Andrea Wulf’s founding gardeners has gotten a lot of play in recent months. By “a lot of play,” I mean I heard interviews with the author on “All things considered,” and the locally produced book show “Writer’s Voice.” It’s also been reviewed in the NY Times and the Washington Post. If I had read about it in the New Yorker it would have been the holy trifecta for my media inputs (New Yorker, NPR and the Times). I am the archetypal northeast liberal elite after-all. Well at least northeast and liberal. To some I guess that already makes me “elite.”
In keeping with my status as an elitist, I enjoyed this take on American history. Wulf focuses on four early presidents: John Adams, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. She describes how botany and horticulture played an important part in their lives. The book re-tells stories of garden tours and each man’s garden design work. To situate the incidents she relates, she clearly and briefly describes the historical context.
Wulf argues that the founders’ interest in botany and gardening informed their political views and decisions. I fing this uncompelling. Her argument relies on juxtaposing incidents rather than showing an actual inellectual connection. For instance, she writes at length about a visit to Bartram’s garden by the men writing the constitution. She then describes how they made a compromise shortly thereafter. Kind of like when Boehner and Obama went golfing, but I wouldn’t argue that golfing affected the “grand compromise.”
As you may have heard, not everyone benefited when we threw off the shackles of our imperial masters. Actually the white folk kept actual shackles on quite a few Americans for several decades. Wulf does speak to the institution of slavery and addresses the hypocrisy of each of these men. She does not point out that John Adams did not own slaves and so was the only actual gardener in the bunch. In my mind standing around telling other people what to do does not make you a gardener, it makes you a supervisor. When I go to the mechanic and ask him to fix my car’s radiator, it does not make me a mechanic even if I know what’s wrong.
Her treatment of Adams interested me. Whereas she wrote at length about the design process of the other three, Adams apparently just farmed and spent a lot of time worrying about manure. Again, he is a real gardener. The others strike me as Virginia liberal elites making others do their jobs for them then taking credit.
Wulf has changed some of my plans. I’ve decided that next year I’m going to plant a smallish native flower garden. Anything is better than a yard.
