Bartram's Garden

This guide to Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia turns on a business gamble: crates of American seeds packed in moss and shipped to London for five guineas apiece, sight unseen, starting around 1750. It follows John Bartram, a self-taught Quaker farmer who built a transatlantic mail-order plant trade with London merchant Peter Collinson and aristocratic subscribers willing to wait years to see if their bet had bloomed. His granddaughter Ann Bartram Carr and her husband Robert Carr later grew the nursery to twelve acres and ten greenhouses, adding ice cream and steamboat excursions for day-trippers.