Bartram's Garden

Bartram’s Garden is a public park in Kingsessing. If you arrive on the other of the two trolley lines running there, you have a bit of a walk through a “neighborhood in transition,” a euphemism for a poor, black, underserved area with a high gun violence rate.

No problem on a sunny morning but not a place to linger or play an edgy street photographer.

It was nice to see a school class out on a field trip, sitting out in the sun in a public space instead of a classroom and the gazillionth multiple choice test.

The setting is a far cry from the rural outskirts of 1728 when John Bartram purchased the land from Swedish settlers who had bought the Lenape “place where there is a meadow.” I don’t know enough about the particulars of those sales in the 17th century, but in the 1700s after William Penn’s death they took a documented ominous turn. 

John Bartram established a farm and garden and established a trade in native American seeds and plants with Europe. It’s hard to imagine an English garden without azaleas and rhododendrons, but they were expensive novelty items then 

John Bartram travelled and collected up and down the Eastern seaboard and became “Royal Botanist” to King George III. 

John Bartram founded the American Philosophical Society with his good friend Benjamin Franklin. He also bought six enslaved people in Charleston and shipped them to his son William in East Florida. 

William Bartram joined his father’s business after some failed business ventures and accompanied him on some travels 

The historic Bartram House was built by John Bartram in the mid-1700s.

John Bartram jr. and his daughter Ann Bartram Carr ran the Botanic Garden and commercial nursery until 1850. 

November is not the best time to visit a botanical garden, no pleasure seekers, no plant sales, but still some spots of color to be found like this American Bittersweet (I think).

Strawflowers have a special place in my heart. I hadn’t seen them for a long time.

The locals were bustling noisily through the dry leaves in preparations for winter.

Andrew Eastwick was an industrialist. He was a builder of locomotives, including the ones for the St.Persburg and Moscow railway, who bought the property from the Bartrams.

And instead of tearing everything down, as the superrich usually do, he preserved the gardens and buildings, including the Dovecote.

After his widow died in 1890, the family donated the whole property to the City of Philadelphia for use as a public park.

The non-profit John Bartram Association was founded by descendants of John Bartram to help the city run Bartram’s Garden in 1893.

Eastwick’s own impressive mansion, Bartram Hall, burned to the ground in 1896. Kingsessing by then was an industrial neighborhood of smog and water pollution resulting in typhoid, cholera and lung diseases.

Even now river activities may be cancelled and trails closed because of chemical leaks from former petroleum holding tanks next door.

After looking for trail signs on the Bartram Trail, I was delighted by the yellow identifying tags (and some non-yellow ones) of the trees. Here a selection from American Linden to White Oak.

Not a naturalist myself, I still looked for the legendary Franklinia, a descendant from seeds transported to Philadelphia by William Bartram in 1777. Obviously no fragrant white flowers to see at this point. I saw one in Brent Martin’s wonderful lumen print for The Bascom exhibition.

The oldest Ginkgo in North America is the lone survivor of three Ginkgos sent from London by William Hamilton, a rich Anglophile botanist and horticulturalist, in 1785. He planted two at his Woodlands estate (now a National Historic Landmark and cemetery) and gifted the third to William Bartram. 

I did not have enough time to see the wetlands, orchards and gardens reclaimed from industrial sites or take a peek at the Sankofa Community Farm, and may have to come back. https://www.bartramsgarden.org/explore/