Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

32. Gingko

156 & 32. Gingko i am hoeing. Leaning into the pull and tug of the flat, sharp hoe against the dry soil. Dry, I discover, only an inch or two on the top. The depths are cool even in this heat.Yesterday I was looking forAnn Bartram again. I went to Bartram’s Garden and read for a couple of hours in the attic above her dairy where the archives are now kept. It was cool and quiet there. I shared the room with three students who were working on the archeological dig around the main house. They were fiddling on computers this morning, making outlines of blue rooms on their machines. “She must have been an amazing woman to have such an amazing son. You would think she had some influence on him,” Joel Fry, the archivist, said as he handed me two folders. I read John Bartram’s will, where he made sure to provide for his wife’s comfort: I gaive and bequeath to my son John Bartram all my plantation whereon we live scituate between David Gibsons land and my son James Bartrams land with all the apurtenances to it both upland and medow to him and his heairs forever he paying his mother yearly ten pounds, and is to find her sufficient firewood cut and hauled to the dore of her kitchen and keep her a cow and horse winter and summer on good grass or hay and allso a sufficient spot in his garden to sow or plant on, and full liberty to pass and repass to the well and rooms here mentioned that is the new seller and the two rooms above it and the parlor and chamber over it and the ould stoveroom now used for a kitshen all which she must claim during her natural life as her full right according to my will. gingko 157 “We know she went into Philadelphia to sell a pitcher plant. But we don’t know how she got there,” a volunteer told me. Did she take a ferry, did she sell her butter and eggs when she got there? “She must have had a wagon,” I said. And she said,“Yes, but we don’t know about any of that, you see she was a woman. This family didn’t save letters, it was only John’s they eventually saved. Most were sold when they ran into money problems.” When John Bartram died in September 1777, the inventory of his house included in the Small Room: “One Twenty four Hour Clock, 1 Old Desk, One Old Tea Table, 1 Small Close Iron Stove & Funell, A Feather Bed, Bolster & 2 Pillows, 7 pr. Sheets, Bolster & Pillow Cases, 1 Cover Lid & 1 pr. Blankets Old, 1 Bed Stead, 9 Rush Bottom Chairs, 2 Old Fire Shovels & 1 pr. Tongs, & 1 Hand Brush.”The Large Chamber had a table and a bed and“One Looking Glass with Sconces, Pewter Dishes & Plates, One Spining Whel, 2 Brass candlesticks & 2 Iron,One Delf Bowl & Dish,A Small Floore Cloth,”and a few other items.An Upper Room contained a looking glass, another bed and quilt, three stone plates, and two leatherbottom chairs. In the Back Room was another bed and blankets, “One Chest, 1 Set of Globes (Broke), Library of Books.” I am hoeing in the heat climbing up to ninety today, but yesterday I stood under the trees that John Bartram planted three hundred years ago. The air was cool. The river ran the opposite way, backing itself away from the sea, high tide, and chocolate colored from the big rains we had a few days before. I stood under the largest ginkgo tree in America, a gift from a wealthy man who had an estate just up the river from John Bartram’s house and farm and garden. A few days ago I went to a gathering of poets.We were all women, sipping our wine and eating the delicious food two other poets had 158 kingsessing prepared.Our host’s backyard was once part of a large extended yard where fruit trees and gardens grew for the houses on that block,built in the 1830s.She shares a very old ginkgo with her neighbors.It towers above her small yard and its thorny orange trees and little lights in tiny pagodas. She showed me where a yellow-bellied sapsucker drills holes each year. The ginkgo trunk is full of the marks...