The Founding Fathers Obsession With Flowers

We're a flower shop; so obviously we're going to tell you "it wouldn't be Fourth of July without flowers on the table". Red ones, white ones, and blue (even if blue is a term florists use with a certain, um, creative generosity).

Flowers at the cookout, flowers at the rooftop party, a beautiful bouquet is by itself a joyful gathering so it's only natural to place it at the center of a gathering. We're not talking about lifestyle trends or a Pinterest moment. The American love affair with flowers and gardens goes all the way back to the beginning, and the Founding Fathers were, to put it plainly, obsessed.

You could argue E pluribus unum was a botanical idea before it was ever a motto.

Leading the pack was Thomas Jefferson, who grew over 105 species of flowering plants at Monticello, and many hundreds of individual varieties and cultivars of vegetables and fruit. When it came to gardening, Jefferson applied the same systematic curiosity he brought to politics and architecture. He recorded every single detail into a Garden Book with the same obsessive precision he brought to the Declaration of Independence.

The 20 oval beds framing the house of Monticello were a flex, hosting specimens from his own travels, souvenirs from Lewis and Clark's expedition, and standing annual shipments of up to 700 flower species from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He once spent an entire spring touring sixteen English landscape gardens with John Adams, clipboard in hand, taking notes. Walk through those beds and you'd find a French tulip beside a wild prairie flower from the American frontier. This was a guy who wanted the entire known world, curated and cross-referenced in one space.

The concept is beautiful, the provenance is not. We know the Founding Fathers were not on their hands and knees in sun hats personally coaxing seedlings out of the ground. The oval beds, the winding walks, the thousand-foot terrace carved out of a mountainside (!) Every inch of that jaw-dropping landscape, designed by men of privilege, was built on the backs of enslaved people who did not get a byline, a garden book, or a nickel with their face on it. If that makes you uncomfortable, good. You're human. Loving a country enough to look at it whole, contradictions and all, is patriotic. Loving only the flattering parts is just a mood board.

The Founding Fathers knew that the thing that makes a garden worth getting out of bed for, worth crossing an ocean for, worth cataloguing in a leather-bound book for sixty years, is the improbable success of different things, from different places, growing together in the same patch of ground and somehow making something more beautiful than any of them could manage alone. America is still a work in progress, but the idea of it, the messy, complicated, gloriously over-planted experiment of it all,  is still being tended, and still coming into bloom.

Like the gardens of Monticello, the most breathtaking bouquets are never built from a single flower. Neither is a great nation.

Now go put something beautiful on the table.