The American Museum in Britain invites you to a talk by award-winning historian Andrea Wulf on 22 May 2014, 6 to 8.30 pm:
Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation
For George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions. Andrea Wulf’s beautifully-illustrated talk looks at the lives of the founding fathers and how their attitude to plants, gardens, and agriculture shaped the American nation.
Photo credit: Antonina Gern
Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in Britain where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of The Brother Gardeners. Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession and the co-author of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. Her book Founding Gardeners. The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation was published to great acclaim in spring 2011.
Her most recent book, Chasing Venus, was published in 2012 in eight countries in conjunction with the last transit of Venus in our century. She has written for The New York Times, the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and many others.
She has lectured widely to large audiences at the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society in London, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Monticello and the Chicago Botanic Garden amongst many others. She is a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013.
The Brother Gardeners was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2008, the most prestigious non-fiction award in the UK and won the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award as well as the CBHL 2010 Annual Literature Award. Founding Gardeners was on the New York Times Best Seller List and praised there as ‘illuminating and engrossing’.
Andrea Wulf
Photo credit: Antonina Gern
Admission
£10 (£8 Museum members)
6 pm (drinks reception), 6.30 pm (lecture)
To register call 01225 820866 or email workshops@americanmuseum.org.
Founding Gardeners was published on 3 February 2011 by William Heinemann in the UK (titled as Founding Gardeners. The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation) and on 29 March 2011 by Knopf in the US (titled as Founding Gardeners. The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation). It offers a fascinating look at the revolutionary generation from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen and farmers.
Wulf’s book reveals how, even as British ships gathered off Staten Island, George Washington wrote to 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.
The Founding Gardeners adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the American experiment, and provides us with a portrait of the founding fathers as they’ve never been seen before.
For further information about events at the American Museum, please visit www.americanmuseum.org.
