The Founding Gardeners: How The Revolutionary Generation Created An American Eden

Synopsis

'A history book for gardeners; a gardening book for historians' A follow-up to the award-winning Andrea Wulf's critically acclaimed history of British gardening, this is the story of how George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison's passion for nature, plants, agriculture and gardens shaped the birth of America. Through a series of vignettes spanning the Declaration of Independence to the death of Adams and Jefferson exactly fifty years to the day afterwards - stories that weave the political, the personal and the botanical and are in turns funny, fascinating and moving - The Founding Gardeners shows is that it is impossible to understand these visionary men and the American nation without considering their love of gardening.