Bob Reviews The Brother Gardener

The Brother Gardeners:  Before Spring, Let’s Curl Up With One Last Good Book

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York.”

Yep, me again, starting off with a Shakespeare quote in partial and tardy justification of all the money my parents squandered on my liberal arts education.

I put in the whole sentence to point out that Richard III does not actually begin Act I by whining about the weather.  What he is trying to get across is something like:  “Oy.  Am I tickled that my brother (York) is now king of England.”

Nobody remembers that, though, because the positive side of the quote is so pallid compared to the negative.  Next to “the winter of our discontent,” “glorious summer” is like saying, “So.  Nice weather we’re having."

Not that this has been a winter of discontent.  It’s hardly been any kind of winter at all and it’s fading as we speak.  But look out!  Here comes another quote:

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” –  Cicero.

That’s right.  Winter is a better time for reading about gardening than actually doing it.  So before this one bursts into glorious summer, let’s curl up with one last good book.  The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, a wonderful, wonderful garden history writer – who knew there was such a thing? – is subtitled “Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession,” and it describes how American plants changed both the the English landscape and the character of the English people.

In the early 18^th century, Ms. Wulf tells us, English gardens were stiff, geometrical affairs featuring high hedges and topiary.  They weren’t very pretty and anyway they were only in the grand estates of the rich. 

Fast-forward to now, when sweet old ladies cheerfully slaughter each other for the best blooms at the London Flower Show and when, as the preface to an English plant dictionary put it:  “The English are all, more or less, gardeners.”

What happened in between?  Ms. Wulf thinks it had a lot to do with the quirky long-distance friendship of Peter Collinson, an English cloth merchant, and John Bartram, an American farmer just outside colonial Philadelphia.  It is the archaically spelled, weirdly capitalized correspondence between these two that is the backbone of  Ms. Wulf’s charming book.

Collinson, though he was what the English of the time would have considered “in trade” as opposed to upper class, had educated himself well enough to become a fellow of the Royal Society.  This was a group of “Scientifick Gentlemen” who would get together for dinner and refer to the fish they were eating as Pleuronectes platessa. 

Bartram, by contrast, was what Collinson called “a plain Country Man.”  Though he read voraciously, there was only so much science one could find in English in those days and, as he admitted, “Ye lattin pusels Mee.”   

But though Collinson and Bartram were by background as well as geography thousands of miles apart, they were “Brothers of the Spade” and the rest is history.

Collinson was always interested in acquiring “curious Plants,” reminding his friends when they traveled, “Forget not Mee & my Garden.”  He did business in the Colonies, but it was through his unpaid work as London agent for Benjamin Franklin’s subscription library that he heard of Bartram and his expertise in New World flora.

So Bartram began collecting for Collinson in America, and in January 1734, after a long sea journey, the first of what was to be many boxes of seeds and plants arrived in London.

Collinson was thrilled.  What in England was as beautiful as a magnolia?  Or a rhododendron?  Or his lifelong favorite, the ladyslipper?  Tenderly, he set out propagating these treasures in his garden, and through the centuries the reader can still hear his joy when they grew.  “I am Charm’d, nay, in Extasie,” he wrote to Bartram when several flower species bloomed at once.

Bartram rode cross-country, canoed down rivers and climbed trees collecting samples all over settled America and into the wild, Collinson urging him on by letter.  Bartram had described a Venus flytrap in one letter, and Collinson replied he was ready to “Burst with Desire.”  If Bartram couldn’t find one soon, he wrote, “never write Mee more for it is Cruel to tantalise Mee.”

At one point Collinson wrote to Bartram, “Pray go very Clean, neat & handsomely Dressed to Virginia.”  Collinson wanted samples from the governor and feared Bartram would disgrace him.

He could be a little patronizing even when he was nice, assuring Bartram his writing style was better than “what one might expect from a Man of thy Education.”  He paid Bartram partly in English seeds, partly in cash and partly in goods – one letter referred to a “Suite of Cloths.”  Once he sent Bartram his old hat which he said had years of mileage left but which Bartram said had holes in it:  “I thought some Sory Fellow had thrown it in,” Bartram wrote.

Bartram eventually complained he received only “one Sixth part” of what he gave.  Collinson replied stiffly he had “affairs of greater Consequence to Mind.”  But then he not only sent more money but also fixed Collinson up with other English enthusiasts, enabling him to make a better living from his collecting – and in the process American flora was spread all over England.

The two friends’ correspondence simply bursts with charm.  In a broader sense, though, it struck me as an eerily perfect metaphor for Anglo-American history of the time, down to the exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods, not to mention the eventual rebellion.  What was the American Revolution but a larger version of:  “You call this a hat?”

The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, is published by Alfred A. Knopf.

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