Andrea Wulfis travel along upThe Brother Gardeners : Botany , Empire , and the parentage of an Obsessionwith a new book about America ’s founding fathers . Founding gardener : The Revolutionary Generation , Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation , is out this calendar week from Knopf . Wulf has an absolutely harebrained tour of duty schedulehere in the United States , starting April 5 and continuing through June 9 with stops all across the commonwealth — then she ’ll be back in September for a few more escort . Do go see her if you have a chance .
I met Andrea atPetersham Nurseriesin Surrey last declension . It ’s an extraordinarily elegant garden center field that seems like it ’s been there for three hundred twelvemonth — incisively the variety of place you ’d expect to line up in the English countryside . you could even have your good afternoon tea there . It occurred to me , as Andrea and I were talking that Clarence Day , that it must be interesting for someone who lives in such a garden - obsess country to compose about the chronicle of American horticulture . Here ’s what she had to say :
AMY : I ’m sure you ’re going to get this motion a peck on your book tour : Since you are not American , what attract you to the American founding father for this book ?
ANDREA : I was born in India , brought up in Germany and lived for the past fifteen years in Britain . my last book , The Brother Gardeners , was about the British obsession with gardens . When I research it , I not only discovered how of import America had been in the creation of the English garden but also that plant , gardens and nature play an important role in the shaping of the American land .
I would have never think that this would conduce me to write a al-Qur’an about the American establish fathers and garden . I had never think of America in term of gardening — in particular compared to Britain , where I have lived for the past 15 years and where everybody seems crazy about their flowerbeds .
AMY : Had you spend much time here in the States before you come over to research and drop a line the playscript ?
ANDREA : My first impressions of America were shape when I went in 1987 on a seven - week road trip-up across the States . It confirmed every cliché : gigantic shopping malls , colossal billboards , interminable movement - thrus , bulky fridge and huge cars . I think of America as an industrial , larger - than - biography country . I certainly never remember of it in terms of horticulture — in America , I believe , I was more likely to see someone driving a riding - mower than pruning rose wine .
But how wrong I was ! At its roots America is a horticulture body politic — just a number dissimilar to the British .
AMY : I ’m willing to bet that many Americans do n’t know about our former gardening account . So who are the Founding gardener ?
ANDREA : One of the protagonists in The Brother Gardeners is John Bartram , an American farmer and plant aggregator who lived outside Philadelphia . For four tenner , from the 1730s , Bartram station so many seeded player box seat of American Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and shrub to Britain that he completely transform the English garden .
It was in Bartram ’s letter that I first realized a singular joining to the founding fathers , for he was a good friend of Benjamin Franklin . As I read on through letters , diaries and other manuscript , I came across a visit of the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to Bartram ’s garden and an bill to George Washington , who had order hundred of trees and shrubs for his garden at Mount Vernon , as well as accounts that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had claver . As I say on , I realized that America s first four prexy – Washington , Adams , Jefferson and Madison – had used nature , though in unlike direction , in their competitiveness for America .
AMY : It ’s awing to mean that they had clock time for gardening or even farming . I stand for , there was a rotation going on !
ANDREA : They not only create the United States in a political good sense , they also understand the importance of nature for their country . favorable cornfields and endless rows of cotton wool plants became symbols for America ’s economic independence from Britain ; hulk Tree became a reflexion of a strong and vigorous nation ; native species were imbued with patriotism and proudly planted in gardens , while metaphor drawn from the natural human beings brought industrial plant and gardening into politics .
In fact , I believe it ’s out of the question to realize the making of America without looking at the founding beginner as farmers and gardeners . But the greatest surprisal for me was that James Madison is the forget male parent of American environmentalism . He regarded nature as fragile ecological system that could easily collapse . Man , he believed , had to receive a station within the residue of nature without ruin it — row that rest as important today as they did when he speak them .
