In August 1776, the British massed 32,000 troops outside New York City for an invasion that would almost destroy George Washington's fledgling Continental Army. Even as Washington prepared to defend the doomed city, his thoughts ran southward, to his plantation home. He wrote a lengthy letter to his overseer and cousin, Lund Washington, with his plans for the "clever kinds of Trees," including "Crab apple, Poplar, Dogwood, Sasafras, Lawrel, [and] Willow," that he wanted to have planted at Mount Vernon. Washington's arboreal reflections at such a time may seem unusual, even inappropriate, but in the midst of every great crisis, Washington found time to write letters about the orchards and gardens at Mount Vernon.

We have always known that the Founders saw farming in general as fostering both financial independence and moral fortitude. As Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." But as Andrea Wulf's engaging Founding Gardeners demonstrates, the major Founders—Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Franklin—incessantly tinkered with their own plants and seeds, endlessly contemplated the best kind of compost, and took every opportunity to view ornamental gardens in America and Europe.

As seen with Washington in New York, the Founders' near obsession with horticulture seemed at times to obscure their judgment—almost no pressing issue could dissuade them from visiting another garden—but it also spoke to their commitment to the agrarian ideal. Farming was the noblest means for establishing self-sufficiency, and boosting agriculture became a means of disengaging from the mother country and becoming an independent nation. Founding Gardeners delightfully introduces the horticultural passion of the Founders, a topic that seems particularly timely as Americans struggle to maintain their economic independence and cultivate a healthy food system.

Thomas S. Kidd is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University, and the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution.

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