The final pages of Virginia Ferrar's pamphlet heralding the ‘rare and new discovery’ for the ‘feeding of silk worms’ are a poetic tribute to the Virginia colony and its agrarian fruitfulness. What Ferrar admired about the silkworm was its utility. Properly cultivated, the silkworm would yield ‘great treasure’ which would be to the advantage of both England and her colonies.

Virginia Ferrar (c. 1627–88), presumably named after the Virgin Queen and the eponymous American colony, was the daughter of John Ferrar (c. 1588– 1657), a deputy to the Virginia Company and a member of four other colonial companies. He owned a large estate in Virginia and published eight pamphlets encouraging planters in the Virginia colony to cultivate silkworms. Ferrar also owned a manor, Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, where his daughter Virginia kept silkworms and wrote poetry extolling the virtue and utility of silk cultivation. The Puritan intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62) supervised the publication of ‘The Reformed Virginian Silkworm’ in 1655.

Most scholarship on Samuel Hartlib and his circle centres upon their Puritan religious convictions, their sprawling correspondence and their various pedagogical and social reform programmes. Virginia Ferrar's poem about silk-worms, however, draws our attention to a neglected aspect of the Hartlib Circle's endeavours. This is their extensive work on planting, and the relationship of their natural philosophy to English colonial ventures in the Atlantic.

It is my contention that colonization was a principal intellectual foundation of the Hartlib Circle's natural philosophy, and that they developed their ideas about agrarian cultivation in the context of English colonization in the Atlantic. Moreover, colonies provided the ideal place for the improvement of land: they were experimental spaces where the world could be reformed.