Founding Gardeners

by Andrea Wulf

  Today it might seem extraordinary that Jefferson risked imprisonment—and his life—for a few grains of rice, but he truly believed that they might hold the seeds of America’s future. “Agriculture,” Jefferson wrote that summer, was “the surest road to affluence and best preservative of morals.” At the same time, horticultural espionage seemed to fill Jefferson with joy, for he described the journey as a “continued feast on objects of agriculture, new to me, and, some of them at least, susceptible of adoption in America.” He examined vineyards (there were more important crops for America, he decided), almonds (too “precarious”) and capers (easily cultivated), but it was the olive tree that was most promising. “Of all the gifts of heaven to man, it is next to the most precious, if it be not the most precious,” Jefferson wrote enthusiastically to his American friends—“this is the object for the patriots.”9

  Jefferson was so impatient about any new and potentially lucrative plants that he not only dispatched them to America but also tested them in his own garden in Paris. He grew, for example, sulla, which he had received from Malta, to determine its viability as animal fodder in the States. Madison also received some of these seeds during the sitting of the Convention and shared them with Washington.

  In Philadelphia, meanwhile, little had been achieved. In the past seven weeks the delegates had agreed to replace the Articles of Confederation instead of simply amending them and determined that government should consist of three branches, but that was all. They had failed to make any decision about the thorny issue of representation of the states in the two houses. “It is impossible to say when the Convention will rise,” one delegate wrote to his wife in New Jersey. Finally, on 5 July, a committee presented a compromise, the so-called Connecticut Plan:10 in the House of Representatives the number of representatives for each state was to be in proportion to its population, while in the Senate each state would have an equal vote. However, the large states, with Virginia leading, remained opposed to the suggestion. By 10 July, Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton (who had temporarily left the Convention to attend to some business in New York), “I wish you were back. The crisis is equally important and alarming.” Franklin, as so often, alluded to nature to explain the predicament, comparing the situation with a two-headed snake (true to form, the scientifically minded Franklin had one on display in a jar) that was trying to move forward with one head around one side of a bush and the second head around the other side. The future of America depended on one head moving with the other—but with no delegate willing to change, there seemed to be no way around the impasse.

  Then, late at night on Friday, 13 July, with the Convention on the verge of collapse, the botanist and Ohio land speculator Manasseh Cutler joined Madison and some other delegates for a drink after dinner at the Indian Queen, the tavern where they were boarding. When the delegates heard that Cutler had planned an excursion to Bartram’s Garden for the following morning, they decided to accompany him. Known among European gardeners as an unrivaled storehouse of American flora, the nursery had more recently become famous through St. John de Crèvecoeur’s charming portrayal of John Bartram in his international best seller Letters from an American Farmer—a work that today is hailed as the “first work of American literature.” We can only imagine that the delegates hoped that a day surrounded by America’s magnificent trees and shrubs would calm matters and remind them just what would be at stake when they cast their votes, once again, on the following Monday.

  On Saturday, 14 July, just as the sun was rising at five o’clock, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton (who had just returned from New York), Alexander Martin and Hugh Williamson from North Carolina, John Rutledge from South Carolina, Caleb Strong from Massachusetts and George Mason and his son from Virginia, together with Cutler, two Philadelphians and Samuel Vaughan, the garden designer of the State House Yard, boarded their carriages at the Indian Queen. Franklin, who had always enjoyed visits to Bartram’s Garden, was not able to accompany them because his kidney stones were troubling him. They drove out of town, crossing the Schuylkill River at the floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry as the morning mist veiled the surface. For the first time in weeks the temperature had dropped to a mere 61°F. The air was crisp and the dew still clung when the carriages stopped outside the gray stone house that Franklin’s old friend John Bartram had built with his own hands.

  Sixty years earlier the land on which the delegates now stood had been fields, but since then it had been nurtured into the country’s most comprehensive collection of mature American trees and shrubs. John Bartram had died a decade earlier, in 1777, at the age of seventy-eight, but his sons John and William continued the business.

  A talented botanical artist, William Bartram was also one of the most knowledgeable naturalists in America—he had “a library within himself,” one fellow botanist enthused. He had received a thorough education at the Philadelphia Academy, where his teacher had used “every possible occasion, to instil republican principles into the minds of his youthful pupils.” William was well known among the founding fathers. During the War of Independence, Franklin had offered to use his position as the American minister to flout the American embargo on trade with Britain by having Bartram’s seed boxes sent to Paris and distributing them to Britain, as well as overseeing the printing of the French plant catalogue. A few weeks before the delegates descended on the nursery, Washington had visited11 and he would later order hundreds of trees and shrubs for the garden at Mount Vernon. Jefferson, too, had always found time to see the garden when he was in Philadelphia—even while writing the Declaration of Independence—and had sent regular orders from Paris for seed boxes so that he could disperse them among French gardeners. Jefferson recommended the nursery to his friends and, knowing how much the Bartrams craved the latest plant books, he dispatched publications from Europe such as the English translations of Carl Linnaeus’s botanical books.

  With his connections to the leading men of his day, William was used to visits from wealthy landowners, revolutionary leaders, international botanists and tourists from across the world, but nothing had prepared him for the early-morning visit of the delegates of the Convention. As the carriages rolled to a stop outside the house, William was at work in the garden. The smartly dressed delegates found him barefoot, with his sleeves rolled up, hoeing the flowerbeds. “He at first stared at us,” Cutler said, taken by surprise by so “large and gay a company so early in the morning,” but within moments William’s initial embarrassment was forgotten as the delegates began to question him about the trees and shrubs in the five-acre garden.

  Together with William, the men strolled down the gentle slope toward the river. The forty-eight-year-old William had to walk carefully because he was still suffering from complications of a compound fracture of his leg. In the previous year he had fallen out of a twenty-foot cypress tree in the garden as he was gathering seeds from the top branches. As they walked along the softly rippling land, they could see the small glades and scoops that John Bartram Senior had laid out in an attempt to imitate the natural habitats where he had first found the plants. At the same time, the undulating lie of the land provided protective pockets that sheltered the more tender plants and created microclimates, allowing the Bartrams to grow such trees as the glorious evergreen Magnolia grandiflora, which John Bartram had collected in the Carolinas and which normally perished so far north. There was a little stream and an artificial pond for the collection of aquatic plants. The land was uniquely suited for growing species from a wide variety of habitats because it lay on the dividing line between the sandy soil of the coastal plains and the rocky outcrop to the west.

  Bartram’s house and garden, drawn by William Bartram in 1758. The figure on the path is probably John Bartram Senior. By the time the delegates visited almost three decades later, many more trees would have been planted. (Illustration credit 3.1)

  It was the perfect garden for a plant collector and William had followed his father’s footsteps—one of the Nat
ive American tribes whom he had befriended during his travels had even named him “Pug Puggy,” the “flower hunter.”12 But unlike John Bartram, William saw more in the natural world than a treasure trove of ornamental or potentially useful plants—his perception of America’s landscape was that of a scientist and an artist. Whereas John Bartram Senior’s published travel accounts read like dry observations of soils, plants and potential agricultural uses of the frontier land, William Bartram’s journal revealed a man enraptured by the grandeur of America: forests were “sublime,” trees were “transcendent” and plains were “Elysian fields.” When he saw the natural world of his country his mind was “suspended” and “beheld with rapture and astonishment.”

  William had tried to publish the journal of his travels in the previous year but failed to procure enough subscriptions. When Travels was eventually published, in 1791, it was far more successful in Europe, where it went through nine editions in the first decade. Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and François-René de Chateaubriand were inspired by his vivid descriptions of the southern states, but in America the response was more muted.13 Although most Americans were not ready for such nature writing, the founding fathers most definitely were. Like Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia, William Bartram described an America that was sublime, magnificent and certainly not inferior to Europe. Neither Washington, Jefferson nor Adams left any letters or accounts that described their appreciation for William’s writing, but they all put their names on the subscription list of the Travels in summer 1790.14 Madison liked William’s work so much that he and his future wife, Dolley, would visit the garden often, also adding William’s portrait to the gallery of “worthies” in the dining room at Montpelier.

  Walking along a tree-lined path that led from the house toward the river at the end of the garden, the delegates could see many of the trees that William would later describe in the Travels. Wherever they turned they encountered yet another specimen from yet another part of the country. America’s entire flora, it seemed, was assembled here—from trees that John Bartram had collected far north near Lake Ontario to flowering shrubs that William had brought from Florida. Some were rare; others were common. There was Pinus pungens, a pine that grew only in the Appalachian mountains, as well as aspen, the most widespread of all North American trees. Live oak from the Deep South was side by side with tamarack, one of the northernmost trees in America.

  There was the wonderful fringe tree, one of the most showy American shrubs. When Madison and the North and South Carolina delegates had traveled to Philadelphia two months previously, they had seen its dangling feathery tassels of white blossom in the thickets that lined the roads—but Caleb Strong, a delegate for Massachusetts, had probably never encountered it, because it grew naturally only in the states south of New Jersey. Similarly, George Mason, who had never in his life left the area around the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, must have been excited to see conifers from the northern regions of the Union, such as mature balsam firs, which John Bartram had collected in the 1740s in the Catskills, or the trees that came from the Carolinas, such as Halesia carolina, which was also called silverbell for its drooping clusters of white bell-shaped blossoms. One visitor had recently commented on the many “species of which very little is generally known.”

  In Bartram’s Garden, the delegates could see how the manifold flora of each state thrived together, their branches intertwined in a flourishing horticultural union. John Bartram Senior had been the first to bring together trees and shrubs from all thirteen states, but he had done so for commercial reasons in order to supply his British customers and out of scientific curiosity. By contrast, Washington had been the first to unite the trees and shrubs from across the thirteen states as a visual expression of the young nation. Since then—and inspired by Washington—the idea had also been taken up by Samuel Vaughan,15 who had planted the garden of the State House (which was, after all, the birthplace of the Union) with the declared purpose of having “a specimen of every sort in America.”16

  The delegates walked in the shade of the willow oaks, tulip poplars and pines that Bartram had grown from seeds sixty years previously, and stepped around the innumerable tubs of saplings that the Bartrams raised for sale. This was, above all, a working garden, which some visitors failed to understand when they criticized how rare specimens were “covered over wt weeds” and beautiful trees “lost in common thicket.” Washington himself, who had visited just a couple of weeks earlier, had commented that the garden “was not laid off with much taste,” while nonetheless greatly admiring the “curious plts, Shrubs & trees.” Cutler equally complained that everything seemed to be “jumbled together in heaps.” But taste was not the point: what had concerned John Bartram, and now his sons, was that the greatest possible variety of American plants should thrive here, however southern their origin—and if that meant sheltering a rare and tender shrub in a protective grove, so be it.

  As the men made their way down to the river’s edge, they were seemingly unconcerned with order or layout. Beauty was all around them and they were above all relieved to be freed from the heat, frustration and locked doors of the State House. They reveled in inspecting plants they had never seen before and took a particular pleasure in the exquisite white flowers of Franklinia alatamaha, a small tree that William had recently named after Benjamin Franklin. The Franklin tree was the rarest of all American plants in the garden, because it could be found only in one particular location in Georgia.17 William had discovered it with his father in 1765 but had only managed to collect ripe seeds on his later travels. The tree was such a horticultural wonder that botanists pilgrimaged to Philadelphia to see it. Only the British were awkward about the discovery, preferring the name Gordonia pubescens and refusing to accept Franklinia alatamaha—which was probably not surprising, given Franklin’s role in the American Revolution.

  The men could immediately see why Bartram’s Garden was famed for its flowering shrubs and trees. The Franklinia was just part of this magnificent show—there was also southern catalpa, which John Bartram had collected in the Carolinas. With its large, translucent, light green leaves and white summer blossoms, it would have been new to the Northerners Strong and Mason. Another flowering rarity from the South was Stewartia malacodendron, admired for its white camellia-like blooms (hence its common name, silky camellia).

  The delegates, so Cutler observed, were “very free and sociable,” forgetting as they talked with Bartram and wandered along the paths the weight of expectation that lay upon their shoulders. Alexander Martin, for example, a delegate from North Carolina, didn’t say much at all during the Convention, but now quizzed Bartram about the trees and shrubs in the garden. Like William Bartram, the other North Carolina delegate, Hugh Williamson, had been educated at the Academy of Philadelphia and was well known as a man interested in natural history. A member of the American Philosophical Society, Williamson also published his observations in the society’s journal and had sent seeds and dried plants for their collection. Just a week earlier he had written home requesting news on the crops in North Carolina, exasperated that “nobody thinks it worth while to mention such a subject.” He would have certainly appreciated the towering trees in Bartram’s Garden, because, like Jefferson, he thought that America’s rivers, mountains and plants were on “a scale of more magnificence than those of the old world.” Even Alexander Hamilton, who was neither a farmer nor particularly interested in botany or gardening, understood that nature could have a political or at least a symbolical meaning. Years after the visit to Bartram’s Garden, when he created his first and only garden, he planted a row of thirteen sweetgums at his house The Grange to honor the original thirteen colonies.

  After three hours the delegates bid their good-byes. Never in their entire lives had they seen so many different species of trees and shrubs. The plants had arrived in Philadelphia from across the thirteen states where they had all thrived in their native habitats, b
ut here they flourished together. The graciously bowing branches of eastern hemlock from the northern states protected southern shrubs. Beautyberry, which John Bartram had brought from South Carolina and which would parade its clusters of bright purple berries on its naked branches in autumn, flourished under the spreading canopy of pin oak that grew as far north as Vermont. Here in Bartram’s Garden, America’s spectacular flora prospered in a vigorous horticultural embrace.

  Two days later, on Monday, 16 July, the delegates assembled at the State House for the final vote on the Connecticut Plan. As always, Madison sat at his table in the front, recording everything that was said and decided. They had already agreed that Congress would be divided into two chambers—the House of Representatives and the Senate—but they had failed to come to any resolution on the distribution of power. Until now the larger states had voted that the number of representatives in both houses should be proportional according to the population of each state, giving the larger states more power. The Southern states, regardless of size, had rallied behind Virginia to defend the institution of slavery. The smaller states wanted to continue the one-state-one-vote method that gave each state, no matter how small, equal say in national matters. The Connecticut Plan combined the two, with one house based on proportional representation and the other based on one-state-one-vote.

  As the voting started, one by one the delegates called out “aye” or “no” to approve or disapprove the Connecticut Plan. There were only ten states voting—neither Rhode Island nor New Hampshire had sent delegates yet and with only Alexander Hamilton present, New York did not have the required quorum. Massachusetts was called first. Two delegates said “no” and two said “aye”—the vote would not count, for it was divided. Everybody must have listened, surprised, because as a large state Massachusetts had always voted for proportional representation. Only two weeks previously, on 2 July, Massachusetts had voted “no” to each state having one vote in the Senate. But Caleb Strong, one of the delegates who had been at Bartram’s Garden, called out “aye” and, by switching sides, had split the vote.