Virgin Earth

1655

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