Planting a dream

Every schoolboy knows the story of six-year-old George Washington taking his ‘little hatchet’ to his mother’s prized cherry tree.

Every schoolboy knows the story of six-year-old George Washington taking his ‘little hatchet’ to his mother’s prized cherry tree. Less well known is that in later years he more than made up for this childish piece of vandalism by planting thousands of trees on his estate at Mount Vernon. Gardening became such a passion that even while defending Manhattan against the British in July 1776 Washington found time to work on planting schemes.

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It was a passion shared by several of America’s other founding fathers, including the three presidents who followed Washington in office: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In this fascinating and well-researched book Andrea Wulf shows that gardening was not simply a gentlemanly pursuit for these men, but was politically and philosophically bound up with their notions about creating a new country.

Wulf even argues that ‘it’s impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners’. Having thrown off the yoke of British colonialism, America needed to become self-sufficient, and the notion of a society in which everyone had their own plot of land was enormously attractive. Bad farming practices meant that much of the land already in cultivation in Virginia (where three of the founding fathers had large estates) had been exhausted by tobacco monoculture, and Washington devoted both time and land to experimenting with new crops. The initial split among the founding fathers into what would eventually become Republicans and Democrats was essentially an argument between the agrarian vision of Jefferson, the country’s first secretary of state, and the mercantile one of its first secretary to the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.