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

From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you've seen before.

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.

• The Brother Gardeners: A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
• American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
• "A Rich Spot of Earth": Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Garden at Monticello
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
• Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens
• A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future
• The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives
• The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession
• The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science