Cultivating Ideas

Two British books helped shape Washington’s landscaping designs

The ideal 18th-century garden balanced the virtues of pleasure and profit. Books on gardening both proclaimed this ideal and sought to embody it within their pages, presenting useful knowledge to cultivate beautiful flowers alongside delightful descriptions of nourishing fruits. Yet they also epitomized the tensions that arose in the gentlemanly pursuit of such virtues. A glimpse at two of George Washington’s gardening books reveals the careful balancing act that masked the contradictions of gardening at Mount Vernon.

In May 1759, Washington ordered “[Batty] Langleys Book of Gardening” (New Principles of Gardening, 1739) from England. Langley’s naturalist ideas would later shape Washington’s landscape designs in the 1780s. The book offered its reader a profusion of pleasures: the knowledge to design a garden of pleasure, an invitation to enjoy the pleasures of gardening as an innocent recreation, and the pleasure of perusing the book itself.

We can imagine Washington receiving the book months later. The large quarto would have felt wide and heavy in his hands, asking to be displayed on the shelf rather than slipped into a pocket. A neatly folded gift nested inside the front cover waiting to be unwrapped: an image double the size of the book displaying two extravagant gardens. Leafing through the pages, he would have found that Langley’s book heeded its own aesthetic principle: The lavish illustrations scattered throughout the book gave the reader the continual delight of being “entertain’d with something new,” just as a garden path might open onto a surprising scene. An early English newspaper advertisement began with the large heading: “Beautifully printed on Superfine Paper, illustrated with great Variety of Grand Designs, curiously Engraven on Twenty-eight Folio Plates by the best Hands.” It was selling a double beauty: the designs themselves and the possibility of bringing them to life in full color and fragrance.

To make such visions a reality, such books had to also be useful. If profit was to follow pleasure, theory must be translated into practice. Another English book that Washington obtained, Philip Miller’s The Abridgement of the Gardener’s Dictionary (1763), wrestled with this challenge. It became an authoritative source for Washington, whose author, he wrote in April 1785, “seems to understand the culture of Trees equal to any other writer I have met with.”

Its publishing history exemplifies the tricky trade-offs. As its title declares, it is an abridged version of a larger, multivolume work, with the explicit intention of rendering it more suitable for the “practical gardener.” It was no longer “adorn’d with copper plates,” as the original had been (though it still came in at more than 900 pages). The single volume to which Washington fixed his bookplate was designed to avoid any laborious flicking between volumes. In condensing the text, “the author has been very careful not to omit any of the useful articles,” but “only the speculative parts,” the more theoretical sections on botany or history.

As a gardener brought order to the wilderness, so Miller brought order to tangled information. Yet a rival author bemoaned how his dictionary “blended and mixed” diverse things. Miller criticized previous gardening books for being “wrote rather to amuse … than to inform the Ignorant,” with too much “fine Theory” and too little practical instruction. Here he drew a direct link between pleasure and theory in gardening books. Reading a book provided enjoyment for the mind, just as a relaxed garden walk provided enjoyment for the senses.

The theory in a book and the pleasurable experience of a garden were linked in another crucial way: The labor of gardening is absent in both. Books do nothing by themselves. The labor necessary to achieve the pleasurable results—the grander the design, the more painful the toil—is hidden between the lines of text. The hard work to create and cultivate the garden is merely implied or appreciated.

It would be an oversimplification to say that Washington and other readers engaged in no labor of any kind. Indeed, the attraction of gardening for gentlemen was to bridge the gap between contemplation and action, to tend delicate plants as a light exercise, an “innocent amusement” in Washington’s own words. Nonetheless, as plantation manager and slave-owner, Washington primarily performed intellectual labor: planning, instructing, supervising, recording, and evaluating. In this he was joined by Martha, who took responsibility for the kitchen garden that produced food for the table.

But of course, as detailed extensively in the Farm Reports of the late 1790s, the manual labor—all the cutting, pruning, digging, weeding, carrying—was performed primarily by enslaved workers, along with some hired help. Like his gardening books, Washington’s diary entries are typically vague about who actually performed particular labors (“Planted peach trees,” etc). When away from Mount Vernon, his written instructions were often clearer, directing “the hands” with his pen, and on one occasion clarifying how his enslaved laborers were to “enable [the gardener] to carry certain plans of mine into effect.”

By placing pleasurable knowledge in the hands of their readers, gardening books could offer mastery over garden labor, as well as gardens. But their delicate blend of pleasure and profit was a cruel fiction for Washington’s enslaved gardeners. Indeed, further toil was needed to grow vegetables in their own small plots, for which no words were written in the pages of Langley and Miller.