Andrea here. As summer begins to unfurl here where I live in New England, the profusion of colors and textures—both wild and cultivated—coming to life have me thinking about gardens. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am NOT a gardener. Other than the annual rite of planting impatiens in the big urns on my entrance steps and herbs on my deck, I don’t have the patience to dig and weed, and work toward a vision that may take years to come to fruition. But I truly appreciate the artistry, and am grateful to those who have a passion for cultivating the earth.
My recent walks reminded me of a fascinating story in botanical history. One of the many books (too many—I really need more bookshelves1) stacked on the overflow table of my TBR and Keeper piles is The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf. It’s wonderful history revolving around a small group of men who started the movement of trading seeds and specimen plantings between America and Britain, which changed the face of the English landscape.
At the heart of the story is Peter Collinson, who was born into a prosperous English mercantile Quaker family. His father was a cloth merchant, dealing in high quality fabric both in Britain and its American colonies. Collinson, who couldn’t attend university in England because of his religion, took over the family business. But his real passion was botany.
Self-taught in the subject through the vast collection of book he collected on the natural world. He soon gained a reputation as an able amateur naturalist and was elected to membership in the Royal Society in 1728 after being sponsored by Sir Hans Sloane.
Rubbing shoulders with the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society inspired an even greater interest in botany. Through his Quaker connections, he came to know Thomas Penn, son of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn, and for a number of years sent him English plant specimens as well as book on English estate design. Collinson also began to use his connections in business to begin collecting seeds and specimens from America.
Digging deeper into the subject, Collinson also created his own specimen garden, and though his Philadelphia friends, he came into contact with the American farmer/naturalist, John Bartram. The two formed a longtime friendship and trading arrangement that ended up changing the face of English landscape design. (Though like most friendships, there were rough patches where each thought the other didn’t appreciate all the hard work he was doing.) Collinson began to pay Bartram to send regular boxes of American seeds and specimens.
He also became friends with Philip Miller, the chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden, who also collected specimens from outside of Britain and was the author of The Gardeners Dictionary, which helped spark an interest in botany with the British public. Through Miller, Collinson began to supply American plants and tree seeds to some of the grand English estates. Baron Petrie was his first noble client—others included the Duke of Bedford and the Duke of Richmond. Soon an impressive array of North American trees—hickory, white and black walnut trees, sassafras, dogwood, red cedar, magnolia, hemlock, chestnut oak, white oak and tulip trees, to name just a few—were changing the British landscape.
The self-taught Collinson also began to hobnob with famous scholars like Sir Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook and collected exotic specimens from around the world, and Carl Linnaeus, who was trying to get the British to accept his new nomenclature for plants. Peter Miller was opposed to the system but Collinson helped convince the British scientific world that it made sense. (Perhaps as a thank you, Linnaeus named a plant after Collinson—Collinsonia canadensis—which pleased him greatly.
Collinson was a catalyst for making Britain the center of botanical research and specimen sharing. His ideas helped spur the creation of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which helped to disseminate medicinal plants, agricultural species and useful trees around the globe. (The Royal Botanic Gardens play an important cameo role in my upcoming Wrexford & Sloane mystery, which releases in September!)
So what about you? Are you an avid gardener? Do you have a favorite famous garden. If Collinson could gift you any tree or flowering plant, what would you choose?
