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Zusatztext 87207175 Informationen zum Autor Marta McDowell’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Woman’s Day, Country Gardening, and elsewhere. Her previous books include Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, All the Presidents’ Gardens, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, Unearthing The Secret Garden, and Gardening Can Be Murder. She consults for public gardens and private clients, writes and lectures on gardening topics, and teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, where she studied landscape design. She lives, writes, and gardens in Chatham, New Jersey. Klappentext Hail to the red, white, and blue—and green! From the most momentous events in our nation’s history to our fleeting cultural obsessions, the White House grounds have been a mirror of America. With wit and insight, garden historian Marta McDowell traces the fascinating story of how our presidents and their families have left their imprint upon the eighteen acres surrounding the executive mansion. Far more than just an account of Lincoln’s goats, Ike’s putting green, and Kennedy’s roses, All the Presidents’ Gardens delves into the thrilling and the heart-breaking events that have shaped our national consciousness. Vorwort All the Presidents' Gardens tells the untold history of the White House Grounds. Starting with the seed-collecting, plant-obsessed George Washington and now revised updated to include the Biden administration, this rich and compelling narrative reveals how the story of the garden is also the story of America. Preface The United States was too big. For a topic, that is. When my editor suggested I might write a history of American gardening, I sat at my desk. Stunned. It seemed a subject broad as a sea of grass, long and muddy as the Mississippi, elusive as a white whale that would, after a mad, obsessed chase, drag me under. Regional differences are vast. What grows happily for friends in Denver sulks, then dies, in my humid New Jersey garden. Then there are questions of influence that vary across the wide waist of the continent: the Spanish with their patio and courtyard gardens from Florida to California, the tidy colonial gardens of New England, the immense plantations of the antebellum South. And with more than five-plus centuries, depending on how you count, the players involved in American horticulture and landscape design are legion. Two people convinced me to take on this quest—one dead, one alive. The reason I study, teach, and write about garden history is because of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872–1959). On my first visit to the grounds of Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown in the 1980s, I was smitten with it and Farrand, its designer, one of the country’s first landscape architects. It was about Beatrix Farrand that I taught my first class at the New York Botanical Garden. Some years later one of my landscape history students, Seamus Maclennan, chose the White House grounds as the topic for his final project. It was riveting, a fifteen-minute chronicle of change in one of America’s most recognizable landscapes. There were victory gardens and flowerbeds, glasshouses and putting greens, all set in the context of American history. For the problem now before me, it would set bounds, but also pull in a cast of characters and a VIP setting. Before I embarked on this undertaking Seamus graciously gave me leave to use his idea, proving once again, if you want to hum along with the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, “that if you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.” Even with this approach, given the number of presidents plus first ladies, gardeners, architects, and the like, I’ve had to impose some economies in terms of scope. If, for example, Zachary Taylor is your favorite president, you will be disappointed. As neither he nor his wife ...
