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The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740-1840 (review)

190 clearly drove Edmund Ruffin to partake in his thorough study of Virginia’s soils and to prescribe the use of shells and marl to neutralize acidic soils. Along these lines, Cohen also makes explicit something that is often unstated: slaves, not elite landowners, did the work that made agricultural improvement possible in antebellum Virginia, for it was they who mined the marl, collected the seeds, and applied the fertilizers. For all its strengths, Notes from the Ground has a few weaknesses. The maps are simple and most illustrations contribute little. At times, Cohen gets bogged down in extensive exegeses of relatively minor texts; what is more, scholars such as Steven Stoll, John Majewski, and Jack Temple Kirby have already assessed several of the same texts in their own recent works. Perhaps most intriguing, but also questionable, are Cohen’s repeated claims that the agricultural improvers of early-nineteenth-century Virginia still resonate in today’s debates over sustainable agriculture and modern technology. He makes the case, yet the same could be argued about agrarian reformers of other times and other places. Despite such minor concerns, Notes from the Ground remains a tightly argued, engaging, and important analysis that will be valuable for any scholar interested in changing attitudes about the land.