Andrea Wulf

I am not a typical nature writer. In nature writing, you allow yourself to be in the writing. Maybe it’s because I am German, and Germans like their academic nonfiction, but I just don’t like using the word “I.” In fact, “nature writer” doesn’t even exist as a category in German. It doesn’t translate.

In Conversation, July 2018

In the shifting light of the garden courtyard, Andrea Wulf and I are surrounded by purple Verbena bonariensis and old-fashioned violets. I take note of them and wonder if, like me, Andrea is thinking of the horticultural backstories and the driven nurserymen or swashbuckling plant hunters behind these flowers. She and I belong to a small club of people who think of gardens as cultural artifacts—she as a design historian, I as a garden historian—and long before we meet for this summer lunch in London, I have admired how she tells horticultural and natural history through narrative nonfiction.

Through vivid scene-making and extensive research, her five books read like adventure novels that immerse readers in the past. We travel to the tops of mountains for extraordinary moments of discovery and into quiet greenhouses where new plants are cultivated. Over coffee, the two of us discuss the way her primary source research, including original letters, manuscripts, books, and travel to original sites, creates unforgettable scenes. “I might have become a painter had I not become a writer,” she explains, in a light, German-inflected accent. “When I am writing, I often close my eyes and walk through landscapes in my mind.”

Experiencing different landscapes has long been part of her life. Born in India and raised in Germany, Wulf was a student of applied cultural studies at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg and design history at the Royal College of Art in London. After moving to England, she was drawn to narrative nonfiction and the range of techniques it borrows from fiction to make conventional nonfiction come alive—enhanced sense of place, dialogue, enriched language, flexible time structures, more detailed characterization, and first-person narration. On one end of this narrative spectrum lies memoir: authors fully immerse themselves as subjects in the story—think Gene Stratton-Porter’s birding books and Vita Sackville-West’s garden writing. On the other end is literary journalism: authors report on events—think Susan Fenimore Cooper’s diary of Cooperstown and Rachel Carson’s environmental investigations. Whether because she is a German historian or because nature writing isn’t part of her cultural tradition, Wulf prefers literary reportage to first-person narrative.

Her first three books—This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History (2005), The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession (2008), and The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (2011)—emerged from her interest in the Enlightenment, that intellectual movement of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to which all the writers in this book are, to some degree, reacting. “The Enlightenment is the moment,” Wulf said, “when we became the modern human that we are today. We moved away from the belief that the world was just a divine clockwork, to the elevation of reason as the faculty to make sense of it all, to focusing on the self as the veil through which we see the world.”

In The Brother Gardeners, Wulf explores how England became a nation of gardeners through the achievements of a dedicated group of men with green thumbs, business acumen, and botanical wanderlust. Gardens are no different from architecture, literature, and music—they are mirrors of society. During the Enlightenment, dreary plots devoid of flowers half the year grew to be “gardens of the world” filled with exotic specimens collected by intrepid plant hunters. In the book’s opening, it’s the summer of 1716, and we are in the potting shed of Thomas Fairchild, leading English nurseryman of the day. We peer over his shoulder as he gently brushes a feather across sweet William then draws its tip across a carnation pink. He is creating the world’s first man-made hybrid, Dianthus caryophyllus × D. barbatus, known today as “Fairchild’s Mule.” In another scene, we step aboard the ship Endeavour during the extraordinary South Pacific and Australian adventures of Swedish scientist Daniel Solander and English botanist Joseph Banks. We feel invested in the relationship between English merchant Peter Collinson and American botanist John Bartram as they worked together for decades as plant exporter and importer. The Brother Gardeners illuminates how much of our modern gardens are living legacies, pulsating with with extraordinary human stories.

Wulf’s third garden history book, The Founding Gardeners, is an eloquent ecological and historical narrative that situates in time the botanical passions of the first four US presidents—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Their private gardens, farms, and forests reflected their unique vision for colonial self-sufficiency and an independent New World republic. Wulf constructs an inclusive narrative of all people working the land, one that addresses the institution of slavery in the creation of Southern estates and plantations—including a particular freezing winter day when Washington’s enslaved workers created an arboretum for him by transplanting trees from a nearby woodland in the dead of winter. In the chapter “Tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener,” Wulf captures how Jefferson longed for the refuge of his gardens at Monticello as he rode home after declining to run for a third presidential term.

A lone rider battled through a fierce snowstorm in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The snow was so deep that the roads were almost impassable, and for the last seven hours an ice-cold wind had cut through the rider’s heavy coat. It was mid-March 1809, but instead of the first green flush of spring the forests were hidden under a stark white blanket, while the layers of mountain ridges had all but disappeared in the hypnotizing dance of light flakes. The traveler was sixty-five-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who had left Washington four days earlier after James Madison’s inauguration as the fourth president of the United States. Seventy miles into his journey home he had overtaken his estate manager, Edmund Bacon, who led two wagons’ worth of Jefferson’s belongings from the White House and one filled with shrubs from the capital’s nurseries. Jefferson could have traveled the remaining fifty miles in his carriage but was anxious not to waste any more time—he had waited for this moment for so long, and a snowstorm was not going to stop him.

“Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” claimed the third president of the United States, who had described his final years in office as “the most tedious of my life.” Desperately lonely in the capital, even his daily rides in the countryside had started to bore him. Like George Washington before him, Jefferson longed to tend to his plantation and garden, and had made the decision to follow Washington’s example and not run for a third term. Increasingly his letters to friends and family had mentioned this pining to return to “the enjoyments of rural life.” “My views and attentions,” he wrote to fellow gardener William Hamilton in Philadelphia, “are all turned homewards.” He was so excited about his garden in particular, he said to Hamilton, that “the subject runs away with me whenever I get on it.”

As a fan of narrative nonfiction, I ask Wulf about her writing process. She says such detailed scenes and character insights emerge from detailed book proposals, which provide “scaffolding” for the depth of storytelling. “I am not a kissed-by-the-muse kind of writer,” she tells me. “I am a crafter. I go through dozens of drafts and hone until someone finally pulls the manuscript out of my hands. It is always two steps forward, one step back. I just feel that it is never done.”

Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (2012) reflects Wulf’s shift from earthly pleasures to heavenly pursuits. It’s the story of how ambitious eighteenth-century scientists from Sweden, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and the American colonies worked together to answer one of the most pressing questions of the 1700s: how far is the Earth from the sun? Scientists believed the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769—when our nearest planet moves across the face of the sun—held the answers. Chasing Venus shows how science is not an ivory tower activity but a discipline that takes place in a human and historical frame of personal journeys and great sacrifices.

The same can be said for the extraordinary life of Alexander von Humboldt, “the lost hero of science,” whose daring vision of the Earth as one great living organism was as bold as the man himself. When we think of the most famous scientists, Darwin, Newton, and Einstein come to mind. Though during his life Humboldt’s fame was second only to Napoleon’s, until Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (2015), few people today knew of Humboldt, the Prussian scientist, naturalist, and geologist whose vision of nature as interconnected has become commonplace. His philosophy so deeply influences the way we understand the natural world that the man behind the science has disappeared. Wulf’s Humboldt book shot into the literary stratosphere. Reviewers everywhere tripped over themselves finding new adjectives to describe it. Best Book of the Year in 2015 for the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist. Winner of the 2016 Costa Biography Award and the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Recipient of the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and the James Wright Award for Nature Writing. A top ten bestseller in Germany for more than a year.

We learn in The Invention of Nature that more places and things on Earth are named after Humboldt than anyone else. Mountains, glaciers, forests. Rivers, colleges, plants. The Humboldt Current. The Humboldt squid. A giant sinkhole. And it’s not limited to Earth—two asteroids bear his name, as well as a basin on the moon. “To him, everything is connected,” Wulf explains to me. “Rachel Carson makes that connection with Silent Spring and you can only do that if you see nature as the web of life.” Wulf drew on Humboldt’s original letters, manuscripts, sketches, scraps of paper, and books to write as deeply about his science as his character. She slept in Venezuelan rainforests, walked around Walden Pond, and hiked in Yosemite National Park. She climbed Chimborazo in Ecuador to capture Humboldt’s pivotal ascent in 1802, the moment he took everything he knew about the natural world and wove it into a cohesive vision that would change worldviews forever.

On 22 June they arrived at the foot of the volcano where they spent a fitful night in a small village. Early the next morning, Humboldt’s team began the ascent together with a group of local porters. They crossed the grassy plains and slopes on mules until they reached an altitude of 13,500 feet. As the rocks became steeper, they left the animals behind and continued on foot. The weather was turning against them. It had snowed during the night and the air was cold. Unlike the previous days, the summit of Chimborazo was shrouded in fog. Once in a while, the fog lifted granting them a brief yet tantalizing glimpse of the peak. It would be a long day.

At 15,600 feet their porters refused to go on. Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and José divided the instruments between them and continued on their own. The fog held Chimborazo’s summit in its embrace. Soon they were crawling on all fours along a high ridge that narrowed to a dangerous two inches with steep cliffs falling away to their left and right—fittingly the Spanish called this ridge the cuchilla, or ‘knife edge’. Humboldt looked determinedly ahead. It didn’t help that the cold had numbed their hands and feet, nor that the foot that he had injured during a previous climb had become infected. Every step was leaden at this height. Nauseous and dizzy with altitude sickness, their eyes bloodshot and their gums bleeding, they suffered from a constant vertigo which, Humboldt later admitted, ‘was very dangerous, given the situation we were in’. On Pichincha, Humboldt’s altitude sickness had been so severe that he had fainted. Here on the cuchilla, it could be fatal.

Despite these difficulties, Humboldt still had the energy to set up his instruments every few hundred feet as they ascended. The icy wind had chilled the brass instruments and handling the delicate screws and levers with half-frozen hands was almost impossible. He plunged his thermometer into the ground, read the barometer and collected air samples to analyse its chemical components. He measured humidity and tested the boiling point of water at different altitudes. They also kicked boulders down the precipitous slopes to test how far they would roll.

After an hour of treacherous climbing, the ridge became a little less steep but now sharp rocks tore their shoes and their feet began to bleed. Then, suddenly, the fog lifted, revealing Chimborazo’s white peak glinting in the sun, a little over 1,000 feet above them—but they also saw that their narrow ridge had ended. Instead, they were confronted by the mouth of a huge crevasse which opened in front of them. To get around it would have involved walking across a field of deep snow but by now it was 1 p.m. and the sun had melted the icy crust that covered the snow. When Montúfar gingerly tried to tread on it, he sank so deeply that he completely disappeared. There was no way to cross. As they paused, Humboldt took out the barometer again and measured their altitude at 19,413 feet. Though they wouldn’t make it to the summit, it still felt like being on the top of the world. No one had ever come this high—not even the early balloonists in Europe.

Looking down Chimborazo’s slopes and the mountain ranges in the distance, everything that Humboldt had seen in the previous years came together. His brother Wilhelm had long believed that Alexander’s mind was made ‘to connect ideas, to detect chains of things’. As he stood that day on Chimborazo, Humboldt absorbed what lay in front of him while his mind reached back to all the plants, rock formations and measurements that he had seen and taken on the slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Tenerife. Everything that he had ever observed fell into place. Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.

Humboldt is haughty and generous, curious and cosmopolitan—a man whose personality hid personal insecurities, whose drive into nature repressed his sexual orientation, and whose lack of empathy with people blunted some relationships. “He was so curious about so many things,” Wulf tells me. “He never stuck with any one idea.” She discusses how Humboldt’s ideas influenced other important scientists and how his observations of the Americas—slavery, environmental devastation, and colonialism—showed for the first time the severe impact Europeans had had on native populations. He was the first person to observe human-made climate change.

The summer afternoon sunlight is shifting as Andrea and I relax beside our empty coffee cups. In the murmur of modern London outside the restaurant, our conversation winds down. We look ahead to our own travel and writing projects. Andrea tells me she’s finishing dialogue on a graphic novel, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt (2019). She explains that 2019 marks the 250th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth. From South America to Germany, she will be speaking at celebrations around the world, reviving the important story of a great naturalist. Listening to her plans for the year, I get the feeling this might be one of the few times over the next eighteen months that she will be sitting still.

More Travel and Nature Writing

Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird (1831–1904) dismissed stifling Victorian gender conventions to become a trailblazing British explorer, photographer, writer, and naturalist. It wasn’t easy. From childhood, Bird suffered from numerous ailments, including a tumor removed from her back at nineteen. Her doctor’s prescription? Open-air. Bird took this remedy to the next level and spent a long life taking sea voyages to lands few men, let alone women, ever visited. Her father gave her £100 in 1854 with permission to stay away from home for as long as funds lasted. Vivid letters home became her first book, An Englishwoman in America (1856). Though generally classified as travel writing—Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (1875), Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1881), Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), Among the Tibetans (1894)—Bird’s books offer glimpses into the natural worlds she visited. Her most famous book was A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879). Bird was a household name in the late nineteenth century and the first woman elected to the Royal Geographical Society.

Isak Dinesen

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (1885–1962) could also be called Baroness Boss. She managed a coffee plantation in Africa. She had a love affair with English game hunter Denys Finch Hatton. She was enamored with the idea of vultures picking her remains clean when she died. She wrote her superlative and best-known work, Out of Africa (1937), a lyrical memoir about her life in the Ngong Hills in Kenya (then called British East Africa) from 1914 to 1931, under the pen name Isak Dinesen. The film adaptation won seven Academy Awards, but ever-Hollywood, the film focuses more on romance than the daily life Dinesen captured in her writing, including beautiful descriptions of African landscapes and dignified portraits of the people who worked on her land.

Elizabeth Dodd

“The contemporary nature writer lives not only in a different century,” Dodd wrote to me, “but a different world from the one inhabited by Henry David Thoreau, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and other American forebears.” Whether hiking to find ancient petroglyphs or canoeing rivers to access ancient trees, Dodd takes readers to places that invite us to consider time, place, art, legacies, and our relationships with other-than-human dimensions. She explains, “Today’s nature writers can celebrate wonder or environmentalist effort on the local level, but any such writing exists within a context, whether explicitly named or not, of global threat.” Her creative nonfiction books include Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World (2012), In the Mind’s Eye: Essays Across the Animate World (2008), and Prospect: Journeys and Landscapes (2003). Her poetry collections are Archetypal Light (2001) and Like Memory, Caverns (1992).