From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you've seen before. “Illuminating and engrossing.... The reader relives the first decades of the Republic ... through the words of the statesmen themselves.” —The New York Times Book Review For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation. Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.

A fascinating look at the men who made Britain the center of the botanical world—from the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. “Wulf’s flair for storytelling is combined with scholarship, brio, and a charmingly airy style.... A delightful book—and you don’t need to be a gardener to enjoy it.” —The New York Times Book Review Bringing to life the science and adventure of eighteenth-century plant collecting, The Brother Gardeners is the story of how six men created the modern garden and changed the horticultural world in the process. It is a story of a garden revolution that began in America. In 1733, colonial farmer John Bartram shipped two boxes of precious American plants and seeds to Peter Collinson in London. Around these men formed the nucleus of a botany movement, which included famous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus; Philip Miller, bestselling author of The Gardeners Dictionary; and Joseph Banks and David Solander, two botanist explorers, who scoured the globe for plant life aboard Captain Cook’s Endeavor. As they cultivated exotic blooms from around the world, they helped make Britain an epicenter of horticultural and botanical expertise. The Brother Gardeners paints a vivid portrait of an emerging world of knowledge and gardening as we know it today.

A leading historic plant expert bring the botanical heritage of early America back to life, documenting more than fifty species of flowers and herbs and providing details on how they were cultivated and used.

This book is a result of three and a half years of weekly columns in the Newark (Ohio) Advocate many years ago. It was very well received, and I often got comments from people I came across about a certain article that was helpful. I simply wrote about the things I did, learned, and failed at over that time. Gardening can be funny, you will learn in this book. My husband was a major asset in gardening and in providing funny situations, but I think he liked getting hit in the head often. As for content, the articles follow the seasons of Ohio which came as I wrote them, but my sense is they can be far more widely applied in other areas of the country. I hope you learn from and enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Happy gardening! Jo Ann Wiblin

Winner of the 2018 Nautilus Book Award, Silver, for Green Living/Sustainability At nearly twenty tons per person, American carbon dioxide emissions are among the highest in the world. Not every American fits this statistic, however. Across the country there are urban neighborhoods, suburbs, rural areas, and commercial institutions that have drastically lower carbon footprints. These exceptional places, as it turns out, are neither "poor" nor technologically advanced. Their low emissions are due to culture. In The Five-Ton Life, Susan Subak uses previously untapped sources to discover and explore various low-carbon locations. In Washington DC, Chicago suburbs, lower Manhattan, and Amish settlements in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, she examines the built and social environment to discern the characteristics that contribute to lower greenhouse-gas emissions. The most decisive factors that decrease energy use are a commitment to small interiors and social cohesion, although each example exhibits its own dynamics and offers its own lessons for the rest of the country. Bringing a fresh approach to the quandary of American household consumption, Subak's groundbreaking research provides many pathways toward a future that is inspiring and rooted in America's own traditions.

Metaphors are ubiquitous and yet-or, for that very reason-go largely unseen. We are all variously susceptible to a blindness or blurry vision of metaphors; yet even when they are seen clearly, we are left to situate the ambiguities, conflations and contradictions they regularly present-logically, aesthetically and morally. David LaRocca's book serves as a set of 'reminders' of certain features of the natural history of our language-especially the tropes that permeate and define it. As part of his investigation, LaRocca turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson's only book on a single topic, English Traits (1856), which teems with genealogical and generative metaphors-blood, birth, plants, parents, family, names and race. In the first book-length study of English Traits in over half a century, LaRocca considers the presence of metaphors in Emerson's fertile text-a unique work in his expansive corpus, and one that is regularly overlooked. As metaphors are encountered in Emerson's book, and drawn from a long history of usage in work by others, a reader may realize (or remember) what is inherent and encoded in our language, but rarely seen: how metaphors circulate in speech and through texts to become the lifeblood of thought.

At the beginning of his working life, a man is told that he is “wasting his life” by following the path he has chosen. Moreover, it is 1932, the midst of the Depression, and he cannot find a position in his chosen field. Finally, one solitary position in the whole United States opens up, and he is able to snag it. The corporation he works for is national in scope, but the division in which he has chosen to work is one of the corporation’s smallest. At the same time, he is desperately trying to get the woman he has been courting by mail for two years to marry him. She is resisting. He is broke and in debt, but he somehow gets money to travel the five hundred miles to see her. It is only the third time they have been together in the two years they have been writing love letters to each other. He convinces her to marry him (the best decision he ever made), and they head out on a journey to a place they have never seen and know little about. It is in the remote hills of Tennessee. Two years later, the family moves to an even more remote outpost. He has a vision of creating something that neither anyone in his corporation, nor any similar corporation, has ever achieved before. For thirty-five years, the couple labors in relative obscurity working on their vision. He refuses promotion to a more prestigious and lucrative position in his corporation. Near the end of his life, he is suddenly and surprisingly elected to the highest office in his corporation. This is their story.