by Andrea Wulf
Addison’s imaginary garden was an allegory of honor and virtue, values that the revolutionary generation held dear. He had described, for instance, a Temple of Honour to which men who had promoted “the good of their country” could retire—a sentiment that Adams and Jefferson shared. What Cobham had done at Stowe was to make Addison’s allegorical landscape real. As Adams and Jefferson strolled along the gravel paths, past dozens of temples and statues, they walked through a story of political dissent.
On a grass mound and enveloped in evergreen laurel, just as Addison had described it, stood the flawless classical Temple of Ancient Virtue housing Greek philosophers, lawgivers and thinkers that embodied wisdom, virtue and moderation. Opposite it and within sight—as if engaged in a political dialogue—was the Temple of Modern Virtue. Cobham had deliberately built it as a ruin to illustrate the moral decline caused by the prime minister’s corruption and political hold over Parliament. And if this allusion was not strong enough, Cobham had also placed a headless statue dressed in contemporary clothes next to the ruin—it did not take a huge leap of imagination to identify the figure as the prime minister Robert Walpole.
The crumbling ruin of the Temple of Modern Virtue with the headless statue to the far left and the elegant Temple of Ancient Virtue at Stowe—illustrations from Stowe’s guidebook (Illustration credit 2.1)
Anything that criticized the British government as depraved would have delighted Adams and Jefferson, for whom “it was certainly the most corrupt and unprincipled government on earth.” Yet what Cobham had created in Stowe went even further, for it aligned the venality and debauchery of England with an inevitable collapse of the entire country. If England followed her path of vice, she would fall just like the crumbling structure of the Temple of Modern Virtue.
Such a message would have resonated with the two statesmen, for despite their optimism about the new republic both were aware that just as the mighty Roman republic had fallen through debauchery, gluttony and corruption, America too could succumb to such evils if it was not careful. Everywhere in Europe Jefferson and Adams had been appalled by the love for luxury and utter laxity of morals that they feared could easily descend on their young nation and bring about its downfall. “My dear Country men! how shall I perswade you, to avoid the Plague of Europe?,” Adams wrote home, as if the vice of Europe was somehow infectious. Young men and women were particularly susceptible to the seductions of the Old World. It was wrong to send them to England and France for their education, Jefferson warned, because “There is a great deal of ill to be learnt here.” Luxury had “bewitching Charms,” Adams echoed, declaring that if he had the power he would banish from America “all Gold, silver, precious stones, Alabaster, Marble, Silk, Velvet and Lace.” Americans should lead a simpler life away from the hedonistic excesses of Europe and follow a path of civic duty, not individual gratification. The indulgence in luxury made people weak and effeminate, thereby corrupting a society, while public virtue, Adams insisted, was “the only Foundation of Republics.”
As Adams and Jefferson walked along, these fundamental beliefs of the revolutionary generation were reflected in Cobham’s garden. Opposite the Temple of Modern Virtue, on the far bank of a snaking river, they saw the Temple of British Worthies, which eulogized those who had stood for such public virtue. This was Cobham’s answer to the “Temple of Honour” in Addison’s essay. In sixteen niches, Cobham had placed busts of British heroes divided into men of action and of ideas, including King Alfred, Edward the “Black Prince,” and William III—all embodiments of the Whig ideals, representing freedom and liberty, for they had fought against the shackles of tyranny.5 Adams admired the celebration of virtuous exemplars who served the public good. And Jefferson, with his passion for Enlightenment thinking and science, realized that this kind of monument to leaders and thinkers was exactly what he wanted for Monticello: a pantheon of heroes who stood for liberty and virtue as well as lauding the advances of science, political philosophy and exploration.
The Temple of British Worthies at Stowe (Illustration credit 2.2)
A few months after the visit to Stowe, Jefferson began to compile his own collection. Like Cobham, he acquired Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke (“my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,” Jefferson said), as well as William Shakespeare, seventeenth-century parliamentarian John Hampden and explorer Walter Raleigh. To Raleigh he would later add Columbus, Magellan, Vespucci and Cortez, as “our country should not be without the portraits of its first discoverers.” And because he would celebrate America’s revolutionaries instead of princes and kings, Jefferson asked Adams for his portrait “to add it to those of other principal American characters which I have or shall have.” Among many others that he acquired were portraits and busts of Franklin, Washington, Madison and Thomas Paine. Probably inspired by Cobham’s temple, Jefferson would later call his paintings and busts “my American worthies”—the largest private collection of American heroes in the country.
Continuing their tour of Stowe, Adams and Jefferson found yet more inspiration when they came across sheep which seemed to be grazing in the midst of the garden. Only when they came closer did they see how these pastures had been separated from the pleasure grounds by a deep ditch that encircled the entire garden. This was a ha-ha,6 the most revolutionary gardening device of the eighteenth century. Because cattle couldn’t cross the ditch, a ha-ha provided the same security as a fence or a wall (keeping the animals outside the ornamental garden) without spoiling the views. Instead of high walls that screened the wider landscape from the garden, the ha-ha allowed panoramic vistas across the surrounding countryside. Across England, the ha-ha had liberated gardens from their brick corsets. And in the United States Washington had already built one in Mount Vernon at the back of his house in the months after the Declaration of Independence and was about to begin the construction of another at the front of his garden. Both Adams and Jefferson would follow, building their own to incorporate vistas of the rugged American landscape—as well as pastures, farm buildings and orchards—into their garden views.
When Adams and Jefferson had finished their tour, they thought Stowe to be so “superb” that they spontaneously decided to go further north to visit more gardens. “We have Seen Magnificence, Elegance and Taste enough to excite an Inclination to see more,” Adams wrote to Abigail, and with no word from Carmarthen about the draft treaty there was nothing stopping them from extending their tour further. They leafed through their garden guide deciding where to go and as the checkerboard of manured fields and pastures passed their carriage window, they had hours during which they could discuss their farms back in America—Adams’s modest homestead in New England and Jefferson’s large plantation in Virginia.
In the evenings over veal chops, jellies and sherry in the taverns, they could also reflect on the gardens they’d seen. Jefferson, the obsessive list maker, noted how many gardeners and laborers were needed in order “to estimate the expence of making and maintaining a garden in that style,” while Adams just enjoyed the pleasure of walking through the gardens, thinking that they “were the highest Entertainment.” Now he and Jefferson wanted to see The Leasowes near Birmingham, Adams wrote to Abigail, the garden created by William Shenstone, a poet and gardener whom Jefferson much admired for his pastoral verse that hailed rural life.
For most tourists, however, the most popular attraction in the Midlands was Matthew Boulton’s famous Soho factory in Birmingham and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. They came from around the world to see Boulton’s assembly-line production of toys, candlesticks and other metal objects as well Josiah Wedgwood’s labor-saving manufacture at the pottery works Etruria in Stoke-on-Trent. “I had lords and ladies to wait on yesterday,” Boulton had boasted some years previously, “I have Spaniards today; and tomorrow I shall have Germans, Russians and Norwegians.” But for Adams and Jefferson a quick look around the city and a brief stop at a “manufactory of Paintings upon Paper”
was quite enough. They didn’t envisage America as an industrial country and therefore had no time for factories or manufacturers—“it would be a waste,” Jefferson said. He liked to get out of cities as quickly as possible. “I make a job of it,” he explained, “and generally gulp it all down in a day.” Instead they headed west to The Leasowes.
Like Wooburn Farm, The Leasowes revealed its status as an ornamental farm through its name—laeswe was Old English for “pasture” or “meadow,” and Leasowes is pronounced like “meadows.” It was, however, not just an exercise in rusticity. Inspired by classical poetry, The Leasowes was a metaphor for a republican and simple way of life, influenced by the writings of Homer and Virgil, for whom working the soil was a model of republican virtue. The poet Alexander Pope—read by both Adams and Jefferson—had popularized these pastoral verses when he translated them to English. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, as industrialization, emerging sprawling cities and the boom in manufacturing threatened rural life, the notion of a bucolic world became even more potent in Britain. The industrious farmer untainted by avarice became the hope for the future—a world of ordered simplicity and Arcadian rhythm.
Jefferson was familiar with Shenstone’s ideas and work, having copied lines from the poems into his garden notebook, and he had read Shenstone’s Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening. From the early 1740s until his death in 1763, Shenstone had created a garden that consisted of a farm with a circuit walk studded with seats, urns and pastoral inscriptions evoking a bucolic idyll. Once again Jefferson had come prepared, reading not only Whately’s account in the Observations but also Joseph Heely’s Letters on the Beauties of Hagley, Envil and the Leasowes and William Shenstone’s works, which included Robert Dodsley’s Description of The Leasowes. Equipped with these books, reading while walking, Jefferson compared the writing with reality and took note of what he did and didn’t like. Together with Adams, he walked up a hill that formed the southern boundary of the garden to find an octagonal seat among a circle of firs on the highest point. The landscape rolled out toward Wales in the northwest to the “blue distant mountains that skirt the horizon.” The view must have reminded Jefferson of the prospect from Monticello’s summit, where he was able to see the Blue Ridge Mountains that lay like crooked spines along the western border of Virginia.
They followed exactly Dodsley’s map, which numbered the points of interest and Jefferson commented in his journal that the “landscape at No. 18. and prospect at 32. are fine.” But Jefferson was disappointed to discover that Shenstone had not been bolder in integrating the agricultural element. “This is not even an ornamented farm,” he complained, “it is only a grazing farm with a path round it,” because instead of vegetable plots and fields, there were only pastures and meadows. Adams by contrast adored the “Variety of Beauties” on such a small scale. It was “the simplest and plainest,” he wrote, and “the most rural of all.”
As they reflected on what they had seen, the most exciting revelation of all was that the English garden was not really English at all. For the gardens they had explored during their tour were densely populated with American trees and shrubs. There were tall white pines, with their long feathery plumes of needles, and shortleaf pine, the most common yellow pine in the former colonies. Familiar shrubs such as rhododendrons and mountain laurels provided the green backbone to the shrubberies during the winter months and brought sculptured blooms in late spring. These were the groves and clumps that had grown from John Bartram’s seeds and cones over the previous five decades.
Wherever Adams and Jefferson visited, they encountered scores of trees and shrubs that reminded them of home, ranging from the flowering dogwoods, which were already wrapped in virginal white blossoms, to American sycamores and birches that were bursting into spring leaf. There were many coniferous trees, such as graceful eastern hemlock and the columnar red cedar, which the Philadelphia farmer and plantsman John Bartram had always included in the seed boxes that he had sent from America to England between the 1730s and his death more than four decades later. At Stowe grew the southern catalpa, found by Bartram in the southern states, as well as the purple-flowering raspberry and mapleleaf viburnum, which, like so many other American forest species, seem to be on fire in autumn. Unlike the more subdued indigenous English species, many of these American imports were prized for the way they created a fiery spectacle when the bloodied foliage of black tupelo would compete with the reds of the maples and the aubergine purple of sweetgums.
John Bartram’s American seed boxes had provided the English gardener with a new palette of hues and shapes that brought variety and colors even to the winter garden. The flowering shrubs, trees and evergreens had completely transformed the English garden and by now, Jefferson and Adams saw, the British were obsessed with American species. Having admired the English garden for so long in his books, it was only now that Jefferson realized how easy it would be to carve such gardens from the American forests, at practically no expense at all, Jefferson said, because “We have only to cut out the superabundant plants.” Adams was similarly thrilled to see so many “rare Shrubbs and Trees, to which Collection America has furnished her full Share” in the English garden. Also at The Leasowes were the ubiquitous tulip poplars and black locusts that laced the sky with a delicate pattern of fresh spring green. Both trees had been introduced to Britain in the 1630s but only when Bartram had sent thousands of seeds had the trees slowly become common in the English parkland. There was arborvitae, one of the first North American coniferous trees to arrive in Europe (in the 1530s), but like the tulip poplar, it had only became widely and cheaply available when Bartram dispatched it regularly.
THE LEASOWES WAS the most northern point of their journey. Heading back south over the next few days, Adams and Jefferson managed to visit Hagley, a 1,000-acre park that Lord Cobham’s nephew George Lyttelton had built in the mid-eighteenth century, and Blenheim, one of the grandest estates in Britain. Here a team of fifty were employed to maintain the pleasure ground alone, Jefferson noted studiously in his journal. These sights made such an impression on them that Adams, years later, advised his son to see the gardens when visiting England, for these estates, he said, “are the greatest Curiosities.” What they had seen, Jefferson wrote to a friend, “indeed went far beyond my ideas.”
By 10 April, just under a week since they had set off, they were back in London, “charmd with the beauties.” They were not so taken, however, with the lack of news from the British ministers. Jefferson dismissed all attempts to negotiate a deal with Britain as “absolutely fruitless.” Instead he went shopping for books, chessmen, ribbons, toothbrushes, muslin and breeches. Because the English were famed for their mechanical arts, he also purchased several instruments that were necessary for architectural drawings and for laying out a landscape garden: a pocket level, a pantograph to enlarge and reduce drawings, a small theodolite, protractors, as well as a pocket graphometer used to transpose drawings onto the landscape, and—continuing the gardening theme—a “botanical microscope.” In between shopping expeditions, Jefferson accompanied Adams and the rest of the family on a day trip to the gardens at Osterley House and Syon House just outside London. Meandering walks led through landscapes that once again featured a great number of American species. “All the Evergreens, Trees and Shrubbs were here,” Adams noted in his diary.
After almost two weeks of waiting for a response from Carmarthen, Jefferson had done all his shopping and seen all the gardens he had wanted to see. “6 weeks have elapsed,” he wrote in frustration, “without one scrip of a pen, or one word from a minister.” Yet although this particular political mission was futile, for Jefferson it ultimately didn’t matter, because “We are young, and can survive them; but their rotten machine must crush under the trial.”
On 25 April, Adams and Jefferson wrote to John Jay, the United States secretary of foreign affairs, summarizing what had been achieved (or not). That day the Portuguese Minister with whom they had also negotiated h
ad accepted their commercial treaty and would send it to Lisbon to be ratified (which it never was), but at the same time they had to accept that no one in Britain was interested in signing a treaty with the United States. Adams and Jefferson also feared that the deal with the Barbary States would be “very tedious and expensive” and “without success.” With no leeway to negotiate because the budget Congress had authorized was so small, there was not much that they could do—it was a mere “drop in the bucket,” Jefferson complained.7
It was time for Jefferson to return to Paris, but not before one last shopping trip at The Vineyard in Hammersmith just outside the city, one of the most prized nurseries in the country. Founded by Lewis Kennedy and James Lee more than four decades previously, the nursery was famed for its vast choice of foreign species. They had received some of the few and precious seeds that Joseph Banks had brought from the Endeavour voyage from Australia in 1771 (they raised the first eucalyptus tree in Britain), while plant collectors from Kew Gardens regularly supplied South African and Asian seeds and bulbs.
Yet none of these precious exotics interested Jefferson—all he wanted to buy were American plants for his friends in France. If the French wanted to create le jardin anglais, they needed the glossy evergreens, spring-flowering shrubs and towering trees of Jefferson’s native forests. When he left for Paris he had in his luggage the seed catalogue of The Vineyard nursery and had ordered more than seventy American plants. It was easier for Jefferson to procure these seeds and saplings from a London nursery than directly from America—only a few months later he would realize just how difficult it was, when the seeds that he had ordered from South Carolina traveled on a roundabout way from Charleston to Paris via New York, Lorient and Le Havre.