John Adams: Farmer and Gardener - Arnoldia - Harvard University

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