John stayed in Virginia for two years, travelling from one beautiful house to another, and staying for months at a time enjoying the famous Virginian hospitality. When he went deeper into the country and there were no large stone houses with slave cabins at the back he stayed instead with more humble planters who were building in wood but hoping for greater things. John found that he preferred the humbler sort of man, no-one could help admiring the determination that they showed to cross such a wide sea to find a new land, and to struggle – and John knew what a struggle it was – to wrest a living in a new country.

Sometimes he slept on an earth floor before a fire, in the warm humid days of summer he slept under a tree in the forest. He was never tempted to shed his English clothes and make himself a clout and a buckskin apron. He would have felt a mockery of the People if he dressed in their way and lived in their way, when they were still kept like ferrets in a box. But he could not unlearn the skills they had taught him, and he would not have wanted to forget them. Even wearing his heavy boots he moved through the woods quieter than any Englishman. His eye for plants and trees was his trained Tradescant eye, but he looked the more sharply because these were woods that he had known and loved as his home.

‘Don’t you fear the woods?’ one of the planter’s wives asked him curiously as she saw him ready to set out, walking to the next plantation.

John shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ he said.

‘There’s wolves, I sometimes hear them at night.’

John smiled, thinking of his old terror in his little house when he heard the wolves howling and thought that they would come in through the gaps in the walls when his fire went out. ‘I lived here once, a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I learned to love the country then. It feels as familiar to me as my own garden at Lambeth.’

The woman nodded. ‘Well, if you keep to the wide track you won’t get lost,’ she assured him. ‘The next plantation starts just three miles up the road. There’s only a little stand of trees between their tobacco fields and ours.’