Kirk Boott and the Greening of Boston, 1783-1845
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Kirk Boott and the Greening of Boston, 1783-1845 Alan Emmet Despite travail, despite tragedy, Kirk Boott and his family contributed much to the early years of horticulture and botany in the metropolis of New England A love for growing plants seemed to run in the Francis lived only to the age of forty-four. Boott family. Kirk Boott (1755-1817), his fa- After he died in 1776, his five sons scattered ther before him, and his several sons after to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Their wid- him, had a passion for plants, expressed either owed mother and two sisters remained in the through horticulture or botany. In their narrow little house in Derby, dependent widely differing lives, lives which included thereafter on the young men to send money important accomplishments as well as bleak home. tragedy, this was one linking strand. One of Francis’s sons found a position as Members of the Boott family shared an- gardener on an estate, where he had three men other bias. Even those whose earliest years under him.3 The second son, Kirk, left home were spent in Boston felt a strong cultural and for London in 1783, when he was twenty- familial bond with England, the land from seven. He found work as a porter in a ware- which their parents had come. Indeed, two house but aimed higher. To improve his sons, when grown, moved permanently to image and his chances, he went to a England. fashionable friseur for a powdered wig.4 To In the middle of the Eighteenth Century, his sister he wrote, "[F]rom small beginnings one Francis Boott owned and operated a mar- I shall rise to be a Merchant, and traverse the ket garden in the town of Derby in the English Ocean to distant shores, with the merchan- Midlands. For about twenty-five years-the dise of Britain, and at last come [home] to whole of his adult life-he and his wife and Derby...."5 Within five months of leaving their children worked together on this shared home, Kirk had arranged for passage aboard enterprise. Francis’s sons worked with him the Rosamond to Boston. on a couple of acres at the edge of town, where Kirk found people to back his venture. they raised vegetables and young hawthorn Friends paid for his trans-Atlantic passage plants for hedges. One son, Kirk, recalled and furnished him with goods so that he could rising early to bunch radishes (three bunches open a shop when he arrived, gambling on his for a penny) and bouncing along in the cab- success to recoup their investments. The bage cart behind "Old Jack," their horse.l diverse shop merchandise that Kirk took with They took the vegetables to be sold by Mrs. him included hats, nails, and barrels of garden Boott and her daughters from a shop at the seeds. front of the family’s house. The shop pros- When he landed in June 1783, Kirk Boott pered and earned for the Bootts the respect of found Boston so green and beautiful that he the denizens of Derby, even those "far higher lamented England’s so recent loss of this in station and fortune."2 country. His first letter home sounds like a 25 market gardener’s son writing: ever, his straightforward business ethic-to sell better goods at lower prices than his com- Peas have been in a week or more and now petitors~nabled him to become estab- sold at 4/6 sterling per peck. I took a walk in lished. He repaid his debts, began sending the garden belonging to my Lodging House, and was soon well on the way and saw Kidney Beans one foot high and cu- money home, to success and cumbers more than that long. They are for- prosperity. warder than with us. I have made some Boott soon threw away his powdered pig- enquiry after gardening, but can get very ~ tail in order to become more American in ap- undifferent accounts. The gardeners are pearance. American women, however, held slovens and idle.6 little appeal for him. But no matter. He soon lost his heart to another newly arrived Eng- His initial optimism waned quickly. The lish emigree, Mary Love, whose father was American economy was in a shambles after captain of the ship that had brought Boott to the Revolutionary War, and Boott’s business Boston. They were married in 1785. went very badly at first. His merchandise Kirk Boott was an urban man. Although his seemed all wrong. He wrote his sister that he youth had been spent working the soil, his rued the day he had forsaken the simple life of boyhood home and his family’s existence had a market gardener in Derby. In time, how- centered on selling produce in the center of town. When he came to the United States, the town life of a merchant was Boott’s goal. An early foray into the hinterland, as far as south- ern New Hampshire, persuaded him that rural New England was rocky, densely wooded, and far less beautiful than Old Eng- land. When he was financially able to build a fine house for his family, a site in town near his place of business was his obvious choice. During Kirk Boott’s lifetime American cit- ies began the increase in density and in area that so changed this country. Kirk’s attach- ment to urban life was tempered by ambiva- lence. He apparently believed that regular es- cape from the city was necessary for one’s physical and mental well-being. He bought himself a horse and rode a few miles into the country every morning before seven. Repeat- edly, he expressed the regret that he had not explored "the grand, bold, and picturesque scenery with which this country abounds," but somehow he was always too busy to travel, except in winter, when it was too cold, or in summer, when it was too hot.’ In 1795, Kirk wrote his sister that "Mr. Theodore Lyman, a worthy friend of ours, has lately bought a Farm. He seems to take much The Boott house in Derby, England, with the greengro- in it."8 Boott had collaborated with cer shop at the front. (The spots are in the original.) pleasure Courtesy of Bradley R. Parker. Lyman in such mercantile adventures as 26 sending a ship to the Pacific Northwest in them to Waltham. Boott turned down quest of furs. The Lyman estate, "The Vale,"" Lyman’s offer, but after listening day and in Waltham, not far from Boston, was one of night to the sound of hammer and saw at a the first places in Boston to be laid out in the nearby coffinmaker’s shop, he closed his store informal English landscape style, following and left Boston-by then nearly a ghost the precepts of designer Humphry Repton. town-until the epidemic had waned. The Theodore Lyman had greenhouses and a high Bootts rented quarters in outlying Water- brick wall to hasten the ripening of the town, Theodore Lyman generously supplying peaches espaliered against it. Kirk Boott, them with produce and cider.9 perambulating Lyman’s acres, may have wondered briefly whether he, too, should A Mansion and a Garden establish his family in a country seat. By 1802 Kirk Boott was at the height of his When yellow fever struck Boston in 1798, prosperity. Neither he nor anyone else fore- all who could fled the city. The sparsely saw the trade embargo that would punish settled countryside was generally viewed as a American business so severely a few years healthier environment than the city. Lyman later. Confident of his continuing financial urged Boott to escape from the unwholesome success, Kirk decided to build a townhouse for city, even offering to provide a house for the himself and his family. His wife worried family, and to send a team of oxen to bring about the expense, but Kirk thanked God that The rear of the Boott mansion, Bowdoin Square, Boston, showing the lean-to greenhouse, with hotbeds below it, and trellises for plants along the brick walls of the house. This engraving was made between 1840 and 1847 by an unknown artist. Courtesy of the Boston Athenxum. 27 he was "enabled to provide liberally for [his table seeds from England, specifying such family’s] wants."lo favorites as "the best green, purple, and white The half-acre site of Boott’s brick house Brocolli."’s was a pasture in Boston’s West End, an area His new greenhouse flourished during its which was just then beginning to be devel- first season. In December 1805, he wrote that oped.ll Charles Bulfinch, Boston’s leading he had "Roses, Jassamines, Geraniums, and architect, may have been the designer of stocks in blow [bloom]," and that bulbs sent Boott’s three-story Federal mansion, with its to him by an English gardening friend were al- tall, Palladian windows lighting the stair- ready "shooting above the earth."1’ Boott case.12 Kirk’s oldest son, Wright, just home knew nonetheless that from school in described the new England, ere January shall be passed Jack Frost will house in 1805 as than I "larger expected, and give us trouble eno’ to resist. If this bold as much handsomer. The doors on the first intruder can be kept out, I promise myself floor are all Mahogany and so highly polished much pleasure [in the greenhouse] during as to make the furniture look ordinary."’3 ... Feb’y, March, and April, at which time we have but little I have taken Soon, according to Wright, his father was vegetation.