Cradling Democracy

We're on the road in Philadelphia, drinking in American history in a blue state. So don't look for a lot of postings to this site this week. What can I tell ya ... we'll eating this wonderful city with a spoon! And we didn't think there was a lot that could make us love this country more, but the historical core of this old, old city does the trick.

Our immersion began yesterday as we entered southwest Philly to find -- in the most unlikely urban industrial neighborhood on the banks of the Schuylkill River -- the house and garden of John Bartram, born in 1699, who lived to become the American colony's first amateur botanist. His house, which he built himself out of native stone, still stands, along with much of the original garden, including the oldest gingko tree in North America and a 200-year-old yellowwood specimen descended from a plant collected in the Tennessee Cumberlands by Andre Michaux, the French botanist who also visited our own Grandfather Mountain. You have to be very deliberate to find the Bartram house and garden, as most tourists don't seek it out. But the Bartrams were our special pilgrimage.

John Bartram is famous in my mind for being a non-conformist Quaker who, when kicked out of the local meeting, refused to stop attending church, and who had the good grace to die in his own garden. I aspire to that. The latter more than the former.

John's son William Bartram also died at this wonderful stone house, where he succeeded his father in taking care of these grounds. William's plant discoveries for the rest of the world included the oakleaf hydrangea and the Franklinia, a cousin of the camellia which Bartram named for his friend Benjamin Franklin. The Franklinia has not been found growing in the wild since 1804, but I saw my first specimens of this rarest of American natives in the Bartram garden yesterday, descendants of the plant that Bartram first collected in the 18th century.

Working in the garden yesterday when we arrived was young Todd, the head gardener, who was the very image of a Quaker descendant of the Quaker Bartrams ... black bearded and open to new people from distant places. Todd is a student in horticulture and landscape architecture at Temple University. He pointed out the original gingko tree from Bartram's time and the yellowwood tree and was very knowledgeable about the other species growing there. He had a good opinion of these trees and a low opinion of the species running Washington right now, so we got along very well with Todd!

Today was our immersion day in colonial and revolutionary war American history. We saw where the Philadelphia revolutionaries of 1775 went to drink at the City Tavern and egg one another on to rebel against the King, and where they marched together (sufficiently liquored up?) down to Carpenters Hall to make speeches and plot and cuss power, just like all the rest of us to this day.

Gosh we love Philadelphia!