with the glowing pink of the eastern redbud. And whenever he saw a beautiful blossom in the forest he noted that it “deserves a place in my Shrubberies.”
By mid-May, however, Washington’s initial joy had been replaced with disappointment. “Most of my transplanted trees have a sickly look,” he noted despondently. They were “withering” and “bereft of their leaves,” and the small pines in the wilderness were “entirely dead,” only the larger ones managing to cling on. A quick count of the casualties revealed that “half the Trees in the Shrubberies, & many in the Walks, are dead & declin[in]g.” A few months later, he put shades over some of the remaining trees to protect them from the parching summer heat, but by August he could see that much had been lost: “In a word nature had put on a melancholy look—everything seeming to droop.” But Washington was a pragmatic plantsman as he had been a pragmatic military leader, famed for his glacial self-control and stoic resilience. He had not lost his nerve during the war, and he wasn’t about to lose it in his garden. His trees needed nurturing just as the new nation did. When he described how the pleasure of planting lay with seeing “the work of ones own hands, fostered by care and attention, rising to maturity,” he might have been speaking about his own contribution to the creation of the United States.
“Once he has begun anything,” one visitor observed shortly after the mass dying in the garden, “no obstacle or difficulty can come in his way.” And so he started again, spending much of the next winter replanting. There were many other things to do: the lawn of the bowling green was sown, he fenced eighteen acres of the steep and wooded slope between the Potomac and the lawn that lay behind the house in order to create a deer park, the two enclosed gardens were replanted with fruits, flowers and vegetables, and new walls had to be erected.
Washington was a hands-on gardener who was involved in every detail, from searching for trees in his forests to drawing the layout of his new greenhouse. He knew exactly what he wanted and instructed his correspondents how to pack the seeds that they were sending from across the United States, “in dry sand as soon as they are gathered.” When he read a “recipe” on how to protect plants from pests by using seaweed because the “Salt is pernicious to most Insects,” he forwarded it to the Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser to share the knowledge with fellow gardeners. He also enclosed a small area between the house and one of the walled gardens (the Upper Garden) as an experimental nursery where he could work away from the crowds of visitors, which still showed no signs of abating. In this more intimate enclosure, the so-called Botanical Garden, Washington spent more time than in any other part of the garden.
He counted his plants and kept a record of when and how they perished. To keep track of them all, he chipped different numbers of little notches into sticks as substitute labels according to a key code that he noted in his diary. He also took detailed records of dates and locations of planting, which he kept safe in his study with the seeds. He ran his estate, according to one congressman, like a military operation—“Not a day’s work but is noted; what, by whom, and where done … Thus the etiquette and arrangement of an army are preserved on his farm.”
Washington’s sense of pragmatism and his entrepreneurial spirit could also be seen in areas of his garden that took on a more utilitarian purpose. He believed that “experiments by intelligent and observant farmers” were the backbone of agriculture, and saw the Botanical Garden as the ideal location for such investigations since the seeds that he wanted to test would not survive in fields or meadows, where “(if not forgot) they are neglected; or sw
allowed up.” So it was in the Botanical Garden, the old vineyard,4 and to some extent in the two walled gardens, that a slightly different approach was taken. Here Washington experimented with non-native plants and seeds. He planted European orchard grass (Dactylis glomerata), which was used for hay, and “bird grass” (Poa trivialis), which was recommended for pasture; seeds from the West Indies and even from China as well as “Wheat from the Cape” and guinea grass (a native to Africa that was successfully grown in the West Indies as animal fodder). In the walled gardens he grew English walnuts and cherries, French pears and grapes, as well as peach trees from Portugal. These plants served a different purpose from the ornamental natives in front of the house (the most visible area). Washington grew them not as patriotic statements or living symbols but for their economic potential and possible future use in American agriculture.
The reasons for Washington’s constant search for new crops, fodder and green manure lay in the soil of his plantation, in the history of Virginia and in his belief in the future of the country. Since the days of the early settlers, Virginians had grown tobacco, a crop that was coveted on the European market but that also exhausted the soil. The cultivation of tobacco was ruinous not only because it depleted the fertility of the land but because it had made America dependent on Britain. Every year the crop had been shipped across the ocean to be sold and marketed by British merchant agents. Plantation owners like Washington and Jefferson had no control over the sales of their own harvests and had felt the pain of the economic chains. Washington had stopped growing tobacco in 1766 and was trying to find alternatives in the hope that the new crops would break this dependence by supplying the home market in America instead.
