Founding Gardeners - The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the

Zusatztext 45771122 Informationen zum Autor ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art and is the author of The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World and Founding Gardeners, The Brother Gardeners , and Chasing Venus , as well as the coauthor (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for The Sunday Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, and she regularly reviews for several newspapers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement. Klappentext 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. Prologue   My first impressions of America were shaped when I went as a young woman on a seven- week road trip across the States, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. We drove hundreds of miles on roads that never curved, along a grid that mankind had imposed on nature. Some days we passed sprawling factories that were pumping out clouds of billowing smoke; other days we saw vast fields that seemed to go on forever. Everything differed in scale from Europe, even suburban America, where rows and rows of painted clapboard houses sit proudly on large open plots of immaculately shorn lawns. America exuded a confidence that seemed to be rooted in its power to harness nature to man’s will and I thought of it as an industrial, larger- than- life country. I certainly never thought of it in terms of gardening— whereas in Britain, everybody seems to be obsessed with their herbaceous borders and vegetable plots. In America, I believed, I was more likely to see someone driving a riding mower than pruning roses.   Then, in 2006, I went to visit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home in Virginia, and began to understand how wrong I had been. On a sunny October morning, I stood on Jefferson’s vegetable terrace, with straight lines of cabbages and squashes at my feet, and saw man and nature in perfect harmony. In the distance the horizon seemed to stretch into infinity; behind me was a manicured lawn lined with ribbons of flowers and, below, a romantic forest that crept into the gardens. The magnificent view from the terrace across the arboreal sea of autumnal reds and oranges of red maples, oaks, hickories and tulip poplars brought together Jefferson’s neat plots of cultivated vegetables and sublime scenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jefferson had combined beauty with utility, the untamed wilderness of the forest with the orderly lines of apples, pears and cherries in the orchard, and colorful native and exotic flowers with a sweeping panorama across Virginia’s spectacular landscape. If nature had been dominated by man, it seemed it was only in order to celebrate it.   Later, I couldn’t put Monticello out of my mind. I was in the midst of writing about th...

Product details

• Authors: Andrea Wulf
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 03.04.2012
• EAN: 9780307390684
• ISBN: 978-0-307-39068-4
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book