Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation

From the author of the acclaimed The Brother Gardeners, a fascinating look at the founding fathers from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen, and farmers.
For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating. Andrea Wulf reveals for the first time this aspect of the revolutionary generation. She describes how, even as British ships gathered off Staten Island, George Washington wrote his estate manager about the garden at Mount Vernon; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; how a trip to the great botanist John Bartram’s garden helped the delegates of the Constitutional Congress break their deadlock; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. These and other stories reveal a guiding but previously overlooked ideology of the American Revolution.
Founding Gardeners adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the American experiment and provides us with a portrait of the founding fathers as they’ve never before been seen.

• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
• The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession
• The Brother Gardeners: A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
• The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives
• A Rich Spot of Earth: Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Garden at Monticello
• Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens
• Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book
• The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt (Pantheon Graphic Library)
• Jefferson's Garden