Content area
Full Text
Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America. By Myra B. Young Armstead. New York University Press, 2012. 209 pp. $35.
Horticulture in its myriad forms-from cultivating crops to creating pleasure gardens-has played a central role in American history. The continent's vast quantities of space and natural resources provided unprecedented opportunities for Euro-Americans to cultivate, classify, learn, produce, and expand in both material and ideological ways. Far from a merely natural occupation, gardening was infused with the national and transnational politics of labor, gender, race, and empire. Gardens played significant roles in both the exploitation and the survival of African Americans, whether they were free or enslaved. Many black gardeners were locally recognized for their extraordinary expertise, but most of what historians can glean about their lives and work comes from cursory references in documents authored by the white elite. Thus a diary written by an African American gardener over forty years (1826-1866) is an invaluable treasure trove, as Myra B. Young Armstead, Professor of History at Bard College, recognized when she first encountered James F. Brown's diary on display at Mount Gulian, a National Historic Landmark and museum in upstate New York. Brown (1793-1868) was born as a slave in Maryland, probably in Fredericktown, and he escaped from slavery in 1826. In 1827 he was hired by the Verplanck family of New York, a prominent, wealthy clan of Dutch descent and antislavery sentiments. He quickly proved to be a skillful, reliable employee. When a dinner guest recognized Brown as a runaway, the Verplancks helped arrange for him to buy his freedom from his legal owner, Susan Williams of...