John Adams: Farmer and Gardener - Arnoldia - Harvard University

10----o~ .. , .........., ,.~- ..,....The unfinished Signing of the Treaty of Paris, 1783, by BenjaminWest. The artist began with portraits (left to nght) of john jay, JohnAdams, Benjamin Franklm, Henry Laurens, and William TempleFranklin. However, the Bntish commissioners refused to pose.riences in the outdoors stayed with himthroughout his life. Early in his working lifehe wrote for the Boston Gazette and BostonEvening Post as "Humphrey Ploughjogger,"¡,extolling the virtues of the farming life and urgingthe cultivation of hemp, Cannabis sativa(marijuana), for the manufacture of cordage andcloth; high on the list of actions he wantedCongress to take in 1771 was promotmg hempfor use in making duck.’ He also referred tohemp’s mind-altering capability, writing, asPloughjogger: "Seems to me if grate Men dontleeve off writing Pollyticks, breaking Heads,boxing Ears, ringing Noses and kickingBreeches, we shall by and by want a world ofHemp more for our own consumshon."Z Hedescribed hemp’s culture in great detail,explaining how to propagate it, how to treat theseed, and how to harvest the mature plant.~As a farmer, Adams was naturally interestedin increasing the fertility of his land, and theoriesabout compost pepper his letters. (He sharedthis interest with George Washington, whorecorded his experiments with compost overmore than thirty years.) In 1771 hewrote a recipe for compost that woulddelight organic gardeners today. Ingredientsinclude "20 loads of sea weed, i.e.Eel Grass, and 20 Loads of Marsh Mud,and what dead ashes I can get from thePotash Works and what Dung I can getfrom Boston, and What Rock Weed fromNat. Belcher or else where." This mixture,combined with livestock waste,weeds, and kitchen scraps "in theCourse of a Year would make a greatQuantity of Choice manure. "’ In a letterto his wife Abigail during one of hismany absences over the years, he wrotethat he was leaving the farm’s managementto her good judgment and theadvice of those working for the family,but instructed her to "Manure in hills ifyou think best, but manure your barleyground and harrow it well."5IAs the Revolution wore on into thelate 1770s, Adams was appointed to avariety of consular posts in Europe.Taking a break from his duties in Londonin 1786, he took a walk, inspectingon the way a piece of land belonging toa "cow keeper." "These Plotts are plentifullymanured," he wrote in his diary. "There are onthe side of the Way, several heaps of Manure, anhundred Loads perhaps in each heap. I havecarefully examined them. This may be goodmanure, but is not equal to mine." In France hewent twice to see the gardens of the writerBoileau, which he estimated to be five or sixacres in size. "It is full of Flowers and of Rootsand Vegetables of all Kinds, and of Fruits.Grapes of several sorts and of excellent Quality.Pears, Peaches, etc. but every Thing suffers forwant of Manure. "6Separations were many and long in the lives ofAbigail and John Adams, and we’ve profitedfrom those separations in their diaries and letters.Nonetheless, John could not always findtime to write as often as he-and Abigailwouldhave liked, and she often complainedabout it. His answer to one such complaintbespoke his sense of priomties: "Suppose Ishould undertake to write the Description ofevery Castle and Garden I see as Richardson

1 1The East Front of Mount Vernon pamted by Edward Savage, ca 1792 The ha-ha bmlt by George Washmgtonis marked by the bmck wall that cuts across the lawn m the foreground Adams may have learned about thisgarden feature from Washmgtondid in his Tour through Great Britain, wouldnot yoo blush at such a Waste of my time."IBut Adams did enjoy his garden visits and wroteapprovingly of the ornamental "pleasuregrounds" of England and France.Remarking on a French garden, he wrote:"The Shade, the Walks, the Trees, are the mostcharming that I have seen." In another garden,seeing a collection of rocks that "[had beendrawn] together at vast Expense," Adamsoffered to sell the owner "1000 times as manyfor half a Guinea" from his fields in NewEngland. (This humorous comment was nomere jest, since the hills of Quincy were at thattime a major source of granite for constructionin Massachusetts.) Visiting an ornate castle garden,complete with grottoes and water spouts,Adams took delighted interest in the fish ponds,where carp and swans swam over to be fed."Whistle or throw a Bit of Bread into the water,and hundreds of Carps, large and fat as butter,will be seen swimming near the top of thewater towards you ... Some of them then willthrust up their Mouths to the Surface, andgape at you like young birds in a Nest to theirParents for Food."gFrom time to time, however, these Europeangardens aroused the moralist in Adams. Whileon an excursion outside London with ThomasJefferson, he was charmed by the greenness andthe bird songs of Osterley, the Middlesex countryhouse of Robert Child, but he remarked thatthese country homes were "not enjoyed bythe owners ... They are mere Ostentations ofVanity." He felt that the English "temples toBacchus and Venus are quite unnecessary asmankind have no need of artificial Incitements,"and hoped that English-style gardenswould never become fashionable in Americabecause "Nature has done greater Things."~9Nevertheless, back home in 1796 he succumbedto his own desire for "ostentation ofvanity" by installing in Quincy a feature popularin England at the time, the ha-ha.’° Used tocreate the effect of a long vista uninterrupted byfencing, with livestock grazing peacefully in thedistance, the ha-ha is a banked ditch, five or sixfeet wide and five to seven feet deep. The higherbank of the ditch, closest to the house, is supportedby a wall of planking or masonry andconceals a fence that keeps the cattle and sheepaway while giving the impression that they can

13A modern mew of the "Old House" m the Adams National Histoncal Parkmamtamed by the U.S. National Park Sermce."Montezillo," which he translated as "LittleHill" in contrast to the "Little Mountain,"Jefferson’s Monticello. (The distinction is purelyfanciful, of course. The root in both cases is"monte," meaning either hill or mountam inboth Spanish and Italian.) Today the property iscalled the Old House and is part of the AdamsNational Historical Park maintained by the U.S.National Park Service.However much their land may have been aworking farm with fields and orchards, John andAbigail Adams enjoyed having ornamentalplants near the house. When they purchasedthe Old House, long triangular beds to thesoutheast were bordered with low hedges ofBuxus sempermrens (common boxwood/ andplanted with fruit trees. These boxwood-linedbeds exist today, though their plantings werechanged from trees to perenmals by succeedinggenerations of Adamses. After 1800, Adamsplanted one or two specimens of horse chestnutin front of the house.z° We must assume theywere the European horse chestnut, Aesculushippocastanum, which came tothe United States via England in1741. In 1821 those horse chestnutsshaded the two hundredWest Point cadets who rested onthe grass after their seven-milemarch from Boston, while the86-year-old former presidentaddressed them from the porch ofthe Old House.21Some of the ornamentals fromthe time of John and AbigailAdams still exist today at the OldHouse. According to family lore,the clump of Magnoha vmgmiana(sweet bay magnolia) next to thefront wall was planted byAbigail.22 A black willow, Sahxnigra, grows at the very edge ofthe property, close to where theFurnace Brook runs. Because ofits age, and because black willowspersist from rootstock, it ishighly probable that this very treeis the one Abigail mentioned ina letter to her sister on April 7,1800: "The verdure of the feilds[sic] and the bursting of the Buds, withthe foilage of the weeping willow, which youhave heard me admire and which is the firsttree to vegetate in the spring, all remind meof Quincy, my building, my Garden."z3 In alater letter she remarked on the "gracefulnessof its slender branches which float and wave toevery breeze. 1124The white York rose, Rosa x alba, whichAbigail Adams brought back from England in1788, still grows at the Old House from cuttingspropagated over the years. A European roseknown from at least the sixteenth century, it isseldom seen in gardens today, but in 1917, theArnold Arboretum’s first director, CharlesSprague Sargent, wrote of his plans to propagateit for Mount Vernon. He considered it "a veryappropriate plant for the Mount Vernon gardenboth historically and because Washington mightvery well have had it in his garden. "25Other plants that John and Abigail enjoyed donot survive. Writing to his granddaughter’s husbandin 1817 regarding a gift the couple hadmade to him, Adams observed: "You would be

14pleased to see the pritty Figure your Peach Treesand Cherry Trees make in my Garden. Theirbuds are at least a fortnight more forward thanany of our native Trees. I hope you will contriveto come and see them next fall. Be sure andbring the Sprightly Elizabeth with you. Tell hernever to forget how her great grandfathersmoked his Segar."z~ The peach and cherrytrees are gone, but the "sprightly" Elizabeth isremembered as the wife of Andrew JacksonDowning, the nurseryman and landscape gardeningtheorist.Certamly Adams was no landscape gardeneron the scale or with the intensity of GeorgeWashington or Thomas Jefferson; the ha-ha washis first and last gesture toward "ostentation ofmeans he wouldvanity." Perhaps with greaterhave done more, as Abigail suggested in a letter,saying "he cannot indulge himself in thoseimprovements upon his farm, which his inclinationleads him to, and which would serve toamuse him, and contribute to his health. "2’Still, his farmer’s heart and his creative mtellectcome together in an observation that remainstrue to this very day. In a letter to Abigail hemuses, "Mr. Madison is to retire [from Congress].It seems the mode of becoming great isto retire. Madison, I suppose, after a retirementof a few years, is to be President or Vice President...It is marvellous how political plantsgrow in the shade. Continual daylight and sunshineshow our faults and record them. Our persons,voices, clothes, gait, air, sentiments, etc.all become familiar to every eye and ear andunderstanding, and they dimmish in proportion,upon the same principle that no man is a hero tohis wife or valet de chambre."2~Endnotes1 John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of Adams, edL. H. Butterfield (Cambndge, Mass.. Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 1961), 2.2342"Humphrey Plough~ogger," rn Boston Evemng PostJune 20, 1763, copy m Massachusetts History Society,Boston.3Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:249.4Ibid., 2 49.5 John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 3, 1794, Lettersof John Adams Addressed to His Wife, ed. CharlesFrancis Adams (Boston. Charles Little and JamesBrown, 1841), 2:151.6Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3:194; 3:14G.7John Adams to Abigail Adams February 26, 1779,The Book of Ablgail and John Selected Letters of theAdams Family 1762-1784, ed. L. H. Butterfield, M.Fnedlaender, and Mary-Jo Kline (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1975), 241.8Ibid., 2:316; 2:314; 3:35.9 Ibid., 3 189; 3:186.~ ° Ibid., 3.231."Ibid.’zIbid., 2.88.i3Ibid., 3:197.laAbigail Adams to John Qumcy Adams, September 27,1786, Letters of Mrs Adams, The Wife of JohnAdams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston CharlesC Little and James Brown, 1840), 2~ 154.15Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 4:40.1~Ibid., 3:281.’~ Letters of John Adams Addressed to His Wife, ed.Adams, 2:139.’8Ibid., 2.251.1~Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3:247.z°Helen Nelson Skeen, "Documentary Narrative ofBuildings Shown on Historic Base Map of the AdamsNational Historic Site," report prepared for theNational Park Service (1964), 5 1Z~Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past (Boston Little,Brown, & Co , 1926), 77-78.zzSkeen, 58z3Abigail Adams to her sister Mary Cranch,Philadelphia, April 7, 1800, New Letters of AbigailAdams, 1788-1801, ed. Stewart Mitchell (Boston:Houghton Miffhn, 1947), 244.zaAbigail Adams to Mary Cranch, Philadelphia, April16, 1800, Adams Papers, microfilm edition,Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, reel 391z5Charles Sprague Sargent to Miss Comegys, July 9,1917, Archives of the Mount Vernon Ladies’Association, Mount Vernon, Vrrgima.z~John Adams to his granddaughter’s husband, John P.DeWmt, May 1, 1817, Cedar Grove, near Fishkill,N.Y., John Adams Letter Book, Adams Papers, reel123.z~Abigail Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams,November 13, 1800, Letters of Mrs Adams, 2: 237.z~ John Adams to Abigail Adams, January 14, 1797,Letters of John Adams Addressed to His Wife, 2~240.Corhss Knapp Engle has been an enthusiastic gardenerand flower show exhibitor in the Boston area for nearlythirty years. She photographs, lectures, and wntes forhorticultural organizations across the country, and hasserved as chairman of the Garden History and DesignCommittee of The Garden Club of America. This is anadaptation of an article first published m White HouseHistory with the permission of the White HouseHistorical Association.