DISSERTATION
Reading and Writing a Garden describes and interprets an example of a relationship between belief, imagination, reading, writing, and the art of gardening in colonial Pennsylvania. The chapters analyze and interpret the role and influence of Francis Daniel Pastorius’ art of gardening based on a close reading of his own plant prints, poetry, literal descriptions, and didactic writing about plants and horticulture. He cultivated over two hundred and twenty species of exotic, ornamental, culinary, and medicinal plants and tended a productive apiary before 1719. His garden art was a multilingual hortenses poesis: a garden poem that celebrated the creative act of making a garden in a Pennsylvania woods.