A Botanical Beehive of poetry and belief in Philadelphian gardens. A radical refiguring of garden culture in colonial Pennsylvania before 1719

Abstract

Botanical Beehive describes and interprets an example of a relationship between belief, imagination, reading, writing, and the art of gardening in colonial Pennsylvania. The religious symbolism and poetic significance of a garden and plants in the day-to-day lives of many German and Dutch immigrants in Pennsylvania was distinct from English, Quaker, garden design. A poetic botanical language evolved from the confluence of multiple European languages, German early modern botany, and German Pietist beliefs of Germantown colonists. This language was a basis of an art of gardening that influenced the ordering and meaning of ornamental and productive garden culture in Germantown. Evidence of this art can be found in the writings and botanical illuminations of Germantown settler Francis Pastorius. His writing documents a garden of over two hundred and twenty species of exotic, ornamental, culinary, and medicinal plants that he cultivated in his garden, orchard, vineyard, and fields. This art influenced the development of the botanical fractur typography and illuminations of the monastic brothers and sisters of Ephrata Cloister. What you will find in this art is an imaginative and productive relationship with plants and language that formed a foundation of Philadelphia’s 18th-century transatlantic horticultural influence.