Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

19. Oranges

100 & 19. Oranges when william bartram returned from his years of travel in the wild parts of Florida and Georgia all the way to the banks of the Mississippi he rode his horse home. He was alone and traveled north in the winter on the sandy hard beaches of the Carolinas, a solitary man on a horse trotting across the yellow sands on the edge of the Atlantic. He had been in the vast wild garden of Florida for several years. He came home quietly, first stopping to visit his uncle in North Carolina, and then traveling north over“roads deep under snow or slippery with ice,” until he met a group of travelers who were taking a ferry across thin ice on the frigid Susquehanna on their way to Philadelphia. He arrived at his father’s house in January and was pleased to find his mother and father still alive. The fruits of his labors over the last four years were sent in boxes to his patron, Lord Fothergill, in England. He came home to his father’s farm and garden at Kingsessing and lived there for almost forty more years. In 1805 he turned down an offer from Jefferson to lead an expedition up the Red River. He was too old, he said. And declined an invitation from the University of Pennsylvania to be a professor. He was a gardener from the time he rode up to his father’s house in the winter of 1777 until he died in July 1823 just after taking his morning stroll in the garden. His journey covered the wild parts of the Carolinas and Georgia, retracing a route he and his father had taken on their trip to Florida in 1765–66 when his father had been appointed King’s Botanist. He rediscovered the plant his father named Franklinia and gathered oranges 101 seeds that he planted in his garden at home when he returned. He spent months in the mountains of Georgia and the Carolinas and explored the western part of Florida with a party of traders and land speculators. Before his expedition, he had failed at being a merchant and a settler. He was in debt. His attempt to start a rice plantation near the St. Johns River in East Florida left him broke and despondent. In April 1766, before heading home, his father had supplied him money and sent “4 good yams two white & two red,” writing, “A rice barrel . . . one covered pot, one iron pot, one heavy pensylvania ax . . . Captain hardy did bring thy watch to be mended & took away to Philadelphia—promised to leave it with thy mother.”He also left good millstones and a grindstone, a pair of smoothing irons, and a long list of things that William would need to start a rice plantation on the wild banks of the wide St. Johns. John’s instructions to William for planting rice are to set fire “to the 20 acre marsh . . . if it be two wett hoe it up in narrow ridges & plant the rice on the ridge for all agree if the water covers the young blade it will kill it.” Peter Collinson thought he needed “a Virtuous IndustriousWife such as knows how to share theToils as well as the Comforts of a Marriage State.” Bartram also bought for his son six slaves: Jack and his wife, Siby; Jacob and Sam; and Flora and her son Bachus,“a pretty boy”who was about four years old.I have a hard time reading John Bartram’s letter to his son that lists the supplies he has procured.He is worried about Billy.He’s asked for advice from his friends about which slaves to buy, like purchasing a pot or an ax, but much more important because these six people will be the ones to make the plantation habitable and profitable. I wonder about Flora and her young son.Bartram had chosen her as a wife for Jacob. By the time Henry Laurens, a friend of the Bar- 102 kingsessing trams, visited William in July, only two of the men could handle an ax to help clear the swamp at his settlement. He had not yet planted rice in July. InAugust,Henry Laurens wrote a letter to John Bartram describing William’s health after a summer on his plantation: His situation on the river is the least agreeable of all the places that I...