United States Botanic Garden

This guide to the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. opens with a doctor's 1817 pitch to Congress for a garden on the raw new National Mall, and the quiet collapse that followed by 1837. It picks the thread back up with Charles Wilkes sailing home in 1842 with thousands of specimens from the Pacific and Antarctica, tended the whole voyage by a horticulturist named William Brackenridge. A crammed greenhouse behind the old Patent Office was where Congress ended up storing what he brought back.