by Andrea Wulf
Part of the problem was also the “ruinous” outmoded agricultural methods in America to which most farmers, Washington bemoaned, steadfastly clung. Nothing much had changed since the first settlers had arrived and American farmers continued to work their soil as their fathers and grandfathers had done. If America wanted to be economically independent, this had to change, as “Nothing in my opinion would contribute more to the welfare of these States, than the proper management of our Lands,” Washington wrote to a fellow plantation owner. Because of the disastrous effect of tobacco cultivation, his foremost endeavor when he returned to Mount Vernon was the replenishment of the ground.
Washington tried many different methods because “every experiment is a treasure.” He scattered different amounts of gypsum—“Plaister of Paris”—on his lawn to examine its viability as a fertilizer. He believed that the mud from riverbeds might be used as manure and when he heard of a dredge in Philadelphia—“Mr. Donaldson’s Hippopotamus”—he decided in autumn 1785 “to make a full experiment upon a small scale,” digging up the mud from the Potomac and spreading it on a field. He tested marl (similar to lime), ash and “fish heads, guts &ca.” and later built a dung depository. He used the human waste from the necessaries, corresponded extensively about manure and bought the latest agricultural publications from Britain (because “no Country has carried the improvment [sic] of Land & the benefits of Agriculture to greater perfection than England”). In fact, he was so obsessed with manure and the improvement of the soil that he was actively seeking a farm manager who, “Midas-like,” could “convert every thing he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards Gold.”5 He was so innovative in his agricultural methods that many regarded him as “the first farmer in America.”
Washington had at last achieved what he had set out to accomplish. As he spread manure on his fields or planted a tree that he had found in his forest, he gave physical embodiment to his belief that the future of America lay in the fields and forests. The recent experiments in the utilitarian parts of the estate were aimed at improving agriculture, while the plantations of ornamental native species in front of the house carried a symbolic message that this new nation would be independent, self-sufficient and strong. Both areas, in their own way, illustrated Washington’s fervent patriotism.
Mount Vernon was his private statement of independence and republican simplicity, wrought from the soil and trees of his country. European visitors accustomed to the pomp of their courts were divided in their judgment—the Prussian Baron von Steuben, for example, who had fought with Washington in the War of Independence, was dismissive about what he thought was a modest estate. Others, however, understood that this simplicity was “quite in keeping with the idea we have of Cincinnatus and of those other great commanders of the Roman Republic.” Mount Vernon, with its many outbuildings and neat gardens, looked like “a rural village.” Everything was as Washington liked it—“trim, handsome & thriving”—tidy fences, scythed lawns, gently winding paths, and woods that had been cleared from its messy undergrowth. This was his vision of the United States of America. After the chaos of the revolution and the war, Washington and his “brother farmers” were bringing order to the land. Agriculture and planting, Washington was hopeful, were to be his only occupations until his death: “I wish most devoutly to glide silently and unnoticed through the remainder of life.”
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1 Washington had divided his plantation into five farms: Muddy Hole, Dogue Run, River, Ferry (also called Union) and Home House (or Mansion House). Each had its own overseer and slave work crew.
2 Balsam firs were “exoticks” for Washington because the tall conifers grew only in the northern states.
3 This was the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon and his three assistants, who had been sent by Franklin and Jefferson from Paris to make Washington’s bust.
4 The old vineyard was fifty yards beyond the walls of the Lower Garden. In spring 1785, Washington turned it into an experimental “nursery” for large-scale experiments.
5 Less than a year later, on 21 April 1786, Washington’s new farm manager James Bloxham arrived in Mount Vernon from Britain.
2
“GARDENS, PECULIARLY WORTH THE ATTENTION OF AN AMERICAN”
THOMAS JEFFERSON’S AND JOHN ADAMS’S ENGLISH GARDEN TOUR
SPRING HAD DUSTED the trees and shrubs with the first specks of green, a glimpse of the glorious spectacle that would soon follow. As Thomas Jefferson left the noisy streets of London behind one morning in early April 1786, he could see the English countryside unfold its undulating patchwork of fields, hedgerows and narrow lanes. Robins were building their nests and small wagtails were just arriving back from their long migration to Africa. The hornbeam’s dangling light-yellow catkins were dancing in the sun and the soft leaves were slowly uncurling on the naked branches, while the blackthorn was already wrapped in white blooms. Lining the roads were swaths of the tiny bright yellow lesser celandine—also sometimes called “spring messenger” because they are one of the first flowers to blossom. In the forest the oaks and beech trees were still without leaves but alabaster white wood anemones and pale yellow primroses lit up the ground. Nature was slowly awakening from its long hibernation and Jefferson was excited to finally see the quiet signs of spring after the hectic cacophony of London life.
Forty-two-year-old Jefferson was the American Minister to France but his colleague John Adams, the American Minister to the court at St. James’s Palace, had asked him in February for help with some difficult trade negotiations in London. “Come here without loss of time,” Adams had begged, because the discussions between Britain and the United States that he had been heading had completely stalled, as had the fraught negotiations with the Barbary States—Tripoli, Morocco, Algiers and Tunis—that controlled navigation in the Mediterranean (asking for a hefty “tribute” for allowing American ships to pass unmolested). “I dare not communicate to Congress what has passed without your Concurrence,” Adams had told Jefferson a few weeks previously. He trusted Jefferson and desperately needed his support, for Britain’s refusal to cooperate threatened the United States of America’s very survival.
The two men had first met in Philadelphia, during the long months before the Declaration of Independence, where Adams had led the heated discussions while Jefferson silently watched. Jefferson was no orator but had proven his sharp mind and exquisite writing style when he wrote the new Constitution of Virginia. It was Adams who had suggested that the quiet Virginian should write the Declaration of Independence, but they only became close friends years later, when their paths crossed again in Paris, where Adams was instrumental in securing the peace treaty after the War of Independence. Jefferson’s wife, Martha, had died before his appointment to Europe, and in Adams the grieving diplomat found both support and comfort. Jefferson had joined him in Paris at the end of 1784, but Adams was then relocated to London a few months later, with his famously independent wife, Abigail, and their nineteen-year-old daughter in tow.
Adams had many reasons to be worried. When the war had ended, the joy of victory was almost immediately tempered by the sheer destruction left in its wake. Thousands of farms had been torched and entire counties in New York, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas had been plundered. A need for iron during the war had left great swaths of forest denuded of the wood that was required as fuel for America’s foundries, and the crops in the northern states had been blighted. Moreover, as if this agrarian devastation had not been enough, fire had also consumed much of Charleston and New York. The United States was heavily in debt and paper money was worthless.
As farmers had slowly begun to recover, they relied on foreign markets to trade their surplus produce. But all ports in Britain and her colonies had been closed to American ships in a deliberate attempt to thwart the young nation’s chances of success. It was against this bleak background of looming economic catastrophe that Adams the straight-talking lawyer and farmer from New England and his Virginian fell
ow revolutionary Jefferson had been ordered by Congress to forge a set of commercial treatises that would allow the United States to resume her trade with Europe. But the old oppressor was standing by, predicting that the United States would have to return to the colonial fold. “There is a strong propensity in this people to believe that America is weary of her Independence,” Adams had quickly discovered on arriving in London, before adding that those who believed such nonsense were “Sufficiently insane.”
Jefferson’s arrival in London on 11 March 1786 had failed to advance things further. And so, after three weeks of wasting his time in London, the restless Jefferson had been so frustrated that he decided to go on a garden tour instead, leaving Adams behind in case the British changed their mind. Jefferson’s disgruntlement about the enforced inactivity was unsurprising because he hated to be idle. He needed to be constantly occupied—reading, recording flowering times of shrubs, measuring or inventing mechanical gadgets. Whenever circumstances stopped him from work, he would occupy himself with something else—from calculating how long it would take to pay back the national debt to constructing a letter-copying machine. “Ennui,” he warned his oldest daughter, was “the most dangerous poison of life.”
When Jefferson left his lodgings in Golden Square on 2 April, he was joining the hordes of tourists who traveled the length and breadth of the country to visit England’s landscape gardens during spring and summer, when landowners from Shropshire to Kent opened their estates to the public. Everybody wanted to see the most fashionable gardens in Europe. The English taste in gardening “doubtless is the best,” one Swedish botanist declared after touring the country, while Catherine the Great had ordered her landscape architect to “visit all the notable gardens” of England, “and, having seen them, to lay out similar ones here.” Tourists with a taste for gardening would not miss the opportunity to visit the famed landscapes—Franklin too had seen them during his time in England, and Jefferson was to be no exception.
The learned Jefferson had been excited to travel to Europe in the name of his country, “combining,” as he said, “public service with private gratification.” Paris and London were after all the greatest cities in the world—centers of art, learning and science. Gardens in particular fascinated Jefferson. He had an “affection in every bud that opens,” he said, and previous to his visit he had already ordered from London a “pair of slippers of waxed leather, rather thick, for walking in the garden.” For years he had studied British horticultural books to learn about the art of planting and designing such landscapes. Despite his disdain for the country, he had to concede that the English had created the most magnificent landscapes in Europe.
Even as the colonies had prepared to declare their independence ten years earlier, while Jefferson labored over the words of the Virginia constitution and the Declaration of Independence, he had found time to order British garden books. The one he admired most was the best-selling Observations on Modern Gardening by Thomas Whately, who—in a twist of irony—had also been one of the authors and defenders of the controversial Stamp Act. As patriots across the colonies were boycotting British goods, Jefferson had disloyally dreamed of an English garden. Over the years he constantly drew extensive plans of new improvements for his garden at his plantation Monticello in Virginia: elaborate planting schemes, waterworks, poetic inscriptions, and fanciful Gothic temples and Chinese pavilions, all inspired by the latest English fashions. He had even tried to find a British gardener but without any success, and so it was mostly in his mind that he moved hills and forests, let water cascade from rocks and lounged in ornamental temples that were never built.
When Adams asked Jefferson to join him in Britain, the Virginian finally had the opportunity to see what he had only read and dreamed about. On the first day of his garden tour he saw no less than five1 and stayed the night in Weybridge in Surrey, some twenty miles to the west of London, so that he could see the famous Wooburn Farm the next morning. As with all English gardens, the entry to Wooburn Farm was free. Except for a small gratuity for the servants or guides, visitors simply had to sign in at the entrance lodge. As this was just a formality, Jefferson was perplexed when the gardener refused him entry on the grounds that his master had ordered him not to admit anybody who might be English. “But I am not an English man,” replied the bewildered (and no doubt slightly offended) Jefferson, before the gate was opened. Asked to explain why “the English” were not allowed to visit, the gardener explained that the owner “cannot trust them, [as] they will take something with them.” It was not just theft that the owner was worried about—with the increasing number of garden tourists across England, vandalism was also rising as visitors stole plants, broke things and even graffitied the pavilions and alcoves. At Wooburn Farm the disturbances had been particularly bad and the Catholic proprietor had been forced to close his garden for “the savages, who came as connoisseurs, scribbled a thousand brutalities.”
Walking along the sandy path in long strides, Jefferson could immediately see why Wooburn Farm was one of the most celebrated gardens in England. Instead of immaculately shorn lawns or rolling parkland, there were pastures with “spotted cows,” vegetable plots and the dark lines of freshly ploughed fields. Wooburn was a ferme ornée (a so-called ornamented or ornamental farm), a style of garden that combined the beauty of a pleasure ground with the agricultural elements of a working farm. It was this fusion that so intrigued and attracted Jefferson. He had read about it in Whately’s Observations, which had praised the merging of the “simple delights” of country life with the elegance of groves of flowering shrubs and trees. Whately had described the “bleating of the sheep,” the “tinklings of the bell-wether” and the “clucking of poultry” that animated the scene.
The “ornamented” part of Wooburn consisted of groves and shrubberies that bordered the paths, which were woven around the fields and meadows like colorful ribbons. According to garden fashions, the shrubberies graduated gently from low-growing scented flowers at the front to tall trees at the back, just as Washington had done in Mount Vernon. And though early April was not the most spectacular season to admire the diversity of the planting, Jefferson could already see a hint of what would come. He had missed the flowering of the snowdrops and crocuses but instead there were graceful bluish purple Canterbury bells, bright yellow Narcissus jonquilla and the paler primroses. Most of the shrubs were still naked and neither the rambling honeysuckles nor jasmines were yet in flower, but the crab apples in the last row of the border were covered in white blossom and the alders were dripping with yellowish pendulant catkins.
When Philip Southcote had designed Wooburn Farm in the 1730s, he had been the first to coalesce the necessities of farm life with the seemingly incongruous fashions of pleasure gardens. Across the Atlantic Washington had made a step toward this when he had decided to place his kitchen gardens next to the bowling green and shrubberies in Mount Vernon, but he had shied away from integrating vegetable plots and fields among his shrubberies. In fact, just as Jefferson was admiring Wooburn’s blend of the aesthetic and the practical, Washington’s slaves were raising, brick by brick, the new walls of the bullet-shaped Upper and Lower Gardens—the demarcation between the flowering shrubs around the bowling green and the fruit trees and vegetables. Wooburn’s unique combination of beautiful groves with tidy farmland struck a chord with Jefferson’s vision of America as a continent of both sublime beauty and vast lands that would feed the nation. The grandeur and majesty of forests was united with the fertile lands that, divided into neat fields, would bring wealth to the country. On a small scale Wooburn combined just that—beautiful groves with tidy farmland.
But Wooburn was also a horticultural reflection of the dichotomy of Jefferson’s own character: his lifelong quest for moneymaking crops and useful vegetables versus his delight in ornamental plants; the contrast between the farmer and the connoisseur; and the tension between his attempts to run a profitable plantation and his insatiable love for beautiful things
, just as he idealized a simple agrarian society while indulging in prodigal shopping trips in London and Paris.
Thomas Jefferson has often been described as an enigma. He was a slave owner who declared that all men were equal; a man who insisted he had no political ambition yet spent much of his life in politics. He would become the president of the United States but he saw himself foremost as farmer, gardener and philosopher. His character was so multilayered and often contradictory that successive generations have celebrated and identified with utterly different aspects of him, while leaders from every corner of the political spectrum have been able to claim “their” part of Jefferson for their own agenda. Jefferson himself famously described the conflicting forces inside him in a love letter that took the form of a long dialogue between the “Heart” and the “Head.” While on the surface this letter revealed the internal battle of a man enchanted by a woman, it also helps us to understand Jefferson’s attitude toward nature and his plantation.
When the Heart talked about the garden at Monticello, Jefferson described a place of breathtaking beauty: “With what majesty do we there ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! And the glorious Sun, when rising as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, and giving life to all nature!” This was not a description of a working plantation but a rapturous eulogy on America’s landscape. Yet his Head asserted, soberly, that “Everything in this world is [a] matter of calculation,” advising the Heart to “Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand.” And just as the Heart and the Head were torn between emotions and reason, so Jefferson was torn at Monticello between beauty and utility.