From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you've seen before. “Illuminating and engrossing.... The reader relives the first decades of the Republic ... through the words of the statesmen themselves.” —The New York Times Book Review For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation. Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.

Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction A New York Times Editors' Choice Selection The untold story of Hamilton’s—and Burr’s—personal physician, whose dream to build America’s first botanical garden inspired the young Republic. On a clear morning in July 1804, Alexander Hamilton stepped onto a boat at the edge of the Hudson River. He was bound for a New Jersey dueling ground to settle his bitter dispute with Aaron Burr. Hamilton took just two men with him: his “second” for the duel, and Dr. David Hosack. As historian Victoria Johnson reveals in her groundbreaking biography, Hosack was one of the few points the duelists did agree on. Summoned that morning because of his role as the beloved Hamilton family doctor, he was also a close friend of Burr. A brilliant surgeon and a world-class botanist, Hosack—who until now has been lost in the fog of history—was a pioneering thinker who shaped a young nation. Born in New York City, he was educated in Europe and returned to America inspired by his newfound knowledge. He assembled a plant collection so spectacular and diverse that it amazes botanists today, conducted some of the first pharmaceutical research in the United States, and introduced new surgeries to America. His tireless work championing public health and science earned him national fame and praise from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander von Humboldt, and the Marquis de Lafayette. One goal drove Hosack above all others: to build the Republic’s first botanical garden. Despite innumerable obstacles and near-constant resistance, Hosack triumphed when, by 1810, his Elgin Botanic Garden at last crowned twenty acres of Manhattan farmland. “Where others saw real estate and power, Hosack saw the landscape as a pharmacopoeia able to bring medicine into the modern age” (Eric W. Sanderson, author of Mannahatta). Today what remains of America’s first botanical garden lies in the heart of midtown, buried beneath Rockefeller Center. Whether collecting specimens along the banks of the Hudson River, lecturing before a class of rapt medical students, or breaking the fever of a young Philip Hamilton, David Hosack was an American visionary who has been too long forgotten. Alongside other towering figures of the post-Revolutionary generation, he took the reins of a nation. In unearthing the dramatic story of his life, Johnson offers a lush depiction of the man who gave a new voice to the powers and perils of nature.

Thomas Jefferson is best known as one of the founders of the United States. His chief love, however, was not politics, but farming. His writings abound with expressions of loathing for the former and perpetual fascination for the latter. "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens," he wrote to John Jay in 1785. While his contributions to the field of government overshadow his many other accomplishments, he also made many brilliant and expert contributions to the development of sustainable, regenerative methods of farming. The 11 chapters address a variety of issues that shaped Jefferson's farming including his methods, crops, alternative crops he promoted, farm machinery, his workers (overseer, slaves, and free workmen). Monticello, landscaping practices, and his plans for a school of botany at the University of Virginia. This book also brings to the fore the human qualities of the man in relation to both his family and his country and shows that his aspirations for both were habitually put before his own. Here is yet another way to understand that without Thomas Jefferson, America would have become a different nation.

Journals and letters, translated from the original French, bring Michaux’s work to modern readers and scientists Known to today’s biologists primarily as the “Michx.” at the end of more than 700 plant names, André Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America. Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, André Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785–1797 is the first complete English edition of Michaux’s American journals. This copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger scientific context of the day. To carry out his mission, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships—debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild animals, even shipwreck—that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of Madagascar.

The story of a girl who paddles her canoe out to the tree islands to learn the plant traditions of her people is presented to help readers learn the patterns that will help them correctly match many species of plants to their proper families.

Thomas Jefferson recorded weather observations, experimented with plant species, kept a pet mockingbird, and turned the entry hall at Monticello into a veritable natural history museum with elk and moose antlers, a grizzly bear claw, and the fossilized jaws of a mastodon. Jefferson wrote with lyrical flair about the landscapes of his mountaintop home, as he did in a 1786 letter to his friend Maria Cosway: How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! Jefferson's deep interest in the natural world -- from the flora and fauna of Albemarle County to the exotic specimens gathered by Lewis and Clark on their trek to the Pacific -- and how it shaped his life as a philosopher, farmer, and Founding Father is the subject of A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History. --from publisher description.

A revised and updated edition of the internationally bestselling classic Anna Pavord's now classic, internationally bestselling sensation, The Tulip, is not a gardening book. It is the story of a flower that has driven men mad. Greed, desire, anguish and devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip from a wild flower of the Asian steppes to the worldwide phenomenon it is today. No other flower carries so much baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behaviour, mirrors economic booms and busts, plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution. Why did the tulip dominate so many lives through so many centuries in so many countries? Anna Pavord, a self-confessed tulipomaniac, spent six years looking for answers, roaming through eastern Turkey and Central Asia to tell how a humble wild flower made its way along the Silk Road and eventually took the whole of Western Europe by storm. Sumptuously illustrated from a wide range of sources, this irresistible volume has become a bible, a unique source book, a universal gift and a joy to all who possess it. This beautifully redesigned edition features a new Preface by the author, a revised listing of the best varieties of this incomparable flower to choose for your garden and a reorganised listing of tulip species to reflect the latest thinking by taxonomists.

"Not since Jefferson himself has anyone combined such love and knowledge of all that blooms and grows and bears fruit at Monticello as does Peter Hatch.... History, pomology, the mind of Thomas Jefferson, the best of many worlds in scholarship and nature, are all to be found here, as well as a number of surprises.... The book is at once thorough, authoritative, and a pleasure to read. For it’s not only that the author knows his subject as does no one else, but that he has the natural ability as a writer to include us in its pleasures."—David McCullough Anyone who didn’t already know that fruit-growing looks more romantic from the outside than the inside will come away from the book recognizing that a working ‘fruitery’ is a hard-won achievement. "As seen here, Monticello fascinatingly crystallized an age full of promise, puzzlement, and contradictions. It was a place quintessentially Jeffersonian: the creation of a man who loved experimenting with unions of the useful and the beautiful."— Los Angeles Times "This is an intriguing book. It took Hatch 10 years to write a book that will appeal to pomologists, backyard fruit growers, historians, and politicians. That is a wide sweep and Hatch does it magnificently."— Richmond Times-Dispatch "Illustrated both with old drawings and photographs as well as recent color photographs of the varieties, this book has an astonishing amount of historical detail.... Those interested in early American fruit culture and the dawn of horticulture (which were nearly synonymous) will find no better account than this."— Horticulture "Beautifully illustrated, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Jefferson, or the history of American horticulture." — Traditional Gardening Lavishly illustrated, Peter Hatch’s The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello is not only a detailed history of Jefferson’s gardens and their re-creation but a virtual encyclopedia of early American pomology. Peter J. Hatch is Director of Gardens and Grounds at Monticello and the author of The Gardens of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson’s Flower Garden at Monticello (Virginia).