It was exactly the kind of project Hosack loved. He signed up as a founding member, as did DeWitt Clinton and many other men in Hosack’s circle. Meanwhile, in Paris, Minister Livingston arranged for plaster casts to be made of great sculptures including the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, and the Dying Gaul. These copies set sail from France and were soon installed in a room in City Hall. In a show of gratitude, the members elected Napoleon to honorary membership in the New-York Academy of Fine Arts. The emperor sent them twenty-four lavish volumes on Italian art. But Minister Livingston sent Hosack something from Paris even more exciting than art. He sent seeds.
FIVE MILES UP the Bloomingdale Road from Hosack’s garden, Alexander Hamilton nursed his broken heart. In May 1802, he had recorded a grim entry in his account book. “Expence (Philips funeral &c) 266.11.” The next month, Eliza gave birth to a boy, their eighth child. They named him Philip.
The Hamiltons’ new country house, the Grange, was completed that summer. By fall, when the goldenrod glowed in the island’s meadows, Hamilton was distracting himself with plans for a garden at the Grange. The architect of the national banking system pored with delight over tomes on trees and soil. He asked some of the farmers who worked the nearby land for practical advice. As he listened to them, Hamilton developed a deep respect for their hard-won intimacy with the island, passed down to them in Dutch, English, and then American accents. He told Eliza, “I may yet live twenty years, please God, and I will one day build for them a chapel in this grove.”
Hamilton also consulted old political comrades whose horticultural knowledge he admired. Writing to the Philadelphia lawyer and farmer Richard Peters, he half-joked, “A disappointed politician . . . is very apt to take refuge in a Garden.” Peters teased in reply that Hamilton was too political an animal to disappear into his garden forever: “A strong Passion for horticultural or rural Persuits has sometimes lulled, but has never yet eradicated the stronger Propensities for political Operations.” Hamilton begged Peters for advice about what to plant and how to keep it alive, quipping that as a novice gardener at the Grange, he was in a position “for which I am as little fitted as Jefferson to guide the helm of the UStates.”
Hamilton was spending as much time at the Grange as he could steal away from his legal practice. His route out of the city and up the Bloomingdale Road took him near the western edge of Hosack’s garden. At about the halfway point of his journey, Hamilton sometimes reined his horse to a stop and went in search of Hosack. The garden was not very far along, but Hosack loved explaining his plans to anyone who would listen, and he must have been especially delighted to show Hamilton around the property. The family physician now began to double as a horticultural adviser. Hosack gave Hamilton bulbs and cuttings for the Grange. Around this time, Hamilton drew a sketch for Eliza of ornamental plantings inspired by decorative beds Hosack had planted at the botanical garden. At the very center of the Grange’s flower garden, Hamilton indicated, he wished to have a smaller circular garden planted. It should be eighteen feet in diameter and contain nine tulips, nine lilies, nine hyacinths, and nine of whatever other flower the Grange’s gardener thought most suitable. Wild roses just outside the circle would furnish a soft border, setting off the formality within.
Perhaps it was these visits with Hosack that gave Hamilton his growing measure of horticultural confidence. He issued detailed orders—for example, that “a few waggon loads” of compost should be spread on the grounds and a ditch should “be dug along the fruit garden and grove about four feet wide.” This ditch was a ha-ha, an ingenious landscaping trick that kept animals out of the garden and at the same time preserved an unbroken view across the land. Hamilton also decided that “a few dogwood trees, not large, scattered along the margin of the grove would be very pleasant.” But he didn’t want this work to “interfere with the hot bed.”
Hamilton also wrote to his friend Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, the Federalist he had favored for the 1800 presidency. Pinckney was an avid plantsman, and Hamilton asked him to send watermelon and muskmelon seeds, which Pinckney did in March 1803 via the brig Charleston Packet. The seeds, he told Hamilton, were the same kind he had previously sent to Martha Washington at Mount Vernon. He admitted they hadn’t done well there and speculated that they were adapted for a warmer climate than Virginia’s, which didn’t bode well for their fate in New York. Pinckney told Hamilton that he planned to send several sets of flower seeds by another ship, settling on species that would produce bold splashes of color. He chose coral bean (Erythrina herbacea), for example, a plant native to the Deep South that lures butterflies and hummingbirds in the spring and early summer with its long red blossoms. If it managed to flower at the Grange, the Hamilton children would need to be warned about its tempting red seeds, because they were poisonous. Pinckney also promised seeds of a “beautiful purple convolvulus” (Ipomoea purpurea)—morning glory. With any luck, the landscapes at the Grange would be vivid with color for many months each year.
Even with his mind on flowers and hotbeds, Hamilton never stopped thinking about politics. This inveterate writer of political pamphlets couldn’t resist seeing the land as another blank page. He sketched the nation’s founding history right there in the front yard of the Grange. He planted thirteen sweetgum trees, one for each of the original states. Hamilton was modest about his gardening skills, but he knew just as well as Jefferson and Burr what wondrous powers lay hidden in American plants.
The Grange as it appeared in the late nineteenth century, with Hamilton’s sweetgums in the foreground
IT WAS HOSACK’S OWN FAULT that so many people and organizations were clamoring for his attention these days. “Flora does not receive from me those attentions which are due to her,” he lamented to a Danish-Norwegian botanist named Martin Vahl. Vahl, a former student of Linnaeus, had heard about the new American garden and shipped Hosack a small collection of dried plants. Hosack felt honored by the gesture. He promised Vahl that he would soon send over some specimens from “this almost unexplored country.” He confided to this brother botanist that he longed to devote himself to his garden. Instead, he was penned indoors in the lecture hall, the sickroom, the surgical clinic. He needed more pairs of hands.
He found them. Two of Mary’s nephews, Caspar Wistar Eddy and John Eddy, came to work with him at the garden. John, who was nineteen, already lived in New York, while Caspar, John’s twelve-year-old cousin, came from Philadelphia. Hosack trained the boys in Linnaean botany, thus passing on to these young Americans what the British heirs of Linnaeus had taught him in London. He made sure they understood that no species was too humble for their regard and that they should write down exactly when and where they found each plant. He taught them to collect as much of the plant as possible—roots, stem, leaves, flowers, seeds—instead of tearing at them like heedless children. He showed them how to carry the specimens back to the garden safely. He explained which ones they should set aside for planting and which they should press, dry, and mount to go into the herbarium.
Then he sent his nephews out into the sunlit world. Patches of green old Mannahatta still sprouted between the boardinghouses and shops, behind the mansions and the shacks, on the beaches below the prison and the piers. Caspar did most of the collecting, while John excelled at preparing and mounting the plants. Hosack lectured at Columbia and walked the halls of the hospital and the prison. The boys wound their way among raspberry brambles and wild roses. As they scouted for specimens around the city, they drew upon the stored-up wisdom of their uncle. They brought him back a sample of boneset—his prized fever remedy—and another of a pretty yellow buttercup (Ranunculus acris) with medicinal powers that Curtis had also been growing at Brompton. Caspar collected branches of white oak (Quercus alba), scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), and dogwood (Cornus sericea). He found a fern that Linnaeus had named Pteris aquilina, eagle fern, for its winglike fronds. He brought Hosack a branch of a shrub called inkberry (Prinos glaber), whose dark fruits were sometim
es used to dye cloth. And in some corner of the city where the boys’ boots could still sink in boggy earth, a place not yet hardened over by streets and sidewalks, Caspar found the damp-loving Saururus cernuus, known familiarly as nodding lizard’s tail.
The boys ranged farther and farther from the city. Near the village of Harlem, Caspar harvested rabbit’s-foot clover (Trifolium arvense). The boys ventured across the Hudson to Hoboken and found primrose-leaved violets (Viola primulifolia). Near Weehawken, it was wild grapes (Vitis labrusca and Vitis vulpina) and viburnum (Viburnum dentatum and Viburnum lantanoides), and on the Paulus Hook beach, Caspar collected a beautiful flowering vine called sea pea (Pisum maritimum). It was probably on the Palisades that he stumbled on a carnivorous plant called side-saddle flower (Sarracenia purpurea). They went east to Long Island, and near the town of Brooklyn, they found sea lavender (Statice limonium).
John Eddy was deaf. He had lost his hearing at the age of twelve, during an attack of scarlet fever. He could not hear the waves beating against the Paulus Hook ferryboat, the whisk of dry grass around his ankles as he crossed a field, or the snap of a branch between his hands. Hosack was teaching him botany by means of “an artificial alphabet formed by the fingers,” as he wrote Martin Vahl. He was illustrating John’s lessons with the volumes he had brought home from London, and at Hosack’s side, John was discovering a world that eluded most New Yorkers. The city’s thick green backdrop divided itself into the tidy compartments of his uncle’s mind. Herbaceous, woody; perennial, annual; poison, remedy. Hosack encouraged John to assemble a little herbarium of native plants. They could use the specimen sheets prepared by Linnaeus as models, and then they would send John’s handiwork to Vahl in Denmark.
John chose plants that captured the whole range of New York’s flora, from tiny woodland flowers to snippets of great trees. He dried and pressed dozens of specimens, then positioned them on clean sheets. The crisp, starry flowers of wood anemone (Anemone quinquefolia), the faded pink of Carolina roses (Rosa carolina), a twig of white oak (Quercus alba), the floppy white blooms of a laurel that Hosack knew as rock rose (Rhododendron maximum). Hosack wrote a friendly letter to Vahl and enclosed it with the collection. He said both his nephews showed great promise as naturalists, but John had made “very astonishing progress.” He wanted to spread the word of John’s accomplishments to botanists around the world, because his story might inspire others. Hosack was touched that John took such “delight in Botanic pursuits that it very much diminishes his misfortune in being deprived of the many sources of pleasure which pass thro the channel of hearing.”
In turn, Hosack was reaping the fruits of John’s newfound passion—and of Caspar’s, too. The boys circled back to him from their ramblings with their stacks of native specimens to be planted or dried. Hosack took out his leather-bound memorandum book and wrote down the Latin names of the ones he could identify. When he needed help, he scoured the illustrations in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and the descriptions in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. The clay pots he had set out in the garden began to fill up with plants. He bought more.
Hosack was smitten with botany. When Mary gave birth to a son that winter, their first since Samuel’s death, he named the baby James Edward Smith Hosack, in a nod to his London friend, founder of the Linnean Society. He went back up the Middle Road and walked his land until his feet knew its shifting textures: dense and damp, or skittering away in dust and pebbles. He learned the angle of the light across his fields as the sun sank toward the Hudson. The kitchen garden and the fruit nursery would go here; there, the medicinal plot. He would put a path up the hill. He made adjustments to his plans, checking his Brompton memories and his botanical volumes against the plants growing in their beds and pots—or not growing, not as they should. Hosack was still learning from Curtis, was coming to know in his bones what Curtis had already lived every day for decades when they had first met: the pleasure and exhaustion of raising a huge garden out of the bare earth.
For five years, Hosack had been trying to convey in words an imagined landscape of scents, colors, and healing powers. Now it was finally coming into being, outside his solitary mind. At first, to travelers taking the stagecoach up the Boston Post Road, the land that jostled past in the distance, with its tiny figures walking behind tiny plows and oxen, looked like any of the surrounding farms. Then the walls of an enormous building began to rise at the northwest corner of Hosack’s property.
IN JUNE 1803, Hosack gave a public lecture at Columbia. With his rich voice he painted a seductive vision of the garden he was building. He explained that he would be training the nation’s new doctors there, and he spoke about the thousands of plants he was collecting from around the world—medicinal, agricultural, commercial, and ornamental. He told his listeners he intended to collect every known species native to the continent, and, as explorers discovered new species, he would safeguard specimens of each one at the garden. He reminded his audience of the critical medicines and crops the nation was forced to import each year from “distant quarters of the globe.” These very plants, Hosack promised, would soon be growing less than four miles north of where they now sat.
The speech was a success. A positive review ran in several newspapers, including Hamilton’s New-York Evening Post, which praised Dr. Hosack’s garden for being the “first attempt of the kind in this country.” In Europe, noted the article, people understood the importance of botanical gardens. It was time to support this “public spirited” American man, and later, when the garden was ready, it should be purchased by the federal government. Hosack couldn’t have gotten better press if he had written it himself.
At the garden, his men were nearly finished with the new building. Few New Yorkers had ever seen anything like it. More than sixty feet long and twenty feet tall, it sat atop the highest point on his property, facing south. Its white façade had seven graceful arches, each stoppered with glass windows. Inside the building, rows of graduated shelves—known as stages—would accommodate dozens of potted plants. Under these stages, Hosack’s men were laying hidden flues that would carry heat from a stove tucked out of sight. Wide walkways would run the length of the greenhouse, allowing access to the plants.
Curtis had had a greenhouse at Brompton, of course, but Hosack also had a model much closer to home. To the west of Philadelphia, a wealthy private collector named William Hamilton had built just such a greenhouse to shelter his extraordinary collection of exotic plants. By the late eighteenth century, his estate, The Woodlands, was nearly as famous among plant-lovers as the Bartrams’ garden. Hamilton hosted many distinguished guests at The Woodlands, including Thomas Jefferson, who thought it was the best garden outside Britain. André Michaux and the teenage François André Michaux had also visited The Woodlands. It was after one of these visits, in fact, that François André had been shot in the eye by a partridge hunter in 1789.
Hosack knew the estate well—probably from his year studying with Benjamin Rush. In July 1803, Hosack wrote his friend Thomas Parke in Philadelphia to say that his greenhouse was nearly identical to the one at The Woodlands. There, the plants were arranged on stages rising to either side of visitors, so that as they strolled they seemed to be traversing a valley flanked by green slopes. Even the view from outside the greenhouse was carefully curated. Seen from the front, the tallest plants stood at the center of the windows, with the others placed in descending order, thus forming “a miniature hill clothed with choice vegetation,” one visitor wrote. As Hosack’s men completed his own new greenhouse, he enlisted Parke’s help. “My collection of plants is yet small,” he told Parke. “I have written to my friends in Europe and in the East and West-Indies for their plants. I will also collect the native productions of North and South America.” He asked Parke to contact William Bartram: “Request him to send me a catalogue.” Hosack’s friends and correspondents responded by burying him in specimens. Down at New York Harbor over the next months, he wrote his signature on bills of lading and then took
possession of boxes and crates filled with seeds, cuttings, and dried specimens. He hauled China, Egypt, India, and the Cape of Good Hope up the Middle Road to the garden. He and his men planted seeds and arranged clay pots on the stages in the greenhouse, and Hosack worried over his young plants as though they were children.
It was around this time that he finally chose a name for the garden. Britain had inspired him to create it, so he settled on a name that recalled his Scottish ancestry and the serene seascape he had discovered during his trip to northern Scotland in 1793. He would call it the Elgin Botanic Garden.
Hosack was not the only one changing the face of the island these days. When he drove from his house to the garden, he passed crews working on a construction site that had recently been slashed into the earth on the east side of Broadway. An elegant new City Hall was slowly going up. The design was by Hamilton’s architect for the Grange, John McComb Jr., who, together with a Frenchman named Joseph-François Mangin, had won the city’s architectural competition. Once complete, the new City Hall would have a two-tiered marble façade with a handsome portico out front and a cupola high above. By design, the rear of the building was left bare of marble. No one but farmers and laborers would think of living to the north, except for wealthy families on their country estates, and they would be too far from City Hall to mind the raw look of its back elevation.
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