8
Three Men, Two Nations, One Passion
eighteenth century
In the age of revolution, edible gardens influenced the course of history.
They were contemporaries and they shared a passionate, decisions-determining interest in horticulture. For Joseph Banks, it was his only interest. King George iii loved agriculture and horticulture so much he came to be known as “Farmer George.” Thomas Jefferson said, “There is no occupation so pleasant to me as the cultivation of the earth.”
Each man contributed to a new design idea that had but brief popularity in the eighteenth century. Today, however, people seek foods grown without pesticides and the environmentally aware want locally grown produce to reduce the fossil fuel required for transport. Others look for heirloom or unusual fruits and vegetables. For all, the answer lies in the ferme ornée, the ornamental farm, the edible garden as it is variously called, now one of the most advocated, written about, and executed of garden plans. Combining vegetables and flowers, ornament and utility makes sense in our small and therefore multipurpose gardens.
Moreover, horticulture played a role in important political events of the times. Jefferson was the third president of the United States and King George iii ruled longer than any other British monarch before Victoria. Both led their nations at a momentous time in history. The embattled farmers of Massachusetts may have, as Emerson correctly reported, “fired the shot heard ’round the world” but plants and seeds also played a role, one usually and mistakenly ignored by historians. Landscape design reflects a culture. In this case it helped to shape the culture.
The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.
—Thomas Jefferson
The lives of Thomas Jefferson, King George iii, and Joseph Banks coincided almost exactly. The king was born in 1738, just five years before Jefferson and Banks. He died in 1820 as did Banks, six years before Jefferson. The king and Banks were close friends and associates, at times seeing each other daily. Jefferson, presented at the English court, was understandably received only briefly and coolly. He may or may not have met Banks, though they certainly knew each other by reputation. But his life and role as national leader intersected profoundly with those of George iii and Joseph Banks.
A portrait of Thomas Jefferson when he was secretary of state under George Washington, by Charles Willson Peale.
Joseph Banks, seated, with Daniel Solander, protégé of Linnaeus, and Bora-Boran Mai, the second Pacific Islander to visit Europe.
Had Thomas Jefferson not written the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, served as governor of Virginia and secretary of state, vice president and then president of the United States, negotiated French support in the early years of the new republic, purchased for the United States the vast Louisiana Territory, founded the University of Virginia, or been an accomplished architect and inventor, he still would have gone down in history for his role in introducing new landscape design principles and advancing the knowledge of horticulture in his new nation. His knowledge of and devotion to horticulture may well have contributed to his diplomatic and political success.
Joseph Banks was the son of wealthy English parents. At school Latin and Greek instruction passed him by. Instead he applied his quick mind to plants, first roaming the fields around his Lincolnshire home and then those near his schools Eton and Oxford. Later he dogged the heels of Superintendent Philip Miller at the Physic Garden when his widowed mother moved to Chelsea. He soon became known as one of England’s most knowledgeable naturalists and botanists.
Then, in 1768, the chance of a lifetime came his way. The great explorer James Cook, commanding hms Endeavour, was to explore the South Seas. Without hesitation, Banks signed on as naturalist for the three-year voyage, knowing that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new plants awaited his discovery there.
King George iii ascended the throne at age twenty-two. Like Banks and Jefferson and so many others in the eighteenth century, he was besotted with agriculture and horticulture, critics accusing Farmer George of spending so much time pursuing agriculture that he neglected other kingly duties. In his own time and subsequently he has been evaluated variously. Was he the tyrant that Americans believed him to be or was he merely doing his duty in enforcing Westminster’s laws regarding taxation? For a long time he remained adamant about not losing the American colonies but finally acquiesced. Could it be that horticulture played a role in his willingness to surrender?
Ipswich, Massachusetts
When Thomas Jefferson developed his ideas of the ferme ornée he began with the several and varied traditions of American colonial garden design that were both utilitarian and decorative. John Whipple House is an early example of the utilitarian.
New England winters were harsh. When the baby came down with whooping cough in the middle of a seventeenth-century January night, it was critical that his mother had grown and dried scarlet pimpernel. All summer she would plant, tend, and harvest this and other medicinal herbs to prepare potions to cure the diseases winter was bound to bring. And she needed her garden near the house, enabling her to keep an eye on both baby and stew pot as she planted and weeded. Practicality, not aesthetics, was the prime consideration for those carving a living out of the wilderness.
The earliest American settlements were forts, evolving eventually into fortified communities. Only after many years—a century in some locations—was it possible to let down the guard and enjoy a relatively safe and peaceful existence. Only then were flowers and other ornamentals introduced. Some, such as the useful and attractive calendula, feverfew, pot marigold, tansy, and gallica rose ‘Apothecary’, fulfilled both criteria.
Captain John Whipple built the first rooms in his Ipswich, Massachusetts, home in 1677. His son and grandson each made additions until, with fourteen rooms, local residents called it “the Mansion.” Medicinal and culinary herbs interspersed with flowers occupied the beds in the front of the house. Sweet-smelling lilacs, able to withstand cold weather and biting wind, framed the front door at John Whipple House then as they do today.
The vegetable garden and orchard were also planted near the house, customary in most colonial American gardens for practical reasons. The housewife’s or kitchen garden as it was variously called was located in the front, back, or side yard depending on the house’s orientation to the sun and other conditions such as wind or ocean spray. The land was cleared around the house for some distance since dangers lurked in the forest. Seeing hostile Indians from a distance allowed time to bolt the doors and load the musket.
Fences encircled gardens to protect from hungry animals, wild or domestic. Split timber was the available material. Building upon memories of England, the colonists laid out their gardens geometrically, often using the paradise form with quadrants around a central point. Paths of gravel or crushed shells gave easy access to the planting beds. Colonial gardens such as that at John Whipple House were the beginning of the ferme ornée in America.
The rail fence and planting beds seen from a second story window at Whipple House.
A triangle forms the basis of design at Middleton Place where the eighteenth-century garden remains the oldest surviving European-style landscape in America.
near Charleston, South Carolina
The Middletons of South Carolina were to the American South as the Adamses were to New England and the Roosevelts to New York. A leading family for generations, they were plantation owners, growing rice in the coastal region near Charleston. Henry Middleton inherited the property from his father in 1741 and began creating the gardens. Following André Le Nôtre’s principles of symmetry, balance, order, and focal and vantage points set within a precise geometric form, he used one hundred slaves for a decade to construct his sixty-five-acre garden.
The house stood atop a forty-foot bluff, a topographical feature unusual in the low country of the Carolinas, commanding a straight view to the Ashley River. Henry Middleton, with the help of an English gardener, extended this axis in the opposite direction, using it as one leg of the right triangle. The second side was formed by a reflection canal, the third by a line through the centers of three smaller geometric gardens with shape-defining hedges, some pruned as trapezoids. Flowers, simple topiary, birdbaths, and urns adorn these gardens, all surrounded by the magnificent live oaks native to the area.
The butterfly-shaped garden has astounded visitors since its creation. A bowling green bordered by the flower beds and divided by an axial path leads from what was once the house’s center to the grassy terraces and symmetrical, man-made lakes that suggest the blue wings of the butterfly.
Designed to be purely ornamental, Middleton Place is a study in peacefulness and prosperity. It was not so with the Middleton family. Henry Middleton was a member and, for a few days, presiding officer of the Continental Congress, resigning when the talk of seeking independence from Britain became serious and intense. His son took his place and countered his father’s position by signing the Declaration of Independence.
Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), an epiphyte, drips from the live oak (Quercus virginiana) in the octagonal garden at Middleton Place.
Middleton Place’s graceful and pensive wood nymph has lived in the garden since 1810.
The enchanting butterfly-shaped garden at Middleton Place is perfectly symmetrical.
Generals Lafayette and Washington at Mount Vernon in a painting by Thomas Rossiter.
Mount Vernon, Virginia
For generations American schoolchildren learned that George Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” First in Washington’s heart was his home, Mount Vernon, overlooking the Potomac River near the nation’s capital that bears his name. Here Washington rested from presiding at the Continental Congress, leading the army in the War of Independence, and serving as first president of the United States. Here he returned to his beloved family, his honored staff, and to farming that was his first profession and his declared first interest. The designed landscape, its utilitarian purpose set within an aesthetically pleasing plan, the ferme ornée, illustrates traits of Washington himself and characteristics of the new republic.
His design for the approach to the house is an interesting combination of styles prevailing in Europe and America in the eighteenth century. Immediately in front of the symmetrical house is a turf circle, itself surrounded by a circular carriageway allowing his many and frequent guests to arrive easily at the main entrance. The two roads that feed into the circle are likewise geometric and symmetrical, but they incorporate the serpentine lines that were becoming popular in England and Europe. A bowling green lies between the roads. Oak and hickory trees, now of great size, line the roadway. Sadly, the American chestnuts that Washington planted fell to blight in the twentieth century. The house is flanked by curving porticoes ending in small buildings that form a semicircle, contrasting with the serpentine lines of river and carriage road.
The east lawn between the house and river was designed in the planned natural style of Capability Brown, complete with a ha-ha that kept the farm animals from the house while ensuring an unbroken view to the river. When Washington in his travels up and down the eastern seaboard encountered new trees or shrubs, he came home with saplings including the eastern redbud, dogwood, and mountain laurel for planting at Mount Vernon.
Committed though Washington was to creating a beautiful home and landscape, his first interest was in making the property that he had inherited a profitable farm. There was the large Mount Vernon community of family, employees, and slaves to feed and many other needs to be met. Putting his considerable organizational and entrepreneurial skills to work, he established a highly successful farm and ancillary enterprises including fisheries, a gristmill, and a distillery. Livestock were work animals as well as providing meat, butter, milk, wool, leather, and, importantly, fertilizer. Writing to his neighbor and friend George Fairfax on June 20, 1785, Washington declared, “When I speak of a knowing Farmer, I mean one who understands the best course of Crops . . . and above all, Midas like, one who can convert everything he touches into manure as the first transmutation towards Gold.”
Ha-ha, lawn, specimen trees, and shed of Washington’s design as a “repository for dung,” the first known structure in the United States devoted to composting.
Trained as a surveyor, Washington laid out on either side of the house extensive vegetable and herb gardens and orchards. The lower garden on the south side was the kitchen garden, bounded by warm brick walls and espaliered fruit trees lining the walks as wind breaks. Head vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and lettuce were featured. Adjacent was the orchard for apples, apricots, cherries, peaches, and pears.
The upper garden to the north featured a large greenhouse and a botanical garden that served as nursery and research station for new plants. The garden outside of the orangery combined ornamentals and vegetables, a style that was gaining popularity in England, France, and the United States. A parterre next to one side of the orangery features the fleur-de-lis honoring France for support of the American cause. Seeing it on his visit to Mount Vernon, General Lafayette must have been pleased.
Old traditions and new ideas are woven together in the gardens of Mount Vernon, just as they were in the new American republic. The geometric forms honored the older traditions; the landscape park represented the new democracy. Both republic and garden were eminently practical, places to put hand to plow. Washington, a man of taste, successfully arranged his garden to be as beautiful as it was productive.
With its tool house and espaliered fruit trees, the kitchen garden provided vegetables that Martha Washington declared were “the best part of our living in the country.”
San Carlos Borromeo (Carmel Mission)
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
Had Thomas Jefferson turned 180 degrees from his sights on England and France magically to look west across the North American continent he would have seen another colonial effort, this one founded by a Spanish Franciscan missionary from Mexico. In 1771, just as independence from England was in the East Coast air, Father Junípero Serra founded the second of what would be twenty-one missions in California to Christianize and “civilize” the Esselen Indians and make firm the claim by Spain to the area. The architectural style of the missions would become the inspiration for future California buildings and their furniture. The layout and ornament of the mission gardens, which included elements of the ferme ornée, likewise influenced future landscape and garden design. Two centuries after the founding of the missions, they would be understood as an early stage in the long history of immigration from the south.
Located on the Monterey peninsula near San Francisco, the mission San Carlos Borromeo was named by the recently canonized Junípero Serra to honor the sixteenth-century cardinal and archbishop of Milan. Known for his care of the poor, San Carlos Borromeo (of the same family who built Isola Bella on a Borromeo-owned island in Lake Maggiore) had roundly criticized his colleague Cardinal Gambara for the expense of Villa Lante, declaring that the money should have been used instead for a hospital.
The first years of the California mission saw change and growth. Moved from the original site to a hillside a half mile from the sea, the buildings at the new location were at first log, then adobe. But the greatest change to the mission in the early years was not that of buildings. In 1784 Father Junípero Serra died at the Carmel Mission and was buried in the church.
It was almost a decade before the mission, its church, other facilities, and gardens were made permanent and beautiful. Manuel Ruíz, a master mason from Mexico City, was assigned the job of designer to build a stone church. While English and European landscapes were being changed by the new ideas of Capability Brown, the California missions, including San Carlos Borromeo, relied on older monastic traditions. Ruíz incorporated Moorish elements and in doing so paid homage to Father Serra and his birthplace in Moorish Mallorca.
Like medieval monasteries, the mission of San Carlos Borromeo is enclosed. But unlike many other California missions, the quadrangle is a trapezoid. At its heart, a quatrefoil fountain with tile floor supplies water to the compound, brought from the Carmel River by a simple canal.
On one side lies the basilica, made of sandstone quarried from the nearby Santa Lucia mountains. Lime from abalone shells collected on the beach provided an essential part of the mortar. The church features a Moorish window made from a combination of a circle and a square placed at an angle. The bells are reached by an external staircase, the surrounding walls lush with colorful bougainvillea.
As well as medicinal herbs, foods such as apples, cactus, corn, culinary herbs, grapes, and olives are grown within the enclosure. Bougainvillea, roses, and other decorative flowers make the Carmel Mission a ferme ornée.
The Mexicans, who founded and operated the California missions, were to become one of the largest and most influential of U.S. immigrant populations. With their counterparts from all over the world on the East and West coasts, they would contribute to the American mosaic and give the nation beautiful and popular architectural and garden forms.
Bells call the mission community to worship. The inner courtyard seen here is constructed with the requisite fountain and a cloister as protection from the elements.
Like Alhambra, the Carmel Mission is a study in sun and shade. Thick adobe walls protect interior rooms from the intense heat.
Prickly pear cactus has three edible sections: the pad, the flower petals, and the fruit. It is also used medicinally to treat diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, and viral infections. Decorative, it is a ferme ornée in itself.
Jeffersonia diphylla, or twinleaf, is the only plant named for Thomas Jefferson.
near Charlottesville, Virginia
When notable American botanist Benjamin Smith Barton addressed the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1792, he assigned a new botanical name to a native Virginia plant. He called it Jeffersonia diphylla, justifying his action with these words: “I have had no reference to his political character, or to his reputation for general science and for literature. My business was with his knowledge of natural history. . . . especially of botany and zoology, the information of this gentleman is equaled by that of few persons in the United States.” Thomas Jefferson would not have been displeased, as horticulture was for him a consuming interest, a passion that ran throughout his long life.
The perfect choice to bear the name of Jefferson, the twinleaf has two opposite and equal leaves, separate yet connected. Thomas Jefferson himself had two sides, the one scientific and empirical, the other artistic and imaginative. At Monticello, his beloved Virginia home, he would utilize the landscape design known as the ferme ornée, the ornamental farm, which he described as “articles of husbandry” interspersed with “the attributes of a garden.”
Jefferson had a great and rare gift that he employed in all dimensions of his rich life. He paid close attention to particularities but always placed these within universals. He famously demonstrated this ability in the Declaration of Independence. Beginning the argument not with objections to the stamp and tea tax, he set the logic for separation from Britain within the framework of “self-evident” truths, “all . . . created equal,” “unalienable rights,” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
So it was in his approach to horticulture and landscape design. He sought and understood the larger picture. He favored landscape design that spoke of his democratic principles. He advocated and practiced farming methods including contour plowing which took account of ecology but also declaring that in “point of beauty nothing can exceed the waving lines.” In his horticultural explorations and experiments he looked for ways new plants could aid the economy and better people’s lives such as when, despite the threatening objections of rice growers, he tried growing upland rice. Brought from the South Seas by Captain Bligh, this strain of rice would, he hoped, encourage growers to move from the malaria-infested swamps near the coast.
The small reflecting pool is located perfectly to show the house in its waters. The dark red cockscomb (Celosia cultivar) seen here was among Jefferson’s favorite flowers.
Tom Jefferson was only twenty-three when he began converting the five-thousand-acre tobacco plantation he had inherited into his ferme ornée. He was inoculating cherry trees even before he began building the house on the “little mount,” and soon he was adding white oak and tulip poplars. Observing the plants on his property breaking dormancy, blooming, and dying back, he began recording in his garden and farm journal each stage of their growth. He would maintain and enlarge his records at Monticello for almost sixty years, noting the date of plantings, when vegetables “came to table,” what flourished or failed, and under what weather conditions. With knowledge of surveying acquired from his father, he began drawing plans for ornamental and vegetable gardens, vineyards, and an extensive orchard.
A curving path with flower beds on either side encircles the green turf lawn on the southwest side of Monticello.
He decided to put the house on the top of the hill and chose the style of Italian Andrea Palladio as his architectural model, a style that was then popular in England. It was ideal for Monticello because it allowed views in all four directions of the Virginia countryside.
His first design effort for the gardens at Monticello followed the European geometric style that was in favor at the time. But a trip to England in 1786 changed his mind. Ambassador to France from the brand new United States, he was sent from Paris to England to join John Adams in negotiating with the English. A lull in the proceedings freed him and Adams to visit sixteen English gardens about which he had read, including Stowe, Blenheim, and others designed by Capability Brown, as well as Painshill, Kew Palace, and Stourhead.
Always perceptive, he understood that the new style of gardening was more than a new fashion, that the landscape park style with its curving approach roads was more representative of participatory democracy than were the old axial, allée-lined roads pointing to a central power. An admirer of other aspects of French culture and not wanting to offend in any way the country he was courting for support for his new nation, he never openly criticized French gardens. Yet he did offer his critique of a German garden designed in the French geometric fashion but with a jardin anglais section: “[It] show[s] how much money may be laid out to make an ugly thing, what is called the English quarter, however, relieves the eye from the straight rows of trees, round and square basins which constitute the mass of the garden.” Of England he wrote, “The gardening . . . is the article in which it surpasses all the earth. I mean their pleasure gardening. This, indeed went far beyond my ideas.”
He thought how he might use these new English ideas at Monticello and eventually was the first to adopt the landscape park style for an American garden. He laid out his plan to his granddaughter: “a winding walk surrounding the lawn . . . with a narrow border of flowers on each side.” He was to revise the plan, planting ten-foot oval flower beds at intervals on either side of the path, each containing one kind of flower, and including in the scheme both local woodland treasures and exotics brought from distant shores. Here he could plant his “belles of the day, [which] have their short reign of beauty and splendor, and retire, like them, to the more interesting office of reproduction.” Hyacinths and tulips were superseded by belladonnas, they in turn by the tuberoses. Flowering trees as well as mighty elms, walnuts, and weeping willows provided needed shade and aesthetic pleasure, trees that he described as planted in “clumps.”
Inspired by garden ornament he had seen in England, he sketched more than twenty ideas including a grotto embellished with pebbles from the Rivanna River which lay at the bottom of Monticello mountain and where he planned to put the quotation from Alexander Pope that he had seen at Stourhead. He got as far as building an elegant pavilion in which he would read, rest, and contemplate his garden and the Virginia hills. But his other plans for decoration at Monticello were abandoned when responsibilities to his new nation demanded his time, first as secretary of state under Washington and vice president under John Adams, then as president himself. Away most of these years, he could only write home and direct his daughter and later granddaughters as when, in 1793, his daughter Martha Randolph wrote of insect damage in the vegetable garden. He advised, “This winter we will cover our garden with a heavy coating of manure. When the earth is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance and of the best quality. I suspect that the insects . . . have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants; and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil.” In so analyzing the problem and its solution, he was anticipating the advice that horticulture and agriculture experts give today: feed the soil, not the plant.
Even when he was absent from Monticello, he was, in these years and ever after, working on his vegetable garden, orchards, and vineyards, advising family and slaves, and gathering seeds and plants from afar. At age seventy-six, he described his own eating habits to a doctor, “I have lived moderately, eating little animal food, and that . . . as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.” While he, his family, endless guests, and servants certainly dined on his garden produce, he also purchased household food from his slaves who were allowed land to farm for their own benefit.
But for Jefferson, the extensive plantings at Monticello were above all an experimental station where he could try new plants with the hope that they would thrive, providing income for farmers in the region. In the orchard there were 150 varieties of fruit and nut trees. Ever hopeful about the vineyard, Jefferson replanted it at least six times, trying thirty-six varietals, but disease, insects, and neglect during his absences took their toll. Another disappointment was olives. Although he tried numerous varieties, none survived the Virginia winters.
The crowning glory of Jefferson’s ferme ornée was his vegetable garden, one thousand feet in length. Here on a terrace carved from the sloping hillside he grew seventy species of vegetables started from seeds gathered from many places, some acquired by purchase, others by exchange, still others from plant expeditions.
Among Jefferson’s sources were the nurseries of John Bartram and Bernard McMahon in Philadelphia, Peter Collinson in London, the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and dozens of correspondents near and far. Not least of these was the Comtesse de Tessé, devoted horticulturist and aunt of General Lafayette whom he met while serving as American ambassador to France. They corresponded until her death in 1813, she sending him plants and seeds including those of white heliotrope (Heliotropium arborescens) and Chinese golden rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) which he declared he cherished “with particular attentions, as it daily reminds me of the friendship with which you have honored me.” It was the first grown in America. He in turn sent her a beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), a persimmon tree (Diospyros virginiana), and a sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus). Lafayette and Jefferson were dear and lifelong friends, bound by a common commitment to democracy, to horticulture, and to Madame de Tesse.
The vegetable garden, the pavilion, and in the distance the mountain Jefferson named Montalto. Threatened by developers in the 1970s, the eight-acre twin of the “little mount” was purchased by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation for fifteen million dollars, the same price Jefferson paid for the Louisiana Purchase.
With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 now-President Jefferson acquired from France the entire area today comprising the middle of the country, instantly doubling the nation’s size. Immediately Jefferson set about assembling an exploring party of thirty-three to map and describe the new territory, the party to be led by U.S. Army officers William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. The chief goals were to find a route westward, secure relationships with the Indian tribes inhabiting the area, establish U.S. sovereignty over the vast territory, and research the natural resources including plants. To that end he sent Captain Lewis to Philadelphia to study botany for nine months under the direction of Benjamin Smith Barton. Departing in May 1804 and returning over two years later, the expedition brought plants, seeds, drawings, reports, and maps of the newly acquired territory.
Among the Lewis and Clark Expedition seeds were those from three Indian tribes who hosted the party in the Dakotas, including sunflowers from the Hidatsa, beans from the Arikara, and Mandan red corn, all subsequently planted at Monticello. There Jefferson also grew red peppers (Capsicum annuum ‘Corno di Toro’) from Mexico; French tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus) for which Jefferson may have acquired a taste while ambassador, perhaps at Madame de Tesse’s table; and white eggplant (Solanum melongena) from North Africa.
At age sixty-eight, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend: “I am still devoted to the garden, but though an old man, I am but a young gardener.” In his admission he recognized that from the science of horticulture there is always something yet to discover and that the art of garden design is by its very nature a reflection of ever-changing culture. Both his intellect and imagination remained keen until his death on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
We can only wonder at his achievements in many fields and at his impact on generations and nations. We can only speculate as to how his consuming interest in horticulture shaped his life and thought. Did his knowledge and interest help him to break into the society of Paris when he was but an unseasoned new ambassador? Did his friendship with Madame de Tesse, formed from their shared interest, contribute to Lafayette’s favorable impression of the leaders of the new United States? Did his commitment to gaining knowledge of new plants and the economic possibilities for cultivating them stimulate western settlement of the expanding United States? Is his ferme ornée the basis of our edible garden today and our current rethinking of what constitutes healthy eating? Thomas Jefferson was a primary shaper of American society. His passion for horticulture and landscape design helped shape him.
London, England
The stated purpose of the voyage of hms Endeavour was to document, from the shores of Tahiti, the transit of the planet Venus. But the hidden object was another: to determine if there was truth in the vaguely rumored tales of Terra Australis, a yet-unexplored southern land. The voyage proved to be an early step in the creation of the world-renowned research institution, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The vision behind Kew and its scientific achievements changed the course of political and economic history.
The ship’s captain was Lieutenant James Cook, charged by the voyage’s sponsors—King George iii, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Society—with keeping the second purpose a secret, lest other nations, especially the Dutch, rival the claim Britain would have to any newly found territory. Even the ship’s sailors were kept in the dark until the departure from Tahiti.
Twenty-seven-year-old Joseph Banks, appointed by the king as the official botanist for the voyage, outfitted the ship from his own fortune for the task of documenting the plant life he expected to find. He would not make the mistake of Columbus and Magellan who had brought back no specimens and no drawings from their explorations. To that end he hired his own staff: Daniel Solander, Finnish naturalist Herman Sporing, a scientific secretary, and two artists, one of whom was Sydney Parkinson. Banks also supplied the Endeavor with a library of more than one hundred books for botanical research and artists’ supplies including microscopes, lenses, razors, chemicals for preserving specimens, wax, and several kinds of salt in which to keep seeds. To Cook’s annoyance, the captain’s quarters were appropriated by Banks for his research station. John Ellis, a merchant and amateur naturalist, wrote to Linnaeus that “No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly.”
As the ship made its way along the South American coast and around Cape Horn to Tahiti, Banks, by his collecting, was already making botanical history. Then, departing from Tahiti, Captain Cook steered the Endeavour around the coast of New Zealand and west. Reaching the east coast of Australia, the ship set anchor in what Cook was to name Botany Bay for the rich specimens gathered there. Sailing northward and hugging the coastline, the ship was almost wrecked near the Great Barrier Reef and had to remain for seven weeks of repair while Banks, Solander, and Sporing found a trove of botanical material. Throughout the journey artist Sydney Parkinson drew each specimen, noting its colors. Upon return to London, Banks had each drawing painted in color and then hired eleven engravers to make copperplates for future printing.
Finally, after three long, often dangerous, and always adventure-filled years, the Endeavour docked once again on English shores. Everyone was eager to hear what the returning crew had seen, done, and learned. With his charm and knowledge, Joseph Banks soon became London’s most talked-about and sought-after speaker, lecturing for the Royal Society where he was a member and later, for forty years, president.
Soon after the voyage, King George iii began garden plans for the smallest of the royal palaces. Known as the Dutch house, Kew Palace was conveniently located on the outskirts of London. There the king settled his family, displayed pieces from his extensive art collection, and indulged his interest in the new plants flooding into England from the Americas and around the world.
Lovely as this setting was, it was not long before Farmer George was introducing vegetables into the scheme. Tomatoes were planted but a stone’s throw from the palace itself. Soon there was a whole garden in the ferme ornée style, designed and planted for both beauty and productivity. The king’s consort, Queen Charlotte, supported his enthusiasm. Her way of participating was to develop her own romantic rustic cottage a short walk from the palace itself, a place to retreat for a quiet afternoon alone or picnic on the lawn with the family.
As the romance with farming and rustic village life grew, the ferme ornée became stylish and was adopted elsewhere. Within a few years Charlotte’s counterpart, Marie Antoinette, taken with the country retreat at Chantilly, built her Petit Hameau, a little village surrounding a pond, on the grounds of Versailles. Instead of the traditional French parterres, her little hamlet featured meadows and vegetable gardens to adorn the rustic buildings that included a farmhouse, dovecote, bakery, boudoir, and grange that served when needed as a ballroom.
But in England Kew was more than a place to play at country life. With adequate land and water, and nurseries nearby in Twickenham and Hammersmith, Kew Palace provided the perfect location for King George to develop his interest in and knowledge of horticulture. Now he needed someone to oversee his efforts and develop the plant collection. Who better than knowledgeable and agreeable Joseph Banks?
King George and Joseph Banks were a good match for they shared not only a passion for horticulture but a particular focus and purpose. Theirs was not only scientific curiosity about botany, but a belief in the potential economic benefits that agricultural development held. Their belief was a realistic one because early in the century London nurseryman Thomas Fairchild, a correspondent of Linnaeus and fellow researcher of the sexual characteristics of plants, had succeeded for the first time in intentionally creating an artificial hybrid. By means of a feather, he cross-pollinated a sweet William and a carnation. The resulting plant, called by other botanists Fairchild’s Mule, opened the door to endless possibilities for new plants whose weaknesses could now be eliminated and desirable characteristics strengthened.
At first Banks was an informal adviser to the king, but that did not hinder his all-out effort on behalf of England. His vision was to collect seeds and plants from around the world, determine the desirable characteristics, develop the best possible plants, and dispatch them to the places in the British Empire where they would be most lucrative. To that end he supported William Bligh in bringing breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies. Soon plants as various as spices, mango, cotton, orchids, flax, tea, and bananas were being transported across oceans and around the capes. He also set about establishing botanical gardens in far-off places including Calcutta where local plants could be strengthened for transport and imported plants tested and nurtured.
Banks’s role at Kew was formalized by his appointment as superintendent and he continued his effort to bring economic benefit to the British Empire. By the time of his death in 1820, he had set Kew on the path it was to follow until the present day. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, became the world’s most renowned botanical collection and research institution, rivaled in importance today only by the New York Botanical Garden. Joseph Banks’s interest and leadership is recognized and honored in the Sir Joseph Banks Centre for Economic Development at Kew.
And what of the intersection of the lives of George iii, Joseph Banks, and Thomas Jefferson? During the 1770s opposition in Britain to the war in America was building to a crescendo. Whig leader William Pitt, Lord Chatham, made an impassioned speech before Parliament about what he described as “the gathering storm,” arguing that the war was costly and would be interminable. Pitt reminded his countrymen and king that America “is a double market—the market of consumption, and the market of supply.” Pursuit of the American war would give “millions, with naval stores, . . . to your hereditary rival [France].”
Pitt appealed to his longtime friend and landscape designer Capability Brown, then head gardener at Hampton Court, to act as intermediary with the king and to convey his profound opposition to the American war. Although Brown agreed with Lord Chatham that the war was, in Brown’s words, “unfortunate” and “disgraceful,” he “shared private hours” with the king. Some weeks later Brown reported that he had fulfilled the requested mission: “To-day, and indeed many opportunities, have occurred of late in which I have had very favorable conversations with the King—no acrimony, nor ill will appeared.” For a long time George iii resisted abandoning the war, but eventually, in 1779, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington.
Did King George cave to pressure from the Whigs or did he decide to put his effort and money into the economic development of the rest of the increasingly vast British Empire? Americans have often used the term “Farmer George” pejoratively, implying that this sophisticated man was but a country bumpkin. But the king was astute indeed to make horticulture his passion and focus. Thomas Jefferson’s interest in horticulture was a thread woven throughout his life, political relationships, and decisions, affecting developments in colonial America and then the United States. Similarly with King George iii, horticulture contributed mightily to his thinking and decisions, consequently influencing the development of the British Empire and, by extension, world history.
