A Gardener's visit to Monticello by John Brossard

I had a great conversation with one of our gardeners about his recent visit to Monticello and the book Founding Gardeners, so I asked him to write a bit about it for us. 

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Monticello (Photo by John Brossard)

In her book Founding Gardeners, Andrea Wulf, an Englishwoman, discusses how the founding fathers were also our founding gardeners. She specifically focuses on four gardeners:  George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but she refers to others as well.

Ben Franklin is quoted in Founding Gardeners stating three ways by which a nation might acquire wealth and gave his opinion on each. “The first is by war” Franklin says, “This is robbery. The second is by Commerce which is generally cheating. The third is by agriculture the only honest way.” So many of the colonists saw America as a place of abundant opportunity when it came to growing their own gardens. In colonial America, the colonists were required to purchase all of their tools and material goods from England. The only thing they did not need to buy from the Crown was what they could grow in their garden for their own consumption. Their garden was their source of independence and they carefully cultivated their gardens into a country of their own!

In 1776 when Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three years old, he wrote the Declaration of Independence. By the time he was forty-three he owned the land that would become Monticello. While all of our founding fathers were very much our founding gardeners, I would like to shed a bit of light on the things Thomas Jefferson accomplished at Monticello before his death in 1826 at the age of 83.

Gardening in the late eighteenth century included much more than vegetable gardens. At Monticello this was no different. It would include flowers and trees as well. I do however want to focus on the vegetable garden located on the southeast slope of “his mountain.” At this laboratory called Monticello, Jefferson  grew 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs from around the world.

As the quintessential American horticultural gardener, Jefferson documented everything he did in his garden: the number of seeds planted, the dates planted, the germination rate, the days until germination, the harvest date, the number of vegetables produced by each plant etc. Jefferson collected seeds from all over the world and was so sure they would do well in American soil that whenever he traveled abroad he always returned with new seeds. One time on a trip to Italy he was shown a rice plant that he was so certain would do well in South Carolina he stitched the seeds into his clothing to be sure they made it home with him.  He traded seeds with his friends from all over the world by mail.

  

The greatest legacy his garden has to offer us today is that it still exists! The very same vegetables he grew at Monticello are still being grown at Monticello today. Thomas Jefferson saved the seeds of all the heirloom vegetables he grew. (Hybrid seeds didn’t exist back then and you cannot save them and expect the same plant next year.) By doing so he could plant them again the following year, catalog them or save them. He then could start his process over by determining how many of the saved seeds germinated the next year, when they were planted and so on.

My wife Amy and I visited Monticello one very rainy day this past April. While we were there, we picked up a number of packages of Jefferson’s heirloom vegetable seeds. We will be growing his Long Green Improved Cucumber, Cherokee Purple Tomato, Yellow Pear Tomato, Bull Nose Pepper, White Eggplant, Long Red Cayenne Pepper and Early Curled Siberian Kale.  If you stop by our community garden plot (SC-8) a bit later this summer we will be dedicating the eastern half of our garden to Jefferson’s actual plants. And, we will be saving seeds!

Monticello is an independent privately owned non-profit 501(C) (3) corporation and is not operated by any royal, federal, state or local government agency. Visit Monticello at www.monticello.org or at Facebook at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Jefferson and John (Photo by Amy Brossard)

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Thanks, John, for some great information about Monticello! And as always, can't wait to see how your plot grows! 

John has been gardening in the WFCG for all three years and also participated in our Heirloom Garden program before the WFCG was built.