Dialogue with Nature: The Bartram Contribution

Dialogue with Nature: The Bartram Contribution. . , Nature As Commodity , In addition to their uses in the landscape, the Bartrams understood that plants also were important to medicine and industry and as food. Following John Bartram's death in 1777, his two sons, John Jr. and William, transformed Bartram's Garden into a commercial nursery. In 1783, they published the first catalogue of American plants for sale and subsequently filled orders for the Constitutional Convention, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson., Conservation , Andrew M. Eastwick (1811-79) anticipated the conservation movement in America by nearly fifty years when he purchased Bartram's Garden in 1850 with the vision to preserve it. He built a 34-room mansion, "Bartram Hall", on the property and kept the original Bartram house and Garden intact. Thanks to Eastwick, Bartram's Garden withstood the industrialization that engulfed the lower Schuylkill River., In 1891, City Councilman, Thomas Meehan, spearheaded the campaign to acquire Bartram's Garden from the Eastwick estate as a public park. Descendants of John Bartram held their first family reunion in 1893 and formed the John Bartram Association to assist the city with the preservation of their ancestor's house and garden., Today, Historic Bartram's Garden is administered as a museum and public garden by the John Bartram Association in cooperation with the Fairmount Park Commission.