"Old Greek" in the Garden

In the 1830s, a boy in Connecticut named Edward North was exploring the woods around his schoolhouse and absorbing the lessons and the pedagogical styles of a succession of young teachers who seemed to change with the seasons. The young woman, the embodiment of Beautiful Goodness, who left the twelve-year old boy broken-hearted when at the end of a summer term she left to be married. The angry and vengeful young man who succeeded her. And the next young man, as different from his predecessor “as light from darkness, as the milk of human kindness from the gall of vindictive wrath.” In a memoir of his school days, North wrote:

Wholly unselfish, he forgot himself in the great work that was given him to do. Untrammeled by printed text-books, he found a larger library in the ancient forest that surrounded the schoolhouse… [B]y the sorcery of a rare personal magnetism he converted his classes into eager, insatiate searchers after knowledge. He went with them on scientific explorations in the woods and fields. He taught them how to know a tree by its bark and leaf, the bird by its plumage and song, the fish by its shape and habit. Each boy and girl in that wide-awake school had at home a growing collection of plants, or minerals, or shells, or birds’ eggs, or insects, or woods, all neatly and accurately labeled, and yielding more of genuine joy to their owners than their fathers ever knew from gathered crops or bank shares and mortgages.

From that unnamed teacher, North absorbed a lesson that would stay with his for the rest of his life, and that he would pass along to the hundreds of students who sat in his classroom during his nearly sixty years as a teacher. Even for a student of ancient Greek, as he would become, the outdoors was a classroom, and nature taught lessons that could not be learned from a printed text.

Edward North was born in Berlin, Connecticut, in 1820. His father was a farmer. His uncle, Simeon North, was a professor of ancient languages at Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York, and from 1839 to 1857 the college’s fifth president. From his schoolhouse in the Connecticut woods, Edward North followed his uncle to Hamilton, where he studied Latin and Greek, graduating with the class of 1841, and where, after a short stint as a school teacher and law student, he returned as a professor of Greek. He taught at Hamilton for fifty-seven years. His students affectionately called him “Old Greek.”

At Hamilton, one of North’s closest friends was Professor Oren Root, a professor of mathematics and geology, who shared with him a love of nature study. “We were alike in our love of trees and birds and rare plants,” North recalled when Root died in 1881. In his diaries, North recorded walks with Root when they “botanized” together, often gathering specimens of wild plants to transplant in their gardens. Their first outing together, when North was a student and Root was a young tutor, was to find a tree growing in the wild along Oriskany Creek and transplant it on campus.

“After dinner I went down to the banks of the Oriskany in Marcus Lathrop’s meadow,” he wrote in his diary on May 12, 1852. “I brought home roots of the clematis, Jack-in-the-pulpit, wake-robin, meadow violet, etc., also bladder-nut, buttonwood, and wild plum. Cherry blossoms are out.”

North’s great passions were teaching Greek and gardening. He had a special fondness for trees, and earned a local reputation for his skill in grafting and growing pears. One of his favorite college traditions at Hamilton was the annual planting of the class tree. In 1841 he was granted the honor of choosing his own class tree, and chose an American chestnut which he had himself “raised from the seed.” He especially loved the chestnut because it reminded him of “the dear old woods of Connecticut” where he spent his childhood.

It should not be surprising that Professor North’s favorite Greek author was Theocritus. To North, Theocritus was a “thoughtful lover of his books [and] his rural haunts,” an ancient Greek poet in whom he may have recognized something of himself. According to his successor as professor of Greek, Edward Fitch, “his study of Theocritus showed whither his mind and taste led him.”

In a lecture on Greek gardening which he often gave in his classes at Hamilton, Professor North wrote: “The genuine scholar is one who likes to keep his thoughts busy not alone with words, but with what the words stand for. He likes to look for something beyond the dry husks and outward integuments of ancient learning. To the genuine scholar, whatever pertains to the landscape scenery and the rural life of the Greeks appeals with a singular fascination.” To truly understand and appreciate a classical author, the student had to understand and appreciate the landscape in which they lived. And that understanding and appreciation could not come from books alone, it had to come from direct experience of nature. Without that direct experience, ancient literature became “a dry husk,” an exsiccata, like a page in an herbarium. North concludes that “a true and wholesome scholarship and culture will keep itself in close communion with nature, and will strive to advance in the knowledge of men and books, without becoming estranged from trees and landscapes.”

In a lecture titled “Why We Study the Classics,” North makes an explicit connection between philology, the study of the classical languages, and botany, the study of plants. “The student sits down to a difficult passage in his Greek author,” he writes. “He carefully examines the original text, and brings to its rendering his best powers and resources. Here is a word he never encountered before, a new acquaintaince to be cultivated by consulting his lexicon. He takes it to pieces, as a botanist would analyze a strange plant, and examines its constituent parts.” On another occasion, he reverses the simile, saying that the botanist approaches the study of a plant “with the gifts of a lexicographer.”

North’s interest in both plants and language is primarily in cultivation. He is a horticulturalist. The purpose of his botanizing expeditions is to bring back wild plants to cultivate in his garden. Likewise, the purpose of studying the Greek language is the cultivation of the student’s mind. In a lecture to college parents, he compares the teacher to the nurseryman who grafts his pears to produce better fruit.

The nurseryman will point you to long, straight rows of pear trees, that have been raised from the seed. If he lets them them keep to their native individuality and come into bearing, one in a thousand may chance to be a good pear. The rest will be as chance decides, bad or indifferent. The nurseryman preferred a profitable certainty to a lottery with so many blanks. He grafts the seedlings, and makes it sure that every one that lives will be a Bartlett or a Flemish Beauty. So it is with your sons and daughters.

He had a special fondness for a row of non-native Lombardy poplars on College Hill that most people at the college found ugly and wanted to remove. He records in his journal that the founder of the college, on a fund raising trip to Philadelphia in 1793, was told that “if he wished his new institution to thrive, he must root out the native, uncultivated trees, and introduce the classic poplar which the Augustan poets had immortalized.” Elsewhere in his journal, he records the observation of another professor that the poplars “looked like Hebrew and Greek scholars, all hirsute and rigid with roots, idioms, and dialects.”

Like the Lombardy poplars and the Bartlett and Flemish Beauty pear trees, the classics were an introduced species, native to other landscapes, and valuable for the culture they import. His first argument for the study of Greek and Latin is that it enables the student to understand and appreciate the English language, which the ancient languages have “polished, enlarged, and greatly enriched.” Again, he turns to the language of horticulture to speak of the cultivation of the English language:

From its unrhythmical rudeness and stiff unaccommodating barrenness, as wielded by Chaucer and his contemporaries, its gradual changes and successive accretions have made it what we now boast it to be—a language unsurpassed for influence of idiom, for flexibility and stateliness of rhythm, by having grafted upon its vigorous Saxon roots the graceful suppleness of the Greek, with the compact energy and melody of the Latin.

The English language was like Professor North’s garden, where introduced and native species grew side by side and were often grafted one to the other.