PROLOGUE

The Pursuit of Happiness

Since 1800, the white house has served as a residence for the president of the United States. The eighteen acres that surround the White House have been the Forrest Gump of gardens—an unwitting witness to history—a backdrop for Civil War soldiers, suffragettes, protestors in the 1960s, and activists today. Kings and queens have dined there. Bills and treaties have been signed. On its lawn presidents have landed and retreated. The front and back yard for the first family, it is by extension the nation’s first garden.

The White House gardens mirror the country’s horticultural aspirations over time. If “melting pot” has been a persistent metaphor for American culture, American horticulture shares the pedigree. The garden styles of the colonies, and later the United States, were borrowed from Europe and farther afield and then shaped by local traditions, by geography and climate, by transportation, economics, and innovation.

The White House that we know today was not in the mind of English explorer John Smith when he first sailed up the “Patawomeck” on a June day in 1608. When the wooden boat turned from the Chesapeake Bay into the mouth of the broad river, he and his fourteen-man crew were looking for the passage to the South Seas. Instead they found forests, fish, and farms. Along the Potomac that summer, they encountered native villages and with the villages, gardens bearing their summer abundance.

Corn was the main crop. Not the juicy sweet ears to which we have become accustomed, but Indian corn: hard kernels that had to be soaked or ground. It sustained life during the hungry season. Other food crops were also in evidence: beans, squash, sunflowers, and goosefoot (a relative of quinoa), and, for smoking rather than eating, tobacco. To his London Company John Smith wrote, “Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for mans habitation . . . were it fully manured and inhabited by an industrious people.”

Industrious settlers soon followed, pursuing not so much happiness as the right to plant and cash in on the brown gold that was tobacco. George Washington’s ancestors were among those who emigrated from England and settled in the rich Virginia countryside below the Great Falls of the Potomac. The subjects of the Court of St. James, as well as the rest of Europe, presumed an unquestioned cultural superiority over the native people and a God-given right to “improve” this new land.

When the Potomac shoreline that John Smith had explored was finally chosen as the capital city of the brand-new United States of America, George Washington knew it needed a place for the president to call home. And that home would need a garden. This book is the story of that garden, and a story of gardening American-style.

Versailles on the Potomac

I am led to reflect how much more delightful to an undebauched mind is the task of making improvements to the earth, than all the vainglory which can be acquired from ravaging it, by the most uninterrupted career of conquests.

George Washington in a letter to Arthur Young, an English agricultural writer, 1788

THE 1790s

(1789–1797) George and Martha Washington

All politics is local, as the saying goes, and so by necessity is gardening. George Washington selected a site for the nation’s capital just fifteen miles upstream on the Potomac from his home at Mount Vernon, though on the opposite bank. He oversaw the plans for the new city, its buildings and green spaces, including the future White House. He was the first president, but he was creating his last garden.

The location of the White House and its surrounding federal city was by no means certain. In the early years of nationhood, Congress bounced from Philadelphia to Annapolis to Trenton to New York. There was even a brief move to Princeton, New Jersey, after a rabble of soldiers demanding back pay accosted Congress in the Pennsylvania Statehouse. The Constitution, ratified in May 1790, stipulated a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) . . . [as] the Seat of the Government of the United States.” It did not specify its whereabouts. States and territories vied for the privilege the way countries bid for the Olympic Games today, and for the same reasons: money, power, prestige.

Washington and his fellow southerners, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, hoped for a Potomac site from the start. It was, they argued, the geographic center of the thirteen states. With plans underway for canals to connect the river with the Great Lakes, the Potomac set a path to the west—the lure of land in the Ohio Valley already singing its siren song. Northerners did not agree. Philadelphia, after all, was cosmopolitan in comparison with the relative backwaters of Maryland and Virginia. One Massachusetts journalist called the Potomac site “a Virginia delusion.” The New-York Journal ran a black-edged mourning announcement: “To the memory of Potowmacus, who was the twin of Philadelphia—He was the child of Miss Assumption, a deluded female.”

But the Potomac site turned out to be no misassumption, due to the political skills of its promoters. For perhaps the first time in the American epic, a dinner party changed history. The site of the capital was a bipartisan deal, brokered by a small pantheon of American gods in New York City. Thomas Jefferson hosted supper one night in 1790 at his Maiden Lane rental, lubricating the event “with punch and Madeira.” James Madison and Alexander Hamilton made their way down the narrow streets of lower Manhattan to join him in the long twilight of a late June evening.

The three were colleagues, though hardly congenial. Tall, lean Jefferson, at the time the secretary of state, and the diminutive Madison, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, opposed Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and his views on national control. But the dinner, or perhaps the Madeira, worked its magic. In exchange for throwing their support behind Hamilton’s bill to have the federal government assume the states’ war debts—Jefferson called this “a pill peculiarly bitter to the Southern States”—Hamilton went along with having the federal government reside on the Potomac. In early July the Residence Act squeaked through Congress, and on July 16, President Washington signed it into law. Philadelphia would act as temporary capital for the next decade, with the final move to a new ten-mile-square district targeted for the first Monday in December 1800. (In 1846, Congress gave one-third of the District back to Virginia, thus removing that portion of the original square southwest of the Potomac River.)

And so the future gardens at the White House were set on their trajectory. Congress provided George Washington broad powers to supervise the development of the as-yet-unnamed new city. As a war hero and unanimously elected president, he was riding a wave of popularity. Congress also gave him the privilege of choosing the exact location for the district within some seventy miles of Potomac riverfront. The tract of land that Washington selected was at an elbow of two rivers, the confluence of the Potomac and the Eastern Branch, or Anacostia.

The new capital and its gardens started, as with most garden projects, with a real estate transaction or, in this case, transactions. Maryland and Virginia ceded public lands while the city commissioners negotiated with private landowners, paying them per acre for their property. George Washington haggled with a few holdouts—speculators expecting a premium—including one he labeled “the obstinate Mr. Burns.”

The George Washington who established Washington D.C. is easy to visualize, as the timing roughly coincides with the familiar Gilbert Stuart portrait that looks out at us from the dollar bill. Washington was physically imposing with prominent features and a legendary stiff upper lip. His hair had begun to recede from his forehead leaving his features in relief, as if waiting for Mount Rushmore. Hair powdered, posture erect, his six-foot frame was clad in a fashionable long coat made to his specifications. Famous as a man of few, select words, Washington once said, “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.”

At this point in the story, let us picture George Washington and his designs for Mount Vernon, his Virginia home, designs that would influence the gardens-to-come at the White House. The landscape at Mount Vernon occupied many hours of his time when the demands of government allowed. Stepping out from the pedimented doorway of his home, he could proceed right or left along a serpentine walk lined with weeping willows.

Like most serious gardeners, Washington was a bit plant-crazy. He asked friends and relations to send seeds and cuttings for his garden. Packets arrived from England, the Caribbean, and the Deep South. For his tender specimens—oranges and lemons, palms and palmettos—he built an expansive brick orangery, a building heated with stoves and lit with long south-facing windows. He planted so many roses that it took twelve days each June for the petals to be picked; his wife, Martha, distilled them into rosewater. He ordered plants in quantity from nurseries in Philadelphia and made a special trip to see William Prince’s nursery, the large and grandly named Linnaean Botanic Garden, in Flushing, New York.

Washington liked to visit nurseries. Two generations of Bartrams—father John and sons John and William—collected plants, then propagated and sold them from a farm on the west bank of the Schuylkill River on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Some years earlier, during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Washington had taken a jaunt to Bartram’s farm, breakfasting with a friend then riding the three miles out from city center. The nursery’s curious plants, many of which were exotic—that is, imported—were impressive, but the garden “was not laid off with much taste, nor was it large.” George Washington was judging the garden with a ruler calibrated on grand plantation gardens. Still, he was inclined to stop at Bartram’s again that September, a botanical distraction during a week when he was especially homesick for Mount Vernon.

When Benjamin Latrobe, an architect who would later work on the Capitol as well as the building and grounds of the executive mansion, visited Mount Vernon in 1796, he described its gardens in his journal. “On one side of this lawn is a plain kitchen garden. On the other a neat flower garden laid out in squares and boxed with great precision.” Latrobe was unimpressed. Of the geometric-patterned boxwood he sniffed, “For the first time since I left Germany I saw here a parterre stripped and trimmed with infinite care into the form of a richly flourished fleur-de-lis, the expiring groan, I hope, of our grandfathers’ pedantry.”

Yet we can forgive George Washington for garden elements that struck the chic Latrobe as old-fashioned. A teenaged Washington, during his first job as surveyor to Lord Fairfax, was a regular visitor to the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg. The gardens of the Virginia governor were known for their clipped boxwood formality. It is a rigid garden grammar: the evergreen nouns, the cut-and-shear verbs, the few adjectives provided by an infill of annual flowers or colored stones. Young George, ambitious and impressionable, must have banked the memories of these parterres for his future use.

As well as emulating the top-tier gardens of his youth, the president had personal reasons for his clipped fleur-de-lis. The victory over the British was still in recent memory, and the French, prominently the Marquis de Lafayette, had been America’s knights in shining armor. After the war Washington and Lafayette remained close. The latter named his only son for George Washington who had no children of his own. It touched the president’s heart. So it seems a small thing for Washington to have a French gesture in his flower garden for the occasional visit of the Marquis.

While now proudly independent as a nation, America and its culture were still in the strong gravitational pull of Europe. George Washington imported gardening books for his library including New Principles of Gardening by the whimsically named Batty Langley, and Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary of 1763, the go-to book for horticulturists of the day. Langley, a surveyor like Washington, wrote, “The most noble and pleasant situation of all others, is that on the top of a hill . . . where the air is fine and clear, with noble views. . . . All kinds of fenny, boggy, marshy lands, &c. whence fogs and noisome vapours arise, are always to be avoided.” These were British horticulturists writing for an English audience. All well-to-do gardeners in the United States stocked their libraries with European books on the topic, as there were no substantive American gardening books yet.

Any eighteenth-century American gentleman worth his salt improved the land as an honorable pastime. Henry Middleton on his vast plantation near Charleston and William Paca of Annapolis were two such gentlemen. Each created terraced pleasure grounds, “falls” gardens, with the land sculpted into wide descending tiers. The platform effect showed off the residence, a sort of ornament atop a wedding cake. It enabled fine prospects, valued for aesthetics as well as good air circulation, as Batty Langley had noted.

It required a huge outlay of energy, this cutting and filling, to grind down the rough edges of nature. Humans, most of them African slaves, labored with axe, spade, and barrow. Draft animals hauled carts piled with soil and stone. It was gardening as demarcation; here is improvement, there is wilderness.

The terraces at Middleton Place, still advertised today as the “First Landscaped Garden in America,” step down to a pair of identical man-made lakes that stretch like butterfly wings toward the Ashley River. In Annapolis, Paca used perspective tricks to make his long view, from the garden’s entrance to the summerhouse, appear longer. He crafted openings through trees and narrowed the planting beds in each successive level. These are gardens of the Age of Enlightenment, based on the geometry of classical proportion. The gentry learned their Latin and Greek and saw themselves as the new Romans, implementing a republic that would avoid the pitfalls of empire. The formality in their buildings and their gardens reflected a philosophical idealism of the day.

George Washington wanted classical designs for the new Potomac city as well, and he knew the man who could deliver. Among the presidential appointments were commissioners to supervise the work, surveyors, and an architect. Though today “L’Enfant” is best recognized as a stop on the Washington Metro, architect Peter (Pierre) L’Enfant set the footprint of the capital.

Born in France, L’Enfant studied art in Paris until, aged twenty-three, he crossed the Atlantic, part of an idealistic band of volunteers that joined America’s revolutionary forces. He served as a military engineer under Lafayette and later as a major on Washington’s staff. After the war he stayed on. In New York City, L’Enfant made his reputation as an architect remodeling Federal Hall into a massive temple of a building. He got wind that Congress was preparing to lay the foundation “of a City which is to become the Capital of this vast Empire,” and in September 1789, he wrote to George Washington to volunteer his services as city planner. Burning with ideas, he was confident, almost brash—and he got the job.

Jefferson, as secretary of state, laid out the agenda for L’Enfant, or tried to. A letter itemized the work: planning, design, and site preparation for the major government buildings using “models of antiquity which have had the approbation of thousands of years.” Thomas Jefferson had in his back pocket, so to speak, his own sketch for the city. His design was simple squares, not unlike William Penn’s 1682 plan for Philadelphia or James Oglethorpe’s 1733 layout of Savannah. Or, as Jefferson was well aware, the grid that ancient Roman engineers applied when extending their empire. (Earlier in his career while a delegate to the Continental Congress, Jefferson had set up the grid system that eventually applied to the rectilinear state, county, and farm boundaries across the Midwest and western United States.) In Jefferson’s quick rendering of the federal city, he placed the government buildings on a single line separated by public walks. The president’s house rated two squares, as did Congress.

But L’Enfant had bigger things in mind. Grand gardens would connect an enormous presidential residence “with the publique walk and avenu[e] to the Congress House in a manner . . . as grand as it will be agreable and Convenient to the whole City.” The executive and legislative branches would be separate but balanced, geographically as well as politically. Going over Jefferson’s head, L’Enfant wrote directly to the president that, “the plan Should be drawn on such a Scale as to leave room for that aggrandisement & embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote.”

Here is a bird’s-eye view of the city as seen by L’Enfant: the diamond-shaped district, ten miles on a side, one hundred square miles total, is split into four quadrants. At the center of his plan rises the Capitol atop Jenkins Hill, described by L’Enfant “as a pedestal waiting for a monument.” The president’s house stands a mile and a half distant on a crest above the river. In the address of the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, the “NW” or Northwest refers to L’Enfant’s original map.

George Washington sited the executive mansion himself. Rather than place it in a direct line with the Capitol, he followed Batty Langley’s advice and set it on a rise with an expansive view. In June 1791 the president marked off the land for the mansion with the eye of an experienced garden designer. L’Enfant was in tow. The following week L’Enfant wrote Washington a letter, saying that the new residence would combine “the convenience of a house and the agreeableness of a country seat situated on that ridge which attracted your attention at the first inspection of the ground.” The president would command a view of some ten miles of the Potomac, a view toward Mount Vernon. A nearby navigational canal would convey commerce from the river to the city markets. The excavation of the canal offered opportunities to terrace the grounds “to procure to the palace . . . a prospect of the Potomac . . . which will acquire new sweetness being had over the green of a field well level and made brilliant by shade of few tree[s] artfully planted.”

That L’Enfant calls the president’s house “the palace” reflects his background. His models were monarchical, places like the French king’s complex at Versailles, his boyhood town, and the Tuileries Palace garden near his school at the Royal Academy in Paris. L’Enfant also considered the plans of an array of continental cities via maps supplied by Jefferson—Frankfort and Amsterdam, Milan and Marseilles.

L’Enfant applied these lessons. He laid out the presidential grounds on cardinal points. What we call the West Wing and the South Lawn are aligned with their respective compass bearings. The design of the presidential garden is clearly on axis, slicing through the center of the house as it often does in landscape design, joining exterior and interior. This centerline of the garden intersects at a right angle with another axis that runs through the Capitol building, that monument to the rule of law.

Not every angle on L’Enfant’s plan was at ninety degrees. Great diagonal avenues burst through the grid coordinates of the streets, connecting major buildings the way the Constitution united the states. At Versailles, radiating avenues were called patte d’oie for their resemblance to a goose’s foot. For the new American city, L’Enfant explained that the diagonals would contrast with the general regularity and “afford a greater variety of pleasant seats and prospect.” Views were important to L’Enfant, and eventually his undoing.

L’Enfant proved himself too much the artiste. He bickered with the commissioners and threw tantrums if one presumed to alter his plans. The president was conflicted. He saw the genius in his former staff member, if only L’Enfant could control his temper. But when the architect had the partially completed house of a commissioner’s cousin dismantled because it was ruining one of his sight lines, he crossed the line. Peter L’Enfant had violated the rules of civility. On the 27th of February 1792, Thomas Jefferson fired him in a coolly worded letter dispatched from Philadelphia.

L’Enfant’s plan persisted. The surveyors picked up, no doubt with a combination of relief and trepidation, where he had left off. Roads were laid out. Plots for private homes were sold in an orderly fashion. An architect, James Hoban, won a contest for the design of the president’s house. Workers cut sandstone for it and other government buildings at a quarry on Acquia Creek, forty miles down the Potomac. Barges carried loads of stone upriver with the tides. Avoiding transportation, brickmakers dug pits and built kilns on the presidential grounds. The requisite abundance of clay gives a hint of the soil that gardeners would eventually have to deal with at the White House.

George Washington had his mind on plants. In March 1792, he ordered more than two hundred trees and shrubs for Mount Vernon from Bartram’s Philadelphia nursery. The order was a gardener’s dream—get a catalog in the mail and request one or more of every plant listed. When Washington ordered in such quantity, it is easy to suspect that he might have been auditioning plants for the president’s garden in the federal city.

The order included a tree discovered by William Bartram in Georgia and named for Benjamin Franklin (Franklinia alatamaha), never found again in the wild, and ironwood, a small tree named at the time Jeffersonia egrilla. (It wasn’t until 1879 that the first president was similarly honored by having his name transformed into the palm genus Washingtonia.) Washington selected plants from states north and south of the Mason–Dixon line: moosewood from the Appalachians, bald cypress from southern swamps, and the Carolina sweet shrub. The Bartram brothers waxed poetic about white pine from the New England woods. “Magnificent! [the pine] presides in the evergreen groves,” read the catalog. George Washington ordered six. It was as if the president hoped that the Congressional representatives from the fifteen states—Vermont and Kentucky had been added during his first term—could get along if their plants could co-exist in a garden.

Political mudslinging might be thought of as an early offshoot of American gardening, and George Washington was not immune. Even John Adams got into the act. He claimed that Washington “raised the value of his property and that of his family a thousand percent at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune.” Perhaps he was right. Washington had always been a good judge of real estate, and he did build some spec houses on land purchased in the District. Still one can hardly blame George Washington for wanting a short commute to what he had to anticipate would be frequent post-presidency consulting work. After turning over the reins to John Adams in 1797, he was clear that he preferred to be “under my own Vine & Fig tree, as I do not think it probable that I shall go beyond the radius of 20 miles from them.” The mileage to the federal city was only fifteen.

In retirement George Washington kept an eye on the progress of his now eponymous capital. (Fortunately the suggestion for “Washingtonople” had been ignored, and the commissioners settled on the simpler and shorter name.) Perhaps if he had lived to see the turn of the new century, the development of the city and its gardens might have moved along more quickly. Washington wrote a week before he died, frustrated “by the obstructions continually thrown in its way—by friends or enemies—[this] City has had to pass through a firey trial—Yet, I trust will, ultimately, escape the Ordea[l] with eclat.”

A bit like Moses and the Promised Land, Washington did not live to see the president’s house occupied nor its gardens planted. He died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, sixty-seven years old. Two days earlier, he had caught a chill riding in miserable weather. He had been inspecting improvements to his land.

Founders’ Grounds

We have not the least fence, yard, or other convenience.

Abigail Adams to her daughter Nabby, November 1800

1800–1809

(1797–1801) John and Abigail Adams

(1801–1809) Thomas Jefferson

The Maryland road was thick with trees, and the carriage driver was worried. His principal passenger was the president’s wife. Mrs. Adams was stoic but clearly put out at being lost south of Baltimore for hours en route to the federal city. The leaves were turning, not the bright colors of Massachusetts sugar maples, but dull maroons and browns that suited her mood. Abigail Adams was not in a forgiving frame of mind when she described her arrival in a letter to her daughter Nabby. “Woods are all you can see from Baltimore until you reach the city, which is only so in name. . . . In the city there are buildings enough, if they were compact and finished, to accommodate Congress and those attached to it; but as they are, and scattered as they are, I see no great comfort for them.”

Comfort, Adams was convinced, would have been delivered to the house if New Englanders had been in charge. “Very many of the present inconveniences would have been removed,” she declared, as if the Puritan work ethic could have saved the day. Yet she couldn’t help but be charmed by the “grand and superb scale” of the house with its view of boats plying the waters to Alexandria. “It is a beautiful spot, capable of every improvement, and the more I view it, the more I am delighted with it.”

John Adams had arrived on the first of November 1800; Abigail Adams two weeks later. They occupied the new executive mansion in the new city a month ahead of schedule, a schedule set by Congress in the Residence Act ten years earlier. Lest we think that this was a shining example of the federal government completing its first major project on time, only six rooms in the gigantic residence were any semblance of finished.

Earlier in his term John had written from Philadelphia to his “Dearest Friend,” as he addressed Abigail in his letters. He moaned about his presidential workload and sighed, “I must go to the Federal City—that must be my farm in future, and I shall have as much more plague as less Pleasure, in it, than I had in the Quincy farm.” In his usual conscientious manner he added, “Except that all the pleasure of life that is solid consists in doing one’s duty.”

In 1788 John and Abigail had moved from their first home, a saltbox at the foot of Penn’s Hill, across town to Peacefield, a more elegant gentleman’s farm, in Quincy, near Boston. With its fields, orchard, barns, and garden, Peacefield was typical of prosperous New England farmsteads in the late eighteenth century. Between the house and outbuildings, the space formed a yard or yards, workplaces filled with sounds of splitting wood and smells of laundry boiling with lye soap, butchering, not to mention a steaming pile of compost. In his diary on September 8, 1796, John Adams had recorded the day’s activities in Quincy, “Sullivan gone for Seaweed. Bass and Thomas carting Manure from the Hill of Compost in the Yard. Billings and Prince laying Wall. Brisler and James picking Apples and making Cyder. Stetson widening the Brook.” That in American English we still call the space around the house the “yard” (in England it is “garden”) speaks to the value, linguistic and otherwise, placed on utility.

New England gardens were fenced to keep the livestock out, as early village law stipulated common grazing. At first, simple palings, stripped branches or saplings sharpened to points at one end, were stuck into the ground to make enclosures. As the decades passed and wealth increased, rustic palings and rail fences gave way to elegant pickets and ornamental gates; modest flower beds morphed into patterned boxwood-lined borders.

But these garden improvements had not reached the grounds of the president’s house by the time John and Abigail Adams moved in. There was no yard, no walls or fencing. The house was drafty and the plaster still wet on the walls. Firewood was strangely in short supply, given the woods surrounding the city. As she lacked a drying yard, Abigail Adams strung up the laundry in the unfinished audience room.

We might have expected Abigail and John Adams to have an extensive garden at the president’s house. They would have appreciated an ornamental garden as well as one to supply the kitchen. While minister to France in the early 1780s, he had strolled the gardens of the Tuileries and Versailles, “a very pleasant Amusement, and instructive Entertainment,” when he could shoehorn in the time. She later joined him for a golden interlude where, with two of their grown children, Nabby and John Quincy, they occupied a manor house in the rural village of Auteuil.

Abigail Adams spent delicious hours in the garden—le jardin