Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf

The subtitle of this book is 'The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation'. Well, that sounds like a tall task, but it is a very interesting look at the Founding Fathers. From their gardens, and what they meant to them, and how that shaped who they were as politicians.
She starts with Benjamin Franklin, who was an anglophile trying to make peace between the motherland and America. He finally gave up when they fired him from his job, but he took home with him a knowledge that while the English had the most impressive gardens in the world, they were populated with plants from the New World.
The gardeners she really focuses on are George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The things all five of these men shared was a close relationship with their land, and developing it to the best of their ability was a focus for them in their lifetimes--what they did was not at all similar to each other, but it was innovative and distinctive (with the exception of Adams, who loved his farm, to be sure, but he didn't do anything remarkable with it).
Jefferson comes out on the top of the founding gardener heap--he cultivated native plants, tried to figure out the best way to grow them, how to expand the food growing potential of the Americas, and then also was a great supporter of Western exploration, which brought hundreds of new plants from the west to the attention of the world. They all saw agriculture as the secret weapon to America's success as an independent nation--if they could sell to others, not just England, they would be a wealthy nation because everybody has to eat. They were respectful of the land and what it could produce. But my favorite is that Jefferson thought that the constitution should allow only farmers to be in Congress--that they had the necessary perspective to govern the nation. I wish they had retained that requirement in later drafts, because it would be really helpful to have more farmers and fewer lawyers in Congress today.