Virgin Earth

March 1656

In March, when the worst of the winter storms had died down, John loaded his Virginia treasures onto a ship bound for London. A couple of planters had come down to the quayside to see him off and press him with commissions to complete for them in London. John accepted packages and errands but never took his eyes from his barrels of plants and boxes of rarities.

He was importing a dozen saplings in tubs which would have to stand on deck and be shielded from the spray by a little shelter woven of reeds. Three of them were new Virginian walnut trees, never seen in England before; the others were new poplar trees and whips of Virginian cypress. Safely packed in tubs of damp sand were the roots of some new asters and some new geraniums, and a new vine. Sealed with candlewax in a waterproof chest were seeds that John had gathered the previous autumn: of the aconitum, which the Americans called wolfsbane, Virginian parsley, the exquisitely pretty Virginian columbine, the leopardsbane of America – a flower like a daisy but with a flaming orange petal and a black heart, as bright as any marigold.

John looked at his treasures with the joy of a wealthy merchant bringing home gold. He stuffed letters and packages in the deep pockets of his coat and stepped back from the ship’s railing as they ran the gangplank ashore.

“Good-bye!” he called.

“When will we see you again?” Sir Josiah shouted.

“In another few years,” John called back over the widening gulf of water. “When my stocks are low again. When I want new marvels.”

“Be sure you come!” Sir Josiah called. “This is a land of marvels.”

John laughed and nodded and waved good-bye, and then stood on deck to watch the town recede swiftly as the current and the wind took the little ship down the river and toward the sea.

“I would never have thought it,” he said to himself. “From the time when I first came here. I would never have thought that they could have survived and built such a town, almost a city, from the forest.”

The new manicured banks of the river slipped quickly by. John looked upriver, to where the shimmer of light on the water gave the illusion that nothing had changed. “Good-bye,” he said softly, to the landscape and to the woman he had loved.