Goodreads asked Victoria Johnson:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Victoria Johnson I grew up in a house filled with maps of New York City from every century, because my father is a retired professor of urban planning who specializes in the history of the city. On family trips, both my parents loved to walk us kids around cities and show us the layers of the past that were still visible in the present--and how to detect traces of what had vanished. I was thunderstruck the first time I heard that one of the most iconic urban spaces in the world today was once the leafy, rural site of the nation's first botanical garden. In American Eden, I try to whisk readers back to that world completely.

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