by Andrea Wulf
As Washington rode south from the fort at West Point toward Mount Vernon, the citizens of the new American nation lined the decorated streets to glimpse their hero. At six foot two and a half and muscularly built, his body always held “perfectly straight,” fifty-one-year-old Washington certainly looked the part, dwarfing his fellow soldiers and citizens and radiating strength, confidence, dignity and “something uncommonly majestic and commanding.” And though the crowds that filled the streets of the cities and villages along his 300-mile homeward journey saw a warrior hero, the condition of his soil and the new shoots of spring were far closer to Washington’s heart than any strategy of war.
HIS LOVE FOR his country was deeply rooted in his passion for nature, agriculture and gardens. As early as 1748, as a sixteen-year-old surveyor in the Appalachian Mountains, Washington had gazed in wonder at the “most beautiful Groves” and had spent days “admiring the Trees & richness of the Land.” During his long absences from home, he continued to follow his interest, observing the new landscapes as a farmer would—investigating the soil, noting species of trees and agricultural practices. In turn the thriving plants and fields became for him a symbol of the future of the young nation. “We have now a goodly field before us,” Washington wrote shortly after the war, a field that the Americans now had to cultivate in order to “reap a fruitful Harvest.”
Like Benjamin Franklin, Washington saw in the cultivated soil the country’s wealth and independence. But there was a crucial difference in their understanding of the world of plants. Franklin (like the first settlers) equated the value of a plant with its productivity: useful plants would feed the American people and trees were valuable sources for fuel and building materials. Washington would have agreed, but being a generation younger he was also more susceptible to the sheer beauty of the American flora.
On 23 December 1783, five weeks after he had set out from West Point, Washington returned his commission as commander-in-chief in Annapolis, some fifty miles from Mount Vernon. There “was hardly a member of Congress who did not drop tears,” one congressman observed, and at his farewell ball women queued to dance with him, just to “get a touch of him.” As soon as the speeches were over Washington excused himself, “intent upon eating his christmas dinner at home.” Less than forty-eight hours later, as he stood on the ferry, he could see his house across the Potomac River, perched 125 feet high on the steep wooded slope, rising above the snow-dusted forest. Finally he had returned to what he called his “philosophical retreat.”
MOUNT VERNON WAS more than just fields that provided Washington’s livelihood, it was also an expression of his social standing within Virginia society. For centuries European estates and houses had been public articulations of their owners’ status, taste and politics, and gardens in particular had long been utilized as a sign of the owner’s wealth and power. At Mount Vernon, Washington’s rising position in society had been similarly imprinted on his 8,000-acre estate, which had changed radically from the 2,500-acre plantation he had inherited almost three decades previously. Just before his marriage in 1759 to Martha Custis, the wealthiest widow in Virginia, he had marked his move into the upper echelons of society by completely rebuilding the house. He had added another story to the seven-room farmhouse, extended the estate and built two walled gardens for flowers, fruit trees and vegetables. He had also turned the orientation of the house from east to west. By the time Washington brought his wife home, the principal entrance and rooms faced not to the ocean and Britain beyond it but to the west, toward the interior of the country. By turning his back to the Old World, Washington had expressed his belief that the future of the colonies lay in the west beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The final touch had been a straight half-mile vista, which Washington cut through the dense forest, opening a spectacular view from his parlor and dining room toward the fertile lands beyond the frontier, “the Land of promise, with milk & honey.”
The next spur of building activity had begun in 1773, after Martha’s sixteen-year-old daughter Patsy (from her first marriage) died. As a consequence, half of Patsy’s substantial inheritance went to Martha and only a month later Washington ordered his first batch of building materials. He added wings to both sides of the house, as well as a large central pediment and a cupola as ornamental focus points, and a spectacular colonnaded double-height porch—the so-called piazza—overlooking the Potomac, the river that Washington believed connected the country to the western interior.
NOW, RETURNING FROM war after eight years of absence, Washington could finally look upon his land. Snow, however, covered his fields and gardens. The cold blanket turned the ground into a white canvas on which only the lines of walls, walkways, and the edges of flower and vegetable beds remained. No color or scent could distract from these outlines. It was a garden ruled by geometry, the landscape of a surveyor’s mind—Washington’s former profession—tidy and ordered with patterns imposed on nature’s unruly shapes. A straight road led to the house, terminating in the so-called Circle, an oval driveway. On each side of this road was a large square walled garden containing fruit and nut trees, vegetable plots and some ornamental flowerbeds. The symmetry continued with the outhouses that extended neatly from the two walled gardens to each side of the house.
Yet something wasn’t right. As Washington surveyed his garden, he was struck by the austere formality, the straight driveway and sense of confinement. The brick walls around the two square gardens enclosed much of the ground that lay in front of the house; by contrast, the outhouses and mansion, which sat exposed on the highest ground, seemed almost naked against the large expanse of the lawn at the back. During Washington’s absence his estate manager had planted the flowering shrubs and trees as he had instructed, in two groves “without any order or regularity.” But the young native trees were still not mature enough to have a real impact on the landscape. The gardens around the house were rigid and, as one visitor who had come during the war remarked, “barren.”
Washington had left in 1775 as a wealthy Virginia colonist, but he had returned as a war hero who had transformed his country and freed his people from tyranny. Standing in Mount Vernon, he realized that what had been perfect for a successful plantation owner was now woefully inadequate. Fresh from revolutionary triumph, he resolved to tear up the driveway, pull down the walls and dig up the hedges to liberate his garden from its claustrophobic corset of geometry, just as he had freed his country from Britain’s imperial yoke. As he returned victoriously from the battlefield to the plough, Washington would transform Mount Vernon once again. This time it wouldn’t just be the estate of a Virginia planter—it would be the landscape garden of a revolutionary.
“I AM BECOME a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac,” Washington wrote in February 1784, five weeks after his return. “Free from the bustle of a camp & the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments.” It was indeed quiet at Mount Vernon. The snow and ice cut the plantation off from the rest of the world. No letters arrived and few visitors made their way through the freezing winter landscape. As the cold weather slowed down the pace of daily life, Washington had time to consider not just his landscape, gardens and fields, but his future. “The tranquil walks of domestic life are now unfolding to my view; & promise a rich harvest of pleasing contemplation,” he wrote to his friend and fellow soldier Comte de Rochambeau. He felt like a “wearied Traveller,” and his future, he said in private as he had done in public, was in agriculture.
The war hero became a farmer once again. Benjamin Rush, one of his fellow revolutionaries, described how Washington assumed “the dress and manners of a Virginia planter,” including a weathered old gray coat. “His simplicity is truly sublime,” Washington’s protégé Lafayette said, remarking that in his retirement he was “even greater than he was during the Revolution.” Every day he rose at five o’clock and, after an early breakfast of Indian hoecakes made with cornmeal soaked in butter and honey, rode the twenty miles acr
oss his plantation,1 regardless of whether icy gales whipped across the fields or the fog rolled thick through the trees (such determination would cause his death fifteen years later when he refused to change his wet clothes before dinner after a five-hour ride across his estate during a winter storm). He was “completely involved with all the details of his lands,” another visitor noted, while others were surprised when they were greeted by their hero dressed in a plain coat and mud-splattered boots.
Washington also spent many reluctant hours in his study, desperately trying to bring order to his papers. Countless times during the war, they had been bundled up and hidden “out of the way of the Enemy” at a moment’s notice, and the result was utter chaos. Instead of planting and redesigning his gardens, Washington suddenly found himself surrounded by piles and piles of papers—not just army accounts and expenses, but also the leases and tenant agreements for his tens of thousands of acres of land in the Ohio valley. The papers were in such confusion that Washington was at a loss as to what land was his and what wasn’t. From surveyors he requested maps, boundary details and information on “the state of the Lands which I am entitled to in my own right.” Some of the forests had been cleared and turned into fields, but because of the remoteness of the land across the Allegheny Mountains and Washington’s long absence, tenants had failed to send a share of the profits.
By the close of summer 1784, Washington had given up on bringing order to his tenant affairs and resolved that he must travel to the West himself, on what he called “a tour of business.” In September he set off toward western Pennsylvania and the “fertile plains of the Ohio.” Here, he explained, “the poor, the needy & the oppressed of the Earth” could settle in peace and “Increase & Multiply.” With thousands of acres to his name this would also conveniently make Washington a very wealthy landowner. Riding through the wilderness, it was the first time since his days as a surveyor that Washington saw the landscape as a civilian and not as a military commander. He could admire trees just for their intrinsic beauty rather than worry about the timber supply for stockades and fuel for his soldiers. At last mountains were not obstacles for the movements of the troops but majestic landscapes that allowed glorious views across the bountiful land.
He returned truly inspired from his 700-mile trip in the beginning of October. With the soil and plants holding the hope of America’s future, Washington decided to “diversify the scene” by bringing nature from across the United States into his gardens. Species from the north and the south, from the mountains in the west and the coastal plains in the east would grow together in horticultural union at Mount Vernon, shaping the first truly American garden. “I shall hope to receive the Balsam trees; or any others which you may think curious, and exoticks with us,” he wrote to his old friend George Clinton, the governor of New York.2 Two weeks later he asked for white pines, the tallest of the northeastern conifers, and for eastern hemlocks, elegant trees with softly arching branches and shallow roots that make them the perfect mountain tree, as they can cling to rocks, ravines and the stony embankments of waterfalls. From the southern states he wanted live oak, the embodiment of the South, adored for its wide low-slung and almost horizontal branches on which Spanish moss swayed like abandoned feather boas. From his nephew George Augustine Washington in South Carolina he ordered Magnolia grandiflora because he had read in his garden books that it “flowers early, & is a beautiful tree” and requested umbrella magnolia with its huge leaves and white blossoms. The evergreens would make the gardens attractive during the winter months and the magnolias would bring glorious blooms. These ornamental trees and shrubs, Washington wrote to a friend, “are now become my amusement.”
At the same time Washington began to assemble a collection of trees and shrubs that he found in the forests on his own estate. “Road [sic] to my Mill Swamp & to other place,” Washington wrote in his diary, “in search of the sort of Trees I shall want for my walks, groves, & Wildernesses.” He knew that the steadily increasing stream of visitors and strangers who came to Mount Vernon would first see this part of the garden. And it seemed that he was now deliberately choosing native evergreens, conifers and flowering trees to make a statement. By doing so, the gardens in front of the house would be an expression of his vision of republican simplicity, and his personal statement of independence.
Washington’s new garden was to be truly American, a radical departure from the traditional colonial plots, for it was the first ornamental garden to be planted almost exclusively with native species. Since the first settlers had arrived in 1607 in Virginia, colonists had tried to re-create the gardens that they had left behind in Britain, including old-world species, which often cost a fortune to procure and cultivate. John Custis, for example, Martha Washington’s father-in-law from her first marriage, had grown English yews and hollies clipped into balls and pyramids in his garden in Williamsburg, and his English friends had regularly dispatched to him European plants, including tulips, foxgloves, Guernsey lilies, tuberose and lilacs. Colonial gardeners such as Custis would have thought it pointless to plant American native trees and shrubs when these were growing in abundance, almost like weeds, in the wilderness just outside their garden gates. Since most American gardeners remained wedded to their old European plants and traditional plots, Washington’s adoration for native species was revolutionary.
Ironically, though, Washington was reading a British publication in order to choose these American species: Philip Miller’s best-selling Gardeners Dictionary. First published in 1731, it was the most important horticultural publication of the eighteenth century—the first and only comprehensive manual of practical gardening in Europe. Every species that was available in Britain was listed alphabetically, together with advice on how to propagate and cultivate it. Miller had been the head of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and had more horticultural knowledge about American species than any other gardener except John Bartram, a Pennsylvania farmer who had supplied English plant lovers from the 1730s with hundreds of seed boxes from America. Unlike Washington, who was familiar with Virginian species and some others that he had noticed during his military campaigns, Miller had received and cultivated plants from all thirteen of the former colonies.
Whenever Washington wanted to know something about American trees and shrubs, he consulted the Dictionary. “In looking into Millers Gardeners Dictionary,” Washington wrote to Clinton, he learned that the Northeastern conifers were more easily raised from seed than by cuttings (which made the transport from New York to Mount Vernon less complicated). Until his death Washington used the Dictionary regularly, preferring such practical books to political works or classical texts. For easy access, he always kept the Dictionary on the table in his study, together with the other agricultural and gardening books he used the most—Washington read only books on “agriculture and English history,” Thomas Jefferson remarked later. On his return journey from West Point after the war, Washington had even found time to stop in New York to order the latest agricultural works (the bookseller knew exactly what his famous customer wanted).
Exactly a year after he had returned home from war, Washington finally decided to implement these ideas and reinvent his grounds. Undeterred by the snow, he set to work. On 12 January 1785, a week after he had written to his nephew George Augustine to order species from South Carolina, Washington scoured his forest for trees. An icy wind was lashing across the fields as he zigzagged the estate. Here and there he stopped, marking the trees he wanted to be dug up: he found thriving ash trees, “a great abundance of the red-bud of all sizes,” pines and cockspur hawthorn, which he admired because they were “full of the red Berries.” Even in the depths of winter as the deciduous trees stood naked in the forest, Washington recognized the many different flowering species by their shape and bark. He chose crab apple, which in spring would be covered in clusters of soft pink blossoms, and the scented fringe tree with its plumes of dangling white flowers. When he returned home, he noted every species and thei
r location—one of the longest entries in his diary. A week later, the work began in earnest and Washington was “Employed until dinner in laying out my Serpentine road & Shrubberies.”
Samuel Vaughan visited Mount Vernon in August 1787. His drawing is the only plan of the bowling green, the winding walk along the shrubberies and the two bullet-shaped enclosed gardens. He also depicted the two groves next to the mansion that Washington had planned in the summer of 1776 just before the Battle of New York. (Illustration credit 1.1)
In front of his house, where the straight driveway and the adjoining two-walled kitchen and fruit gardens covered most of the ground, he planned a large bell-shaped tract of lawn instead—the “bowling green”—hugged by a winding walk on both sides along which he envisaged hundreds of American trees and shrubs planted in irregular drifts and heights. In order to create the sinuous openness of the bowling green, he altered the shape of the enclosed gardens by reducing them to almost half of their original width and adding a curved wall to extend their length. With this Washington would turn the two square gardens that had dominated the front into two slim bullet-shaped sections at the edge of the central lawn. The walls would disappear behind the irregularly planted trees and shrubs.
Having gathered his chosen trees, the eager Washington ordered his slaves to remove the snow and begin digging holes immediately. He admitted it was “exceeding miry & bad working” but, determined to see his vision of an all-American garden realized, pressed on regardless. The new walk, his “serpentine road,” which circled the bowling green, was lined with trees that were placed “promiscuously without Order,” as Miller instructed. He planted tall trees such as black gum, American linden—which Clinton had sent from New York—and aspen, which he had procured from Fairfax, Virginia. As undergrowth he chose mountain laurels, which in spring open their puckered pink flowers like mini-umbrellas. Many of the species that Washington collected in the surrounding forests were spring-flowering shrubs that would also look magnificent in autumn. Sassafras, for example, paraded exquisite yellow flowers on its naked branches in early spring and colorful leaves in autumn. Similarly the flowering dogwood, one of Washington’s favorites, impressed with its perfect alabaster blossom in April and May and its brilliant red foliage in October.