The Founding Gardeners

A follow-up to the award-winning Andrea Wulf's critically acclaimed history of British gardening, The Founding Gardeners is the story of how George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison's passion for nature, plants, agriculture and gardens shaped the birth of America. In the aftermath of the Declaration of Independence and the revolutionary war, these four men turned to America's landscape and plants to make the republic truly independent. Fertile soil yielded more than food, it brought freedom from Britain. At the same time the independent small-scale farmer became the footsoldier of the young nation and the embodiment of liberty - planting, ploughing and farming thus became political acts. Nature was above all a unifying force, giving the thirteen states a national identity that still resonates today - if the Constitution united them politically, legally and economically, it was America's sublime landscape, soil and plants that provided a transcendent feeling of nationhood. The very wildness of America's rugged mountains and untamed forests became the embodiment of a nation that had freed itself from the shackles of tyranny. Through a series of vignettes spanning the Declaration of Independence to the death of Adams and Jefferson exactly 50 years to the day afterwards, stories weave the political, the personal and the botanical and are in turns funny, fascinating, moving and profound, The Founding Gardeners shows is that it is impossible to understand these visionary men without considering their love of gardening.