Publisher Description
From the author of the acclaimed The Brother Gardeners, a fascinating look at the founding fathers from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen, and farmers. 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. Andrea Wulf reveals for the first time this aspect of the revolutionary generation. She describes how, even as British ships gathered off Staten Island, George Washington wrote his estate manager about the garden at Mount Vernon; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; how a trip to the great botanist John Bartram’s garden helped the delegates of the Constitutional Congress break their deadlock; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. These and other stories reveal a guiding but previously overlooked ideology of the American Revolution. Founding Gardeners adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the American experiment and provides us with a portrait of the founding fathers as they’ve never before been seen.
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“I completely enjoyed this book. It tranported me to early american history and frankly was surprised by how very important botany was to the intellect of the founding fathers. In botany they found peace, ideas, philosophy, economic reform, exploration, revolution, independance and pure joy. I had taken for granted the enormous diversity of plants available to us now at the click of a mouse or a trip to homedepot, back then that was not the case. The treasures that the colonies, later early independent country, to further exploration of this country, is clearly the abundance of plants, we have such abundance . Gardening is the most basic of how we should see life in general. Nature is a universtiy. This book will fill you with patriotic fever and an urge to work on your garden.”
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Piedad (5 out of 5 stars)
