Founding Gardeners

by Andrea Wulf

  The irony was that the English garden was in fact American. “It is now a fashion in England,” one German garden lover observed, “to create plantations which consist almost entirely of seeds from America.” In a strange twist, at the very moment that the colonies had become independent, American species had become the mainstays of the most fashionable English groves and shrubberies. Adams was delighted, and over the next two summers, he and his family visited as many gardens as they could. With Jefferson gone, Adams bought his own copy of Whately’s Observations. But they missed Jefferson and his horticultural knowledge. “We wished for your Company,” Adams wrote to Paris two months after Jefferson had left, bombarding his friend with questions about the gardens in France and how they compared with the ones they had seen during their tour.

  Adams went on his own to Thorndon in Essex, where the late Lord Petre had planted John Bartram’s first seeds more than fifty years before. Petre had been hailed as the most innovative landscape designer of his age when he had created the parkland in the 1730s. He had drawn with Bartram’s trees as if they were “Living Pencils,” using their height, foliage and texture like brushstrokes in a vast landscape painting. Instead of enforcing patterns on nature with pruning shears, the American trees themselves provided the shapes and color. By the early 1740s there were so many American plants in Thorndon that one of the visitors had written, “when I walk amongst them, One cannot well help thinking He is in North American thickets—there are such Quantities.”

  Adams was so impressed by the way the English used American native species that he made “a List of these Trees, Shrubbs and Flours,” because “Larches, Cypruses, Laurells are here as they are every where.” It was almost as if the English adoration of American plants made him appreciate their beauty more. What he did not understand, however, was why the owners spent so little time on their estates. They seemed, Adams said, “very indifferent to their Beauties.” Why have a place like this, he asked, if the “beauty, Convenience, and Utility … are not enjoyed by the owners”? For a man who relished every minute that he could spend in a garden, it seemed absurd to create such picturesque landscapes and never walk among the groves.

  Both Jefferson and Adams were profoundly inspired by these pleasure grounds. For now, though, their gardens flourished only in their imagination, nourished by garden books and visits—Adams in Britain, Jefferson having to make do with France. When the Adamses left London in late spring 1788, they packed books, seeds and plant lists of American trees, shrubs and flowers in the English garden, all of which would be indispensable once they had returned to their own farm. Back home, there were “many places” where ornamental farms such as those they had admired at Wooburn Farm and The Leasowes could be constructed. England’s gardens were an inspiration, but in America they would be able to take them even further and for less money, because “Nature has been more liberal” to America than to “most of the places here,” the Adamses said. Just before their departure, Abigail wrote to Jefferson that they couldn’t wait to return: “improveing my Garden has more charms for my fancy, than residing at the court of Saint Jame’s where I seldom meet with Characters So innofensive as my Hens & chickings, or minds so well improved as my Garden.”

  OF EVERYTHING one could see in England, Jefferson believed, gardens in particular were important for Americans. They might have failed to negotiate a trade treaty with Britain and the Barbary States, but they had discovered how important America had been in the creation of the gardens of the old enemy. Now it was easy for Jefferson to admit that the English garden “surpasses all the earth”—he could wholeheartedly embrace them without feeling unpatriotic because they were populated with American plants and shaped by ideas of liberty. When Adams and Jefferson returned to the United States, they would lay out gardens that were directly inspired by what they had seen in England.

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  1 Jefferson saw Alexander Pope’s garden at Twickenham, as well as Chiswick, Hampton Court, Esher Place and Painshill.

  2 While he was in England, Jefferson also wrote to one of the merchants, claiming that “To pay that debt at once then is a physical impossibility.” Having lost much of his harvests because of the war, Jefferson ended his letter, writing “We deem your nation the aggressors.”

  3 Adams also bought a copy of the book, noting in the margins which gardens he had visited with Jefferson.

  4 Cobham had also employed some of the most famous landscape designers in Britain, including Charles Bridgeman, William Kent and Lancelot “Capability” Brown.

  5 In Cobham’s Temple of British Worthies, the seven men (and one woman) of action were King Alfred, Prince Edward, Elizabeth I, William III, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, parliamentarian John Hampden, merchant and politician John Barnard. The eight men of ideas were poet Alexander Pope, financier and philanthropist Thomas Gresham, architect Inigo Jones, John Milton, William Shakespeare, John Locke, Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. John Locke in particular was important for the American revolutionaries because his famous Second Treatise of Civil Government with its argument of natural rights and social contract had influenced much of their political thinking.

  6 The ha-ha was a French invention but had become popular in England earlier in the eighteenth century. In France it had been called an “Ah, Ah” because the French, when they first saw it, had exclaimed “Ah! Ah!” in surprise.

  7 In January 1787, Adams signed a treaty of protection with Morocco, paid for by “gifts” to the Emperor of Morocco. When Washington became president, he spent around 15 percent of the annual national budget on the Barbary States. Only in 1816, when the British and Dutch attacked Algiers, did the threat of the Barbary pirates stop.

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  “A NURSERY OF AMERICAN STATESMEN”

  THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION IN 1787 AND A GARDEN VISIT

  WHEN THE BELLS CHIMED their brassy melody on 13 May 1787, Philadelphia’s citizens rushed into the streets despite the unusually cold and wet weather. The men of the First City Troop of Light Horse, in their smart white-and-black uniforms, sat on their horses in straight formation at the edge of the Schuylkill River. As the elegant carriage crossed the river at Gray’s Ferry, the men raised their hands and saluted George Washington. When the carriage rolled on, they rode beside it to the city center, where the artillery waited to welcome the hero with celebratory gunfire. Looking through the window, Washington could see the crowds that lined the streets in the rain, cheering and waving.

  He had been on the road for the past five days, having left Mount Vernon while his slaves planted corn. It had been an exhausting journey because rain had hindered his progress and strong winds had made the crossing of rivers dangerous. But Washington was not the only one who had left home that month. Eleven years after they had declared independence, delegates from across the states traveled once again to Philadelphia.1 Some rode across the mountains and others came by carriage down the muddy roads. It was rough traveling, for America’s roads were notoriously bad—“every minute you run the risk of turning over,” as one French tourist complained. Several weeks passed before the full number of delegates had at last arrived, and it would take four months of heated discussions, long speeches and circular arguments before they would be able to return home again. During those long summer months they would assemble every day except Sundays behind closed doors and windows to argue about the future of the Union.

  The reason for their gathering was that many had lost confidence in the Articles of Confederation, the first Constitution of the United States. This had been drafted in the months following the Declaration of Independence and adopted five years later, in 1781. Because the Union had been formed as a war alliance, the Articles of Confederation had granted Congress no real power to make decisions about the day-to-day running with regard to the levying of taxes and managing foreign affairs. As a result, after the war ended in 1783, the states had retreated into parochialism, often pursuing their own narrow interests at the expense of others in a deter
mined attempt to restore local economies ravaged by the war.

  New York, for example, now imposed duties on vessels coming from New Jersey, and many states were still using non-interchangeable currencies. No money was paid into the public treasury, and when people spoke of “my country,” they usually meant their state rather than the United States. The Declaration of Independence had spawned only two national institutions: the army, which had been reduced to a handful of regulars after the war, and Congress, which now found itself impotent. When a group of farmers in Massachusetts rebelled against tax and debt collections late in the summer of 1786, many began to fear that anarchy might spread across the states unless Congress was given more legislative and administrative muscle.

  Some of the men who had united the colonies in the fight for independence now saw the need to make the alliance stronger, believing that the former colonies had to become one nation if they wanted to survive. George Washington, for example, was certain that if nothing changed it would “be our downfal as a Nation,” adding that this was as obvious to him as “the A.B.C.” John Adams, who was still in London and who felt the lack of congressional power whenever he tried to negotiate on the Union’s behalf in Europe, agreed that something had to be done because to his mind Congress had been reduced to nothing more than “a diplomatic assembly.” Writing to Washington, John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs, similarly warned that the failure to change the Articles would “threaten to blast the Fruit we expected from our ‘Tree of Liberty.’ ” Many were disheartened, but among all of them one stood out—Thomas Jefferson’s most loyal friend and fellow Virginian, James Madison.2

  A mere five foot six—slight even by eighteenth-century standards and “no bigger,” as one contemporary put it, “than half a piece of soap”—the frail and quiet Madison faced the threat of being eclipsed by the more dynamic, colorful orators of the revolution. But his appearance belied an iron will and a legislative genius. “Never have I seen so much mind in so little matter,” one observer marveled, and his wife, Dolley, would later call him “great little Madison.” A congressman for Virginia and son of a plantation owner who had long voiced concerns about what he saw as “dangerous defects in the Confederation,” Madison had relentlessly lobbied for the convention and spent months preparing for it. The assiduous thirty-six-year-old who had studied law, among other subjects, at Princeton University, had approached the task with a tenacious diligence. He had ordered from Jefferson a trunkful of books from London and Paris in order to study the governments of modern and ancient republics, and as a result had written two essays, “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies” and “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” neat summaries to which he could refer during the sessions in the coming months.

  He favored a single, strong federal government over a many-tentacled confederacy of independent states because the rivalry between the states threatened to unbalance the Union. North Carolina, for example, was “a patient bleeding at both Arms,” taxed by Virginia and South Carolina. New Jersey was in a similar predicament, being taxed by both Pennsylvania and New York. The competing states therefore needed something like a “disinterested & dispassionate umpire,” Madison believed, which would require much more than merely amending the Articles of Confederation. What Madison sought to secure at the convention was nothing less than a brand-new constitution that would form the foundation of the American nation.

  Unsurprisingly, as the driving force behind the convention Madison had been the first to arrive in Philadelphia, on 5 May 1787.3 It had also been he who had managed to lure Washington away from his garden and fields in Mount Vernon, in the belief that the hero of the revolution would imbue the convention with the necessary patriotic gravitas. It had taken Madison many months of persistent arguing, but after much reluctance, Washington had finally relented.

  The summer of 1787 was one of the most important moments in the history of the United States. During these weeks the fifty-five delegates of the Constitutional Convention overcame their differences—temperamental, political, regional and economic—to forge a legal framework on which the country would be built. While most ordinary Americans did not see the states as one nation, many of these men understood that they had to become one country, economically and culturally. “Let us look to our National character,” Washington said to Madison, for “We are either a United people, or we are not.”

  Such rhetoric was crucial, for, as they arrived from across the United States the delegates made an incongruous group, both in terms of their respective states’ agendas and their own backgrounds. Some had degrees from the best universities in America, while others had no formal education at all. There were wealthy slave owners, financiers and city lawyers as well as small farmers and land speculators. They were from the South and the North, some protecting the rights of the small states that feared being squashed by the large ones, others zealously fighting for slavery. Some were pompous, others were plain, some were silent during the debates, others were enthusiastic orators. The youngest delegate was twenty-six years and the oldest—Benjamin Franklin—was eighty-one.

  But there were also similarities: of the fifty-five delegates more than half were farmers or came from a planter’s background. For many of them, agriculture, plants and politics were parts of one single endeavor—the creation of a country that was independent, industrious and virtuous, a country that would not succumb to the same corruption, decadence and tyranny that had destroyed ancient republics and Europe. They believed that farmers were the backbone of society. Husbandmen, as Madison said, were “the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety.” At the same time, the delegates’ interest in plants, agriculture and gardens granted a welcome relief from the tedium of the protracted and fraught discussions, as many of them escaped together on excursions to country estates and gardens. One of these visits in particular—to John Bartram’s magnificent garden on the outskirts of Philadelphia, halfway through the convention—arguably had an even more important part to play in the birth of the Constitution.

  AS THE DELEGATES in Philadelphia began the painstaking work of thrashing out a new constitution, Jefferson—who, like Adams, sent advice from Europe throughout the discussions—was fighting another battle in Paris. It too would involve plants and nature, and was part of his crusade to give America a strong national image and identity. Unlike the delegates in Philadelphia, however, the tools he used were native trees, the weights of American mammals, a pelt of a panther and the bones and skin of a moose.

  For the past few years the accomplished Virginian had been seeking to refute the French theory of the “degeneracy of America.” Noting how European grains, vegetables and fruits often grew quickly but then failed to mature in America, and how imported animals did not thrive, some French scientists insisted that flora and fauna degenerated when “transplanted” from the Old to the New World. America’s native species fared no better because they were fewer and all of them inferior, the scientists argued. To make matters worse, some also insisted that even humans did not mature properly in the New World—they had children early and their health declined while still young. One of these scientists was Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, the most famous French naturalist of his age. He wrote that in America all things “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land.”

  As these theories and arguments spread, the natural world of the United States became a metaphor for its political and cultural significance. So, by the same logic, Jefferson reasoned, if he could prove that everything was in fact larger and grander in the New World, he would elevate his country above those in Europe. Nature had thus become a weapon of political battles and patriotic endeavors. Jefferson had consulted written accounts, including John Bartram’s travel journal and Humphry Marshall’s recently published Arbustrum Americanum: The American Grove, the first botanical book about America’s plants to be written by an American and published in the United States. He also
asked friends and acquaintances to send him the biggest specimens of different mammals from across the thirteen states, compiled a list of measurements to correct Buffon, and requested details from his former guardian, Thomas Walker, of “the heaviest weights of our animals … from the mouse to the mammoth.”4

  Jefferson was not the first American to take up the dispute. Before his return from Paris to Philadelphia in 1785, Benjamin Franklin had found his own, typically striking way to refute the French theory. While still in Paris as the American minister, he had attended a dinner party together with Abbé Raynal, one of the offending scientists. As Raynal was elaborating his favorite subject, Franklin noted that all the American guests were sitting on one side of the table with the French opposite. Seizing the opportunity to make his point with as much flair as possible, he offered his challenge: “Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature had degenerated.” As it happened, Franklin had told Jefferson, all the Americans were of the “finest stature,” while the French were all diminutive—in particular Raynal, “a mere shrimp.”

  Franklin’s argument might have been charming, but Jefferson approached the challenge more scientifically. Before leaving for France, he had packed an “uncommonly large panther skin” in preparation for his fight and ordered a moose from Vermont to show Buffon its enormous size. Even Madison had found time to assist during his intensive studies of ancient republics and dissected animals to provide Jefferson with detailed measurements of organs, bones and even the “length of nails” of a weasel. Part of this battle for America was a short book that Jefferson wrote (the only one he ever published): Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in French in 1785. Jefferson was finally preparing the first English edition just as the delegates in Philadelphia were arguing about the Union’s future.