“Founding Gardeners” offers a fascinating look at the Revolutionary generation from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen, and farmers. For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating.

Author Andrea Wulf reveals for the first time this aspect of the Revolutionary generation. She describes how, even as British ships gathered off Staten Island, George Washington wrote his estate manager about the garden at Mount Vernon; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson's and John Adams's faith in their fledgling nation; how a trip to the great botanist John Bartram’s garden helped the delegates of the Constitutional Congress to break their deadlock; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. Taken together, these and other stories are a revelation of a guiding but previously overlooked ideology of the American Revolution. “Founding Gardeners” adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the American experiment, and paints a portrait of the Founding Fathers as they've never been seen before.

Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at Royal College of Art and is the author of The Brother Gardeners (long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2008 and winner of the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award) and the co-author (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for The Sunday Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Garden, and regularly reviews for several newspapers, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She lives in London.

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