by Andrea Wulf
With no gardening to be done outside, Jefferson brought some flowers inside to his private cabinet, the only room in the White House that he cared about. Shut away from the public, this was his sanctuary. In the drawers of a long table he kept a set of garden tools so that he could interrupt his long hours of writing to prune and deadhead his flowers. In the windows were pots of roses and geraniums, which were, his friend Margaret Bayard Smith remarked, “his delight to attend.” Without his “darling grandchildren,” whom he adored, she continued, the flowers became “objects of tender care.”
It was in this room that Jefferson spent much of his presidency. He was practically invisible to the public and did not even deliver his Annual Message to Congress in person. One of his main concerns during these early years was the reduction of the enormous national debt (accumulated mainly through Hamilton’s assumption of the state debts). During the first year alone, he received almost 2,000 letters and sent around 700 himself, not including the internal correspondence to and from his cabinet members. But for all the hours spent at his writing desk, he also needed to be close to nature, and so every day he would interrupt his correspondence at midday and go on long solitary rides through the countryside. Once in a while he stopped at farms to discuss “rural improvements,” often bringing gifts of seeds that he had received from abroad. He also explored the thickly forested banks of the Potomac and the hills above the city. “Not a plant from the lowliest weed to the loftiest tree escaped his notice,” Smith observed when Jefferson returned from his excursions with specimens that he had collected. Instead of holding public parades and parties, the third president waded through swamps and clambered up rocks in order to add a species to his collection. His love for botany was so widely recognized that the American botanist Benjamin Smith Barton even named a delicate flower—Jeffersonia—in his honor.
When he had first come to the district with Madison, now his secretary of state, more than a decade earlier, Jefferson had deeply admired the forests, and his ideas for the small capital town had always included large areas for public gardens and walks. He had therefore told the commissioners from the beginning that proprietors were not allowed to cut trees that the president (or the commissioners) thought to keep for ornamental purposes in the city. Even before the first houses had been built, Jefferson had suggested lining the avenues and streets with trees—after all, houses could always be erected quicker than a tree would grow to maturity.
Over the past decade, however, the commissioners had struggled to control the felling of trees for firewood and building materials. Again and again they wrote letters warning inhabitants about “cutting wood of any description” and asked that “ornamented Trees” remain standing in the public squares and on the grounds around the White House. Yet, with no guards to enforce these rules, trees continued to disappear. In a single night, one citizen recalled, seventy tulip poplars were “girdled” and afterward cut up for firewood. Thornton had also desperately tried to preserve the trees on the Mall but failed. By the time Jefferson became president, many trees had been lost. Most shocking of all, those on the grounds of the White House had been felled by Federalists after the accession of the Republicans, one observer noted, “out of spite to them who cherished it.” Enraged by Jefferson’s election, so the rumor went, his rivals had ordered the ancient trees to be cut down as a parting gesture, knowing how such vandalism would wound the new president, who regarded tree-felling as “a crime little short of murder.” Jefferson was so furious at this unscrupulous destruction that shortly after he moved into the White House, the author of the Declaration of Independence was overheard making the rather surprising comment, “I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling.”
Although Jefferson might have disliked L’Enfant’s imposing city—the large White House and awe-inspiring formal gardens—he never wanted Washington to fail as a thriving and organically growing town. The problem was that L’Enfant’s plan was so enormous that the city grew in several small clusters around important buildings such as the Capitol or the White House instead of around a single center. One of Jefferson’s few improvements was therefore the work on roads to link these separate areas. The main link was Pennsylvania Avenue (still more a dirt road than an elegant boulevard), and though he was not planting trees in the White House garden, he was happy to order two double rows of Lombardy poplars along the avenue. Native willow oaks—one of his favorite trees—he said, should be planted in between so that they would eventually replace the fast-growing poplars.12 As always, the meticulous Jefferson was involved in every detail, from drawing sketches of where to plant the trees to advising the superintendent of the city, Thomas Munroe, on how to protect them against grazing cattle (for cows were still wandering along the avenues of Washington).
Jefferson clearly felt that shaded footpaths for the public took precedence over spectacular presidential gardens. In the same vein he tried to democratize horticulture in the capital, encouraging gardening and opening a market for vegetables and other produce. He also requested that American diplomats across the world dispatch seeds from foreign ports to the White House—not for the president’s use but for the citizens of the capital. Whenever a parcel arrived, Jefferson would visit local gardeners and nurserymen to distribute the seeds himself (together with his notes on how to cultivate them). He shared melon seeds from Malta, nuts from Kentucky and, from France, a species of wheat that was reputedly resistant to the destructive Hessian fly. On his daily rides, he regularly stopped to check on the progress. “This,” one friend observed, “was the means of greatly improving our markets.” Instead of planting his own vegetable garden at the White House, Jefferson patronized the Washington market, telling his steward to pay the highest prices for “the earliest and best products of these gardens” so as to encourage competition among the gardeners and an abundance of vegetables. In addition he would buy plants for Monticello whenever possible from nurserymen in the capital to support their business.
For six years Jefferson did nothing to the White House garden. Most of the money that Congress had appropriated was spent on roads and the Capitol building—as the seat of the Senate and the House of Representatives, it was much more important in Jefferson’s political universe than the house of the executive. Some money was spent on the renovation of the White House (the roof was still leaking and the main staircase had to be installed), as well as on the construction of the east and west wings that Jefferson designed, but that was all.
Since Jefferson’s inauguration in March 1801, the city of Washington had not changed much. Visitors continued to be surprised by the lack of urban atmosphere and complained about the rocks and the tree stumps that obstructed the roads, “often threaten[ing] your limbs with dislocation.” Travelers who thought they had lost their way and asked for the capital were amazed to be told that they stood at its center. As foreign ambassadors paraded through the lavish rooms of the European courts, in Washington the ornate carriages of diplomats in full regalia got stuck in the avenues, the red mud clumped on the axles “like glue.” Being stranded, one British diplomat drily commented, meant “either los[ing] one’s shoes or one’s patience.” A group of congressmen got so lost one evening that they had to spend the rest of the night zigzagging through bogs and wasteland in search of Capitol Hill, several times almost overturning their carriage in the deep gullies that veined the ground. An accident in the middle of the night between the Capitol and the White House, another congressman worried, was dangerous because you were “out of sight or hearing of human habitation.”
Then, one evening in spring 1807, Jefferson turned his attention for the first time to the garden at the White House. He and the Surveyor of the Public Buildings, the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, spent an entire evening discussing ideas for the grounds, not retiring until well after midnight—hours beyond Jefferson’s usual bedtime. Exactly what piqued Jefferson’s enthusiasm is unclear. Perhaps he felt that he should f
inally do something after six years of understated nothingness in the garden. Or maybe the popularity of the Republican party and the diminished Federalist threat made symbolic gestures less important.13 Jefferson had won his second term by an impressive majority of 162 to 14 votes, and the Republicans were now so popular that even John Adams’s son, the future president John Quincy Adams, joined the party. Or maybe, having decided to retire at the end of his second term, Jefferson thought it would be better to create a republican garden while he could, rather than risk his successors turning it into a mini-Versailles.
Whatever his reasons, the designs would not be lavish. Jefferson told Latrobe that he wanted changes that “require but a moderate sum.” The first step was to enclose the five acres that Jefferson had allocated for the garden with walls and to open the remaining land to the public so that no future president could increase the grounds again. Jefferson first envisaged a circular garden—the most democratic of all shapes—but the surveyor calculated that the natural lie of the land lent itself to a slightly more oval shape. Jefferson also ordered that a professional gardener should be hired—though the work in the ornamental grounds would not justify a full-time employment—so Jefferson suggested finally laying out some vegetable plots “for the use of the Pts House.”
Like Washington in Mount Vernon and Samuel Vaughan at the State House Yard in Philadelphia, Jefferson wanted to make a political statement with his choice of species. He envisaged an all-American garden, as Margaret Bayard Smith recalled, planted “exclusively with Trees, shrubs and flowers indigenous to our native soil.” He made a long wish list—arranged according to the “forms and colours and the seasons in which they flourished.” Categories included “Large trees for Single trees,” “Clumps” and “Flowering Trees & Shrubs,” to which Jefferson added the names of local nurserymen where they could be procured. This sudden burst of enthusiasm for the garden at the White House, however, was not matched by the public money available for such a creation. With the limited funds provided by Congress, there was not much that Jefferson and Latrobe could do.
When Jefferson left office two years later, he had not been able to plant a single tree or shrub. Instead he had to spend the budget on preparatory work—leveling most of the ground, enclosing it by walls and fences and adding the half-finished wings to the White House.14 Latrobe had also built an arched gateway as entrance to the grounds from Pennsylvania Avenue, which, following Jefferson’s rule of republican simplicity, was so restrained in its architectural detail that Thornton thought it was “scarcely fit for the entrance of a Stable Yard.”
Jefferson’s plans for the White House garden can only be gleaned from a sketch and a couple of Latrobe’s drawings from 1807. According to these designs, radiating avenues would terminate at the entrance to the north of the house, with groves and weaving paths softening the formality of the straight lines. To the south, below today’s oval reception room and portico, was to be a large rectangular plot (exactly the width of the house) bordered with trees, shrubs or flowers as well as an area designed along the lie of the land, following the dips and knolls. Paths would snake around the small hillocks, clumps of trees and shrubs in a casual, informal way. Latrobe’s drawings of the south and east front of the house also depicted thickly planted shrubberies enveloped by large trees.
But there was a place where Jefferson implemented his vision, another garden that he designed exactly at the same time: Poplar Forest, an estate he had inherited from his father-in-law that lay in Bedford County, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, ninety miles west of Monticello. Knowing that Monticello would be crowded with visitors just as Washington had experienced in Mount Vernon, Jefferson decided to build a house and garden so far removed from the usual tourist itineraries that he would be able to live a more secluded life there. During his retirement Poplar Forest would become Jefferson’s retreat, and much of what he was planning for the White House garden found its expression there instead.
At Poplar Forest, the house was placed in the middle of a five-acre circular enclosure—exactly the shape that Jefferson had originally wanted for the White House garden. Similarly, in June 1807, at around the same time that Jefferson and Latrobe were sketching the White House garden, Jefferson instructed his overseer in Poplar Forest to begin digging a sunken parterre to the south of the house—mirroring precisely the rectangular plot to the south of the White House. Years later, in 1812, Jefferson would plant a row of flowering native shrubs along both sides, again just as he had planned for the White House. Next to the house at Poplar Forest he placed clumps of native flowering shrubs such as Robinia hispida, with its dangling pink blossom, black locust, and eastern redbud—all of which were on the list that he had made for his Washington residence.
Other similarities were equally striking. At Poplar Forest, the east and west wings of the White House became two rows of trees flanking the house. And where Jefferson had designed (but never executed) two-story pavilions in the middle of these wings at the White House, at Poplar Forest they became planted mounds in the arboreal “wings.” Next to the mounds, Jefferson built two small privies at Poplar Forest that were situated exactly where the buildings of the Treasury and War Office were standing next to the White House—quite possibly a symbol of Jefferson’s aversion to the two departments.
Poplar Forest was the perfect republican retreat: far away from the commercial centers, turned toward the west, intimate, set amid agricultural activity and inspired by Palladio’s country villas. Exactly what Jefferson had envisaged for the President’s House and garden: his republican ideal writ into bricks, earth and trees.
At the White House Jefferson had not been able to translate all these ideas into the building and the grounds. And though the garden—enclosed by its wall and fences—was much smaller than L’Enfant had wanted, Jefferson would never walk there in the patriotic shade of American trees. He had also failed to stop Washington’s and L’Enfant’s grand plans. However, because of the capital’s remote location and the continuous lack of funds, it wasn’t a bustling metropolis but remained for many years a small rural town where politicians battled with snakes and “vermin of all filths.” As such, Jefferson had achieved what he wanted—if Washington, D.C., had been built as a reflection of the federal government, there was no need to worry. The city did not exude the atmosphere of a powerful central legislative or executive. The avenues might have looked grand on the map, but inhabitants still had to jump into the mud when their carriages got stuck. While others complained about the backwardness of the capital, Jefferson wrote about his life in the White House that it was “a very agreeable country residence … free from the noise, the heat, the stench, & the bustle of a close built town.” For now it was a republican capital.
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1 For the sake of consistency, the President’s House will be called the White House throughout the chapter. However, the first recorded use of the name “White House” was only in 1811.
2 In telling the story about this bargain, Jefferson simplified the situation. Over the previous weeks there had in fact been several secret meetings and the so-called Dinner Table Bargain was only the culmination.
3 In the following year, in 1791, the new capital was named “Washington” after the president.
4 The three avenues that were named after the most populous states, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Massachusetts, were also the avenues that cut through the whole city.
5 L’Enfant went on to plan another city that also ended in failure: Alexander Hamilton’s manufacturing city Paterson at the Great Falls of the Passaic River, where Hamilton envisaged industry and factories instead of agrarian idylls.
6 Washington later instructed Thornton to reinstate the tomb space but it was never built because of the slow building progress.
7 Washington’s university and botanic garden were not built for many years. During his presidency Madison proposed a university to Congress three times and in 1816 Benjamin Henry Latrobe prepared a draw
ing of a university situated on the Mall between Thirteenth and Fifteenth streets (just east of today’s Ellipse). In 1817, the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences proposed a botanic garden, and finally in 1820 Congress gave them five acres near the Capitol.
8 Adams later bitterly complained that he was accused of having been involved in the creation of the capital. “Charge as much Ignorance, Folly, and Pride as you please upon the City of Washington,” he wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1808, “but lay none of it to me. Not one shilling was spent upon it by me.”
9 The two Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, had both received 73 votes. With Burr refusing to step down, the House of Representatives had to decide—it took thirty-five ballots before Jefferson was declared president-elect. After this election, the Twelfth Amendment separated the voting for president and vice president.
10 It would come to haunt Jefferson when in 1802 the same journalist accused him of having fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings.
11 Jefferson kept an extensive memorandum book for his expenses and a garden book in which he noted what and when his gardeners sowed and planted at Monticello—even counting the number of peas that would fill a pint. In Washington, he also began a list for his dinner guests at the White House (dividing them with taxonomic precision into columns of Federalists and Republicans) and recorded when vegetables appeared on the market in the capital.