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Title
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Diary, John Quincy Adams, 1827
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Creator
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John Quincy Adams
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Date
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6/5/1827
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Description
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President Adams' diary entries from June 1827 detail his regular visits to the White House garden. In this entry he describes the variety of plants in the garden, from fruit trees to common weeds. The President relied on his gardener, John Ousley, to identify many of the plants. Apparently, Adams encountered the living form of tarragon, an herb, for the first time on June 5.
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Source
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The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005. View original.
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Coverage
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1800-1829
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Text
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Then spent two hours in the garden, where at every visit enquiries multiply upon me. In this small garden of less than two Acres, there are forest and fruit trees, shrubs, hedges, esculent vegetables, kitchen and medicinal herbs, hot house plants, flowers and weeds, to the amount I conjecture of at least one thousand, one half of them perhaps are common weeks, most of which have none but the botanical name. I ask the name of every plan I see. Ousley the Gardener knows almost all of them by their botanical names, but the numbers to be discriminated and recognized are baffling to the memory and confounding to the judgment. From the small patch where the medicinal herbs stand together I plucked this morning leaves of Balm and Hyssop, Marjoram, Mint, Rue, Sage, Tansy, Taragon, and Wormwood, one half of which were know to me only by the name. The Tarragon not even by that.
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Original Format
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diary entry
