Something/Someone Old

This is the Hamilton mansion, an eighteenth-century house in West Philadelphia. It was originally a 250-acre tract purchased in 1735 by lawyer Andrew Hamilton. Andrew Hamilton was a famous Philadelphia lawyer, originally from Scotland, who made his name successfully defending printer and publisher Peter Zenger from an accusation of libel. His eloquent defense concluded with saying that the press has "a liberty both of exposing and opposing tyrannical power by speaking and writing truth." As far as I know, he bears no relation to the even more famous Alexander Hamilton.

Six years later, Andrew Hamilton died. His son, also named Andrew, inherited, but only lasted six years more before he died in 1747. However, by that time he had increased the holdings to 300 acres, which he left to his son, William.

What William built on his family lands was one of the greatest architectural achievements in eighteenth-century America, a Georgian-style mansion with a two-storied portico overlooking the Schulykill River. It had 16 rooms, a carriage house, greenhouse, and hot houses. Unfortunately, after William died, the land was in high demand; the area surrounding his estate was becoming a suburb.

After Hamilton died in 1813, his heirs sold off much of the Woodlands estate for institutional and residential development. By the first quarter of the 19th century, the West Philadelphia district was becoming a fashionable suburb. In order to save the core of Hamilton's estate, in 1840,[4] The Woodlands Cemetery Company of Philadelphia purchased the last 92 acres (37 ha), which included the mansion, carriage house, greenhouse and hot houses, as well as extensive plantings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands_(Philadelphia)

That explains (partly) why I lived almost on top of Hamilton's old estate, going to the University of Pennsylvania (which received most of its lands from him as a gift), and writing my dissertation on, among other things, eighteenth-century botany, without ever knowing about him or visiting the estate; it was in the middle of a cemetery, and, my family living elsewhere, I had no need to go to a Philadelphia cemetery. You'd think somebody would have mentioned it to me, though.

Something New

As always, my "new" things aren't that new, but at least this one is fewer than ten years old. In 2013, Elizabeth Gilbert, famous for her memoir and travelogue Eat Pray Love, published The Signature of All Things, a historical novel set in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. Her inspiration for the house where much of the novel is set, White Acre, came from William Hamilton's The Woodlands.

Gilbert's story centers around Alma, the daughter of Henry Whittaker. Whittaker grew up in poverty but managed to cheat, steal, and trade on his father's botanical knowledge and position as a fruit tree man to George III. Using these means, he becomes a botanical and pharmaceutical giant with a worldwide business and a large fortune. He settles in the New World, building a mansion in Philadelphia, and naming it, eponymously and rather egotistically, White Acre.

Alma is born into a world of botany, wealth, and strict discipline (mostly coming from her severe Dutch mother). Her story takes her, eventually, as far afield as Holland and Tahiti. This book is a bildungsroman, a novel focused on the development of the hero, and basically, you're travelling on Alma's shoulder while she tries to make sense of her early nineteenth-century world. Her search for meaning is inextricably wound up with the philosophical debates of the time, and presages later philosophical and scientific developments.

I've been reading this book lately, and I haven't finished it yet, but it's inspiring me, all right--though not, probably, in a direction the author intended. I will have to finish it before I come to any conclusions, so no spoilers, please, if any of you have read the book past the point where Alma arrives in Holland. I don't expect any big plot twists or reversals are waiting for me, but if they are, I want to encounter them in the ignorance a novelist has the right to expect of her readers.

It's a very well-written book, and one which certainly challenges the mind.

Something Borrowed

William Hamilton was an active botanist, holding more than 10,000 species of plants in his greenhouses and estate plantings. These included the first specimens introduced into America of the Ginkgo biloba, Paper Mulberry, Sycamore Maple, Ailanthus, Caucasian Zelkova, and Lombardy Poplar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands_(Philadelphia)

The ginkgo biloba tree is pretty amazing. It's "borrowed" for us because it is native to China. But I really should have put it under "something old." Ginkgo is unbelievably old!

Ginkgo biloba, commonly known as ginkgo or gingko[4] (both pronounced /ˈɡɪŋkoʊ/), also known as the maidenhair tree,[5] is the only living species in the division Ginkgophyta, all others being extinct. It is a very old species, with some fossils dating back 270 million years.

270 *million* years? Primates hadn't even evolved 270 million years ago!

Ginkgos are large trees, normally reaching a height of 20–35 m (66–115 ft), with some specimens in China being over 50 m (160 ft). The tree has an angular crown and long, somewhat erratic branches, and is usually deep rooted and resistant to wind and snow damage. Young trees are often tall and slender, and sparsely branched; the crown becomes broader as the tree ages. During autumn, the leaves turn a bright yellow, then fall, sometimes within a short space of time (one to 15 days). A combination of resistance to disease, insect-resistant wood and the ability to form aerial roots and sprouts makes ginkgos long-lived, with some specimens claimed to be more than 2,500 years old.

Apparently one of the reasons ginkgo is so good at survival is that it has multiple ways to reproduce--and, in fact, reproduction is one of its reactions to its environment being disturbed:

Accordingly, ginkgo retains a prodigious capacity for vegetative growth. It is capable of sprouting from embedded buds near the base of the trunk (lignotubers, or basal chichi) in response to disturbances, such as soil erosion. Old individuals are also capable of producing aerial roots on the undersides of large branches in response to disturbances such as crown damage; these roots can lead to successful clonal reproduction upon contacting the soil. These strategies are evidently important in the persistence of ginkgo; in a survey of the "semiwild" stands remaining in Tianmushan, 40% of the specimens surveyed were multistemmed, and few saplings were present.

There have been claims that ginkgo can help with memory function and sharpness of mind. Apparently studies on the topic show mixed results.

They have leaves unlike all other leaves on the planet:

The leaves are unique among seed plants, being fan-shaped with veins radiating out into the leaf blade, sometimes bifurcating (splitting), but never anastomosing to form a network.[11] Two veins enter the leaf blade at the base and fork repeatedly in two; this is known as dichotomous venation. The leaves are usually 5–10 cm (2.0–3.9 in), but sometimes up to 15 cm (5.9 in) long. The old popular name "maidenhair tree" is because the leaves resemble some of the pinnae of the maidenhair fern, Adiantum capillus-veneris.

Something Blue

William Hamilton also collected seeds and cuttings from Lewis and Clark's expedition.

Hamilton’s plant collection was vast, and he boasted that “there was not a rare plant in Europe, Asia, Africa, from China and the islands in the South Sea, of which has had any account, which he had not procured.” He was referring to a collection that could only have been amassed through access to a large network of botanists and nurserymen. The network’s local origins lay in the endeavors of James Logan, John Bartram, and Bartram’s English collaborator Peter Collinson. Hamilton’s connections to the new nation’s top political leaders--Washington, Madison, and Jefferson--among others, their similar socioeconomic positions, and their mutual interests in botany and estate development, resulted in his successful lobby to receive seeds sent by Lewis and Clark to the government during their exploratory trip to the Pacific in 1804-1806.

http://woodlandsphila.org/hamiltons-landscape

It's far from impossible that his collection contained the blue flax named after Meriwether Lewis, linum lewisii, collected by the famous expedition (though not, possibly, by Lewis himself) in July, 1806:

Lewis's blue flax, Linum lewisii, was collected on July 9, 1806 in Montana. It is not known for certain who collected the specimen that is housed in the Lewis & Clark Herbarium in Philadelphia. It could have been Meriwether Lewis, who was traveling along the Sun River from Lewis & Clark County into Cascade County, or William Clark, who was at Camp Fortunate in Beaverhead County. Lewis's journal entry for the day says nothing of blue flax, but does talk about the rain and cold, "we then proceeded and it rained without intermission wet us to the skin…the day continuing rainy and cold…" The preserved specimen in the Lewis & Clark Herbarium appears to be in good shape and has a partially opened flower. Blue flax flowers don't remain on the plant for long, and rain is not a good time to collect blue flax. For these and other reasons, some scholars believe that the blue flax specimen was collected by Captain Clark, who was at Camp Fortunate enjoying a relaxing and pleasant day. Either explorer could have collected Lewis's blue flax and we will never know for sure. At any rate, it was named for Meriwether Lewis by Frederick Pursh, who described the plant in his 1814 Flora Americae Septentrionalis or Flora of North America. Pursh attached a label to the specimen that reads, "Perennial Flax. Valleys of the Rocky mountains. July 9th 1806." This Lewis and Clark specimen is one of a group that was feared lost but was fortunately relocated in 1896 at the American Philosophical Society and subsequently placed on permanent loan to the Academy of Natural Sciences.

http://fwp.mt.gov/education/youth/lewisAndClark/plants/flax.html

It's also known as blue flax and prairie flax, and is native to western North America from Alaska south to Baja California, and from the Pacific Coast east to the Mississippi River.

How are you all today?