LATER THAT SAME SUMMER, the executors of Alexander Hamilton’s estate finally paid Hosack for the medical services he had rendered the previous year. For consultations and medications he had provided to Hamilton from January through June 1804 (probably for the latter’s persistent gastrointestinal complaints), Hosack received $37.50, and for “attendance &c during his last illness,” he received $50. Given Eliza’s plight as a widow with a large young family, it might have been decorous of Hosack to refuse payment, but he needed the money, both for the garden and for his own growing family. A few months earlier, Mary had given birth to their third child, a brother to five-year-old Mary and two-year-old James. They had named him Alexander, for Hosack’s father or for Hamilton—perhaps for both.
IN THE FALL OF 1805, while Hosack and his medical colleagues battled another yellow-fever epidemic, he was also busy overseeing Andrew Gentle and the laborers as they prepared the Elgin grounds for winter. In December, the same month that Captain William Clark inscribed his name on a tall pine overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Hosack’s men blanketed a bed of peas with manure and hay, “to be uncovered when the weather is fine,” as Hosack noted in his memorandum book. He needed more help, and he began running an ad in the New-York Gazette for a kitchen gardener. Back home at 65 Broadway, he sat at his desk drafting letters in his crabbed script. He folded them up, sealed them with wax, and addressed them to Philadelphia, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Florence, and everywhere else he knew of someone who might send him plant specimens.
In Albany, meanwhile, Governor Lewis had not forgotten him. At the opening of the new legislative session in February 1806, the governor stood before the members of the State Senate and the State Assembly and praised the Elgin Botanic Garden to the skies. He implored the legislators to support Hosack’s work, pointing out that “in a country as young as ours . . . individual fortune is not adequate to the task.” Lewis told them that Hosack had already assembled one hundred fifty different species of crops and grasses.
The governor’s speech moved the lawmakers to action. Within two days, several senators formed a committee to consider Lewis’s plea, and just two weeks later, in mid-February, the Senate passed a bill granting Hosack an annual allowance for the garden. Now it was up to the state’s assemblymen; if they too passed a bill, the garden would be safe. Hosack heard about the governor’s speech and the Senate bill, but he had been disappointed twice before by Albany politics. He would try to take care of himself. He had dreamed up a financial scheme to help keep the garden afloat until his fellow citizens came to their senses. New Yorkers always craved fresh produce. If he could grow and sell enough fruit and vegetables at the garden, he might be able to offset the mounting expenses of his plant collecting and his gardeners’ wages. He had already begun testing his idea by selling turnips and potatoes to a few of his friends, including the Pendletons and the Bards, and although he was chafing to launch his planned botanical and medical research, he focused instead on the more pressing problem of bankrolling the garden. In the spring of 1806, with Andrew Gentle’s expert help, dozens more vegetable crops were planted.
Hosack still had much to learn about practical horticulture, but in a stroke of providential timing he could now consult the very first comprehensive garden manual in the United States, The American Gardener’s Calendar. This month-by-month guide, published in early 1806, contained more than six hundred pages of lively instructions on everything from growing a decorative bower to heating a conservatory to preventing worms in fruit trees. The Gardener’s Calendar was the work of Bernard McMahon, a talented Irish-born horticulturist who, with the capable aid of his Irish wife, ran a Philadelphia seed store where they welcomed customers into a clutter of gardening tools, books, baskets, barrels, sacks, and cabinets filled with seeds. The guide was greeted with glowing praise—including an anonymous review in the Medical Repository, a journal Mitchill had founded with the late Elihu Hubbard Smith in 1797. The review, probably by Mitchill or Hosack, praised McMahon for bringing botanical sophistication to the practical chores of gardening: “Ceres, and Flora, and Pomona, have all studied modern classification, and become acquainted with the Linnaean system.” McMahon’s Gardener’s Calendar was exactly the sort of book Hamilton would have devoured happily when he was laying out his gardens at the Grange—and if he had lived long enough to do so, it would have been a point of agreement with Jefferson, who loved McMahon’s book and consulted it frequently as he gardened at Monticello.
Hosack bought his own copy of McMahon’s guide and set to work with Gentle. Their first order of business was to create the hotbeds that would protect the vegetable seeds from the late-winter chill as they germinated and sprouted. For these, McMahon recommended nailing together four yellow-pine planks into a rectangle about nine feet long and five feet wide, with one of the long sides of the rectangle standing taller than the other. This asymmetry would create a sloping angle for the panes of glass that would be placed atop the frame, thus keeping the rain from puddling and allowing the full warmth and light of the sun to reach the seedlings. At night, straw mats or piles of branches could be laid over the panes to insulate the plants from the cold. Once completed, the frames had to be filled with a mixture of straw, dirt, and manure, the last of which would generate heat as it decomposed. Hosack had his own steady source of manure from the cattle and pigs he was stabling at the garden—although if he followed McMahon’s directions to the letter, he would have to pick his way through the piles of dung until he came across a vintage of a “lively, warm, steamy quality.” McMahon warned against trying to grow seedlings directly in the manure mixture, as some gardeners did, because it could spike to temperatures fatal for the plants. Instead, McMahon liked to plant his seeds in pots first and then plunge the pots into the soil, so he could pull them back up to the surface if the soil temperature rose too high.
For the Elgin hotbeds, Hosack and Gentle settled on workaday edibles that they were eager to see growing as soon as possible, such as cabbage and parsley. Then they turned to the next urgent task in the kitchen garden: preparing the outdoor vegetable plots in which they would be sowing the rest of the vegetables. It was to these outdoor plots, too, that the hotbed seedlings would be transferred when warmer weather arrived. As Hosack worked with Gentle to prepare the vegetable beds in the kitchen garden that spring, he seemed to catch gardening fever. He flipped his big memorandum book upside down and backward, and on the backs of the pages where he recorded the names of his private medical students, he noted each day’s work at Elgin with more and more precision. On March 21, his gardeners prepared the earth for early potatoes, peas, and beans, which they planted the next day. Five days later, they sowed lettuce seeds; three days after that, it was onions, beets, and radishes. In early April, they transplanted the hotbed seedlings to the outdoor plots and then worked to get dozens more vegetable crops into the ground, among them carrots, peppers, cucumbers, squash, and additional varieties of lettuce, beans, peas, and potatoes. Inside the thick stone walls of his Manhattan garden, Hosack was leading an idyllic country life.
HE WAS ALSO TRYING to establish an orchard at Elgin. Several years earlier, he had bought about twenty species of fruit trees, scrawling the poetry of their names across a page of his memorandum book: bower apple, blood clingstone peach, greengage plum. By 1806 he had many dozens of species—among them nine types of cherry tree; several each of pear, apple, and mulberry; and a persimmon from Paulus Hook.
The cultivation of an orchard was an endeavor in which Bernard McMahon counseled vigilance and fortitude. Too many farmers planted their orchards and then left them to their own devices instead of pruning them regularly. It pained McMahon to see fruit trees “exhausted by moss, and injured by cattle,” and “with their twigs so intimately interwoven, that a small bird can scarcely creep in among them.” Late that February, just when McMahon recommended, Hosack had his fruit trees pruned. He intended to take excellent care of his orchard. He was looking forward to the time when he could set
out baskets piled high with luscious fruits for sale.
But any competent Manhattan farmer with enough patience could grow apples. Or turnips and potatoes, for that matter. It was when Hosack climbed his hill and stepped through a tall archway into his greenhouse that he entered the colorful, fragrant realm where he was nurturing his own American revolution. For the previous few years, thanks to Hosack’s letter-writing campaign to his British friends and to botanists he knew only by reputation, hundreds of seeds and plants had been migrating across the globe toward the garden. In cities across Europe, Hosack’s correspondents had carefully labeled, packed, and shipped samples of the flora native to their home countries, along with still more specimens they had received from botanical outposts in Australia, India, the Far East, Africa, and South America. Once these specimens arrived in New York, many of them needed shielding from the harsh northeastern climate, so Hosack had planted them in his greenhouse, where they would be safe from frost. On the bitterest days, they could luxuriate in the warmth emanating from the flues he had had installed under the graduated shelves.
As Hosack moved down the long central walkway of his greenhouse that spring, he was surrounded by clay pots filled with dozens of species that few Americans had ever seen. From the East Indies, for example, Hosack had received a rare plant covered in fragrant white flowers, Arabian jasmine (Jasminum sambac), as well as a tall grass called Job’s tears (Coix lacryma) for the pearly little tear-shaped grains that grew at the end of its stalks. From the Cape of Good Hope, a contact had sent him a plant with spotted, swollen leaves called tongue aloe (Aloe lingua) and also a spectacular evergreen native to the southern tip of Africa known as silver tree (Protea argentea) because of its shimmery metallic leaves. From the South Sea islands where his friend Banks had once roamed, Hosack had a striking plant with black flowers called Lotus jacobaeus. He was cultivating a tree heath (Erica arborea) from the island of Madeira and a beautiful silvery coronilla (Coronilla argentea) from the island of Crete.
Elsewhere in the greenhouse, Hosack was raising exquisite treasures from the Far East. One of his favorites was a sweet-scented daphne (Daphne odora) from China. He also loved his Japan rose (Camellia japonica) for its “splendid petals.” He was equally proud of the many fruit trees he had acquired from China and Japan, among them species of orange and kumquat. And he was raising still other novel fruits nearby, including figs from southern Europe and avocados from South America. When the weather warmed, he would be able to move a great many of these exotic plants outdoors to soak up the fresh air and sunshine. He waited impatiently for that day, complaining in his memorandum book about how “cool and unsteady” the spring of 1806 was turning out to be. For now, the best he could do was to follow McMahon’s advice to slide open the sashes along the front wall of the greenhouse around ten or eleven in the morning, and then close them in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthened and the day grew cooler.
Hosack knew that for some of his most delicate exotic specimens even the sheltering embrace of the greenhouse would be inadequate in the New York climate, so he had directed his men to erect two hothouses, one at each end of his greenhouse. These buildings were made almost entirely of glass to let in floods of light on sunny days, and they were heated by a powerful stove to near-tropical temperatures. Each of Hosack’s new hothouses was about sixty feet long, just like the greenhouse they flanked, thus creating a palatial conservatory complex that stretched for nearly two hundred feet across the hilltop. The hothouses jutted forward past the façade of the greenhouse a few paces, and the roofline of each hothouse sat well below that of the greenhouse, making the latter look grander still. Hosack had flower borders planted in front of the buildings, choosing species that would stipple their façades with color from early spring to summer’s end: snowdrops, crocuses, violets, hyacinths, irises, asphodels.
Hothouses like Hosack’s made busy diplomats of their gardeners, who were drawn into a ceaseless conflict between the excess smoke that billowed from an overstoked stove and the frigid winter air that rushed in if the smoke was vented too freely. McMahon considered it an “evil of great magnitude” to build a hothouse with a roof whose panes couldn’t be louvered open to release the rank air that built up inside. Hosack seems to have agreed, because an oil painting of the garden done after the completion of the second hothouse shows roof panes open on both buildings. Inside the hothouses, Hosack and Gentle had two options for arranging the plants. They could place the pots on graduated stages, as they had done in the greenhouse, or they could construct hotbeds in which to put the plants. William Hamilton’s gardeners at The Woodlands, the private estate near Philadelphia on which Hosack had modeled his buildings, mainly used hotbeds in the hothouses. Whichever way Hosack chose to arrange his plants, McMahon recommended making sure “to sprinkle the flues occasionally with water, to raise a comforting steam,” and to wash “dust or any sort of foulness” off the leaves with a sponge.
Hosack was soon growing many edible plants in his hothouses, including cinnamon, ginger, pineapple, mango, and even a coffee tree from Arabia. Visitors were enveloped in a swirl of spicy and sweet aromas that added, in Hosack’s words, “zest to this delicious banquet.” He also had other exotic species notable mainly for their beauty or curiosity. His Mimosa sensitiva snapped its fernlike leaves tightly closed when he touched it. He had a pretty periwinkle flower from Madagascar (Vinca rosea), a crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) from the East Indies, and a prickly-stemmed Parkinsonia tree (Parkinsonia aculeata) from the West Indies. One of Hosack’s rarest plants was a curious shrub whose glossy green leaves looked like they had been sprinkled with gold; this was his Japanese gold-dust tree (Aucuba japonica). Throughout the hothouses Hosack also had splashes of red and pink, but for sheer drama, none could match his flame lily (Gloriosa superba), whose crimson petals, edged with yellow, leapt and curled through the air like fire.
Hosack’s conservatory complex, sketched by John Trumbull in the summer of 1806
HOSACK SURVEYED the rich plant life in his orchard, kitchen garden, greenhouse, and hothouses with mounting pride. Each species, no matter how small or plain, meant yet another entry in the living encyclopedia that his men were inscribing with their spades and rakes on the face of Manhattan. Every specimen that he acquired and successfully cultivated, or dried and labeled to add to the herbarium, meant another satisfying gift of his energy and intellect to that tenacious, globe-scattered tribe of natural historians who labored daily to identify more species. No one on earth knew how many kinds of plants were out there—growing in the jungles of Africa, on low-slung Pacific islands, alongside languid American rivers—and no one knew how long it would take to find them all. He was thrilled to be playing his part in the international effort to catalogue the flora of the whole planet.
Yet Hosack also had a sturdy toolbox of a heart. First in New York and Philadelphia, then in Edinburgh and London, he had absorbed his teachers’ excitement about the promise of scientific progress to improve human lives. Ever since then, he had been alert to the smallest hint of a hidden practical advantage. His new figs, for example, might be delicious, but they could also be mashed into a hot poultice to soothe a pus-filled pocket of infected flesh. The juice from his oranges could be prescribed to ward off scurvy in the sailors who congregated around the harbor, and Hosack could also distill the orange tree’s leaves into a tea to use as an antispasmodic in cases of epilepsy. The oil from his sweet bay laurel tree promised a gentle stimulant for a sluggish circulation, but if that didn’t do the trick, his fiery West Indian pepper (Capsicum annuum) would deliver a near-electric jolt. From his cinnamon tree (Laurus cinnamomum), he could prepare an essential oil that was widely stocked in British medicine shops and that the Edinburgh New Dispensatory praised for its power to reduce “immoderate discharges from the uterus.”
Hosack could read about these and a thousand other remedies in the Edinburgh New Dispensatory, but he was starting to outpace even the very latest edition of that gold s
tandard of European medicine. By 1806, he was growing many plants at Elgin that were not listed in the Dispensatory. Hosack was learning about these new medicinals from country people on Manhattan as well as from the writings of explorers and traders who had spent time among the native peoples of North and South America. In his greenhouse, for example, he was growing Indian arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea), a plant he had acquired from St. Vincent that was named for its use as a poultice to remove arrow poison. He was growing a locust tree (Hymenaea courbaril) from the West Indies (today known as stinking toe), whose bark was used among indigenous peoples against coughs, diarrhea, and funguses. He had a tamarind tree (Tamarindus indica), a species native to Africa that had made its way to India and then traveled across the world to the West Indies—the source of Hosack’s own specimen. Tamarind fruit could be mashed into a pulp that functioned as a gentle laxative, and he also liked to use it for fevers.
Yet these were the known remedies. What cure for what scourge shot silently through the veins of the plainest leaf that brushed his coat as he walked through the greenhouse? With hundreds of species now assembled at the garden, he was nearing the moment when he could focus on his medical research. For this, he would need assistants. His nephews John and Caspar had been an enormous help, and they continued to distinguish themselves as rising young botanists, but Hosack had recently taken note of a talented student in his Columbia classes.
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