Less than three hundred years ago, America was a huge Eden of plants as yet unknown and unnamed by Europeans. In The Brother Gardeners, Andrea Wulf wrote about the great era of American plant hunting that accompanied England’s heyday of colonial exploration and led to the development of the science of botany and the art of landscape gardening. No one was more important to this enterprise than the Quaker farmer John Bartram, an indefatigable backwoods plant collector and propagator of newly discovered botanical species. After forming a relationship with the London merchant Peter Collinson, he became the principal supplier of the seeds that brought American plants into cultivation in England. Thanks to Bartram’s boxes of seeds, the horticulturist Philip Miller transformed the Chelsea Physic Garden into a living catalog of botanical specimens, and Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, spurred the conversion of the Royal Gardens at Kew into a showcase for exotic flora. Because of the efforts of these enterprising men, Chelsea, Kew, and Collinson’s own garden turned into major centers of botanical intelligence.

That story inevitably sets the stage for Wulf’s latest book, The Founding Gardeners, an account of how the four first presidents of the United States—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison—acted as major players on the other side of the Atlantic. All of these men were garden builders who shared their British contemporaries’ curiosity and delight in the discovery of new plants. They regularly corresponded with Bartram and furnished their gardens