Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“And it’s very pretty,” John said. “I’ll take a couple home with me when I go. I should like to see it growing in London, I have a good collection of daisies. Could you show me where it grows in the wild?”

“Of course,” Sir Josiah said cheerfully. “We can go out this afternoon. And you must have a good roam through my woods. And when you have done with me I’ll give you a letter of introduction and you can go upriver and stay with my neighbors and see what they have that takes your eye.”

Lady Ashley came floating across the grass toward them. “Is this your first time in Virginia?” she asked with the slight drawl that the planters all shared.

“No,” John said. “I was here more than ten years ago for a long stay.”

“And were you plant-collecting then?”

“Yes,” John said cautiously. “But it was not like this.”

Sir Josiah wanted to lend him a horse but John preferred to walk in the woods. “I miss too much if I am too high and going too fast,” he said.

“I’m sure there are snakes,” Lady Ashley pointed out.

“I have good thick boots,” John said. “And I was much in the woods when I was last here.”

Sir Josiah had left a good stand of timber to the north of his estate and John started to walk there and then found himself following a stream which drew him deeper and deeper inland. He walked as he always did, as his father had always done – with only the occasional glance toward the horizon and the path ahead and with his eyes mostly on his boots and the little plants under his feet. He had been walking all morning when he suddenly exclaimed and dropped to his knees. It was a sorrel, but what had attracted him was the tiny indentations of the leaves. It was an American version of the familiar plant. John swung his satchel down, took out the trowel and carefully lifted the plant from the moist, dark earth, wrapped it in a broad leaf and tucked it into the pocket of his satchel.

He straightened up and walked on, his eyes glancing up at the trees, and then down to the path. After a little while, amid the buzz of the Virginian spring, the birdsong, the loud cry of the occasional flight of ducks and migrating geese, there was a new sound: a soft tuneless whistling. John was happy.

John stayed in Virginia for two years, traveling from one beautiful house to another, and staying for months at a time enjoying the famous Virginian hospitality. When he went deeper into the country and there were no large stone houses with slave cabins at the back he stayed instead with more humble planters who were building in wood but hoping for greater things. John found that he preferred the humbler sort of man, no one could help admiring the determination that they showed to cross such a wide sea to find a new land, and to struggle – and John knew what a struggle it was – to wrest a living in a new country.

Sometimes he slept on an earth floor before a fire, in the warm humid days of summer he slept under a tree in the forest. He was never tempted to shed his English clothes and make himself a clout and a buckskin apron. He would have felt a mockery of the People if he dressed in their way and lived in their way, when they were still kept like ferrets in a box. But he could not unlearn the skills they had taught him, and he would not have wanted to forget them. Even wearing his heavy boots he moved through the woods quieter than any Englishman. His eye for plants and trees was his trained Tradescant eye, but he looked the more sharply because these were woods that he had known and loved as his home.

“Don’t you fear the woods?” one of the planter’s wives asked him curiously as she saw him ready to set out, walking to the next plantation.

John shook his head. “There’s nothing to fear,” he said.

“There’s wolves, I sometimes hear them at night.”

John smiled, thinking of his old terror in his little house when he heard the wolves howling and thought they would come in through the gaps in the walls when his fire went out. “I lived here once, a long time ago,” he said. “I learned to love the country then. It feels as familiar to me as my own garden at Lambeth.”

The woman nodded. “Well, if you keep to the wide track you won’t get lost,” she assured him. “The next plantation starts just three miles up the road. There’s only a little stand of trees between their tobacco fields and ours.”

John doffed his hat to her and left. She was right, here and all over the country there were only little stands of trees left between the riverside plantations. For rare plants he had to go deep into the countryside, high into the hills, following rivers and living off the land. He hired a canoe for a few months and took it down the coast to the marshy area that Suckahanna had showed him when she was a little girl. He even went to the place of the bad water where the People had made their stand, and tried to survive before they were hunted down. He found a little plant there, an exquisite valerian, and packed it carefully in damp earth wrapped in leaves to take back to Jamestown with him. He thought if he could persuade it to thrive in Lambeth then it would remind him of the People, even when all other traces of them were gone.

He returned to Jamestown several times during his visit, to pack barrels of plants and send them back to the Ark and on the second visit he found a letter from Hester.

September 1655

Dear Husband,

Your new maple has arrived safely and been planted into the garden near to your first Virginia maple so that men may make the comparison and see that it is a little different. I shall write and tell you if it too changes the color of its leaves in autumn to scarlet.

Some of the daisy plants were spoiled by saltwater by the negligence of the sailors but Frances has potted up the others and says they will live. She says that your Virginia convolvulus must be called Tradescantia. It flowered this summer and is most beautiful with huge flowers very prettily marked. They only live a day but are succeeded by many others. You did not say whether it will over-winter, so we have taken it into the orangery and we also collected seeds and took cuttings. Lord Lambert has begged some seeds for his rare garden and we sold them to him at one shilling for half a dozen.

Frances is well and stayed with me for the summer, and there have been many other guests too, come to see the rarities and stay to enjoy the garden. Elias Ashmole has been a constant visitor and many other of your friends send their regards.

You may not have heard but the Lord Protector has established the rule of major generals – one to each county to supervise the work of the magistrates and the churchwardens and the parish overseers. The innovation is not much welcomed in Lambeth, but I will say no more in a letter.

I am caring for your rarities and your garden as ever and I am well.

Your loving wife,

Hester

In March, when the worst of the winter storms had died down, John loaded his Virginia treasures onto a ship bound for London. A couple of planters had come down to the quayside to see him off and press him with commissions to complete for them in London. John accepted packages and errands but never took his eyes from his barrels of plants and boxes of rarities.

He was importing a dozen saplings in tubs which would have to stand on deck and be shielded from the spray by a little shelter woven of reeds. Three of them were new Virginian walnut trees, never seen in England before; the others were new poplar trees and whips of Virginian cypress. Safely packed in tubs of damp sand were the roots of some new asters and some new geraniums, and a new vine. Sealed with candlewax in a waterproof chest were seeds that John had gathered the previous autumn: of the aconitum, which the Americans called wolfsbane, Virginian parsley, the exquisitely pretty Virginian columbine, the leopardsbane of America – a flower like a daisy but with a flaming orange petal and a black heart, as bright as any marigold.

John looked at his treasures with the joy of a wealthy merchant bringing home gold. He stuffed letters and packages in the deep pockets of his coat and stepped back from the ship’s railing as they ran the gangplank ashore.

“Good-bye!” he called.

“When will we see you again?” Sir Josiah shouted.

“In another few years,” John called back over the widening gulf of water. “When my stocks are low again. When I want new marvels.”

“Be sure you come!” Sir Josiah called. “This is a land of marvels.”

John laughed and nodded and waved good-bye, and then stood on deck to watch the town recede swiftly as the current and the wind took the little ship down the river and toward the sea.

“I would never have thought it,” he said to himself. “From the time when I first came here. I would never have thought that they could have survived and built such a town, almost a city, from the forest.”

The new manicured banks of the river slipped quickly by. John looked upriver, to where the shimmer of light on the water gave the illusion that nothing had changed. “Good-bye,” he said softly, to the landscape and to the woman he had loved.

John came back to his garden, to the Ark and to his wife as the tulips were starting to fatten and show their color. The wagon rumbled across the familiar bridge and into the stable yard and Hester, looking out of the window of the rarities room at the noise, saw John sitting beside the carter and came running down the terrace and into her husband’s arms.