Philip J. Pauly moves the story of plant introduction, plant breeding, and pest control out of the history of horticultural science into the much broader and ideologically freighted framework of “culture”—in the eighteenth-century, not the twentieth-century, use of that word, he hastens to add. The ideas and activities of America's gentleman gardeners, professional nurserymen, landscape designers, scientists, and government bureaucrats were never just about plants. Inevitably, their work resonated with multiple meanings, reflecting and addressing the many ways Americans linked their physical environment to their nation's postcolonial identity. Did the American environment invariably lead to the degeneration of living things, or could it in time develop an advanced culture? Did indigenous varieties represent the highest potential and pride of the American environment? Could foreign varieties be naturalized into the American continent? Or was it best to keep out aliens altogether? Those questions frame the meaning of the horticultural events and issues Pauly details: Thomas Jefferson's anxious gardening agenda; the postrevolutionary “invasion” of the purposefully named Hessian fly; the competing visions of improvement represented by native and naturalized fruits; the varied approaches to the problem of the treeless prairie; federal distribution of foreign plants as a form of economic engineering; the political debates over plant quarantines; the clash of nativist and cosmopolitan styles of American landscape gardening; the possibilities, botanical and otherwise, presented by America's only semitropical landscape, south Florida; and the transformation of horticulture and its practitioners in an age of scientific expertise and state power. Pauly's research is stunning. He mines obscure periodicals, transactions, treatises, and textbooks and brings to life the dullest of government reports. He offers fresh perspectives on such familiar figures as A. J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted; introduces such new figures as the nurseryman and horticultural journalist Charles Hovey and the United States Department of Agriculture entomologist Charles Marlatt; and includes such unexpected characters as Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, horticultural missionaries to the West and South, respectively.