by Andrea Wulf
Jefferson’s daughter Martha had moved to Monticello as her father’s housekeeper, alongside her six youngest children (Ellen and her younger sisters and brothers).3 Bacon described how they “delighted to follow him about over the grounds and garden.” They clung to him, threw themselves against him, cuddled and kissed him, sat on his lap. When the snow had melted they all eagerly awaited the first greens breaking through the red soil. Every morning the children would check the flowerbeds and then run to Jefferson to announce any new arrivals. He relished their excitement and fostered their love for plants. “Botany here is but an object of amusement,” he said, “a great one indeed and in which all our family mingles.” It helped that he had a knack for turning play into education, such as giving Ellen pet fowls under the condition that she had to find their proper Latin names in his zoological books or peppering his letters with playful instructions such as “more Latin, madam.” When Jefferson’s old friend Margaret Bayard Smith arrived from Washington, a few months after his retirement in August 1809, she found him sitting on the back lawn watching the children run along walks that were rimmed with the luscious colors of summer. “It is only with them that a grave man can play the fool,” he told her, before getting up to join the race among the flowers.
After his twelve long years as vice president and president, Jefferson was finally home. The building work on the house was finished and had transformed the eight-room villa into a twenty-one-room mansion.4 The first thing visitors saw when they entered the hall was the enormous jawbone of a mastodon. Next to it Jefferson had placed the much smaller jawbone of an elephant—his proof that the New World was indeed superior. Adjacent to his library was his greenhouse, a loggia enclosed with large sash windows that opened to the garden so that Jefferson could be close to his plants.
Most exciting of all, however, was Jefferson’s reinvention of the grounds of Monticello itself. In the years leading up to his return he had created a garden that was a living tapestry of the themes and ideas that had always inspired him. The plants that Lewis and Clark had brought back from their expedition were a reminder of the treasures that lay in the West; small fields near the ornamental part of the garden captured Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian republic; large experimental vegetable plots provided a scientific laboratory, while the grove and woods celebrated America’s magnificent landscape. Monticello had become the nexus of Jefferson’s world.
Over the past few years the changes had involved shifting tons of soil in order to level parts of the grounds, as well as planting large numbers of trees, shrubs and flowers. Jefferson had carefully staged these different elements of his garden, turning the changing landscape along the winding roads that led up the mountain to the mansion into an orchestrated approach. In some places roads were cut into the slope, while in others large areas were raised or flattened; fields were carved out of the forest and elsewhere trees were planted to create groves. The closer to the house, the more controlled the landscape became, almost like a journey from wilderness to civilization. Starting at the bottom at the mountain, Jefferson presented his visitors with an untamed forest. Halfway up the mountain, he introduced the first visible agricultural elements and then a carefully planned eighteen-acre grove that led to an enormous vegetable terrace, the lawn and the flowerbeds at the house.
Arriving at Monticello after a long journey through the Virginia forest, visitors first had to ford the Rivanna River in the valley (accidents involving people and horses slipping into the water were a regular occurrence). After crossing the river they found themselves once again surrounded by thick forest. “I looked around everywhere expecting to meet with some trace of [Jefferson’s] superintending care,” Margaret Bayard Smith said when she arrived in summer 1809—but instead of the “labour of man,” she could see only “untamed woodland.”
Where tired visitors expected a straight and manicured driveway, they were led instead along a winding road known as the North Road. Nestled along the contours of the steep ridge, this gradually climbed up toward four interconnected “roundabouts” that slung around the mountain at different levels. The first, or upper, roundabout was at the top of the mountain and a little over half a mile long. Descending from the top and connected by oblique roads came the second and third roundabouts and then the fourth and lowest, more than two miles long. The first and second roundabouts had been constructed in the 1770s and 1780s, but the third and fourth were later additions—as was the North Road, which had been finished in May 1806 as part of the redesign of Monticello’s landscape.
Until the completion of the North Road, visitors had taken the relatively straight Farm Road, which ran along two hundred acres of farmland. The North Road was considerably longer but much more scenic, with spectacular views down to the river. What the irked Bayard Smith did not realize was that she was in fact passing the fields and farmland that were located between the North and the Farm Road. Jefferson had screened them in the forest because he did not want his visitors to see any signs of agriculture—not yet, at least.
The illusion worked, with Bayard Smith complaining that she felt she was penetrating ever deeper into the forest along an “endless” road. She was not the only one who was surprised by the “savage” approach—some visitors worried so much about the state of the rough road that they abandoned their carriages and walked up the mountain. Others compared its slow and steep route to “Satan’s ascent to Paradise.” Nature ruled in Monticello’s forests, and trees decayed naturally. There was white oak, Jefferson’s most treasured oak because of its height, and tulip poplar, another giant favorite. They were, Jefferson boasted to his friend Madame de Tessé, “the Jupiter … [and] the Juno of our groves.” Jefferson claimed never to have felled any trees on this part of the mountain because they were, he said, “majestic” reminders of America’s spectacular beauty.
It was almost as if he was continuing what Washington had begun at Mount Vernon after the War of Independence. But instead of creating a manicured shrubbery of native species, Jefferson’s garden embraced an entire forest. Bayard Smith might not have been quite ready for this kind of American garden, but in the coming years the wilderness became an elemental part of landscape admiration. McMahon’s best-selling The American Gardener’s Calendar was the first horticultural book published in America that suggested introducing rugged nature into the garden. “Sometimes a blake declivity, rocky ground, or rough vale, is made to exhibit a wild and uncultivated scene,” the author advised, adding that native species “so bountifully bestowed upon us by the hand of nature” were great ornaments in the garden.5 Jefferson embraced this at Monticello, boasting that “what nature has done for us is sublime & beautiful & unique.” Slowly, as America’s wilderness became part of the country’s national identity and an object of pride, visitors to Monticello began to appreciate Jefferson’s approach. What had been dismissed as an uninviting wilderness by Bayard Smith became “a noble forest” and “extremely grand and imposing” to later visitors. It would be a full fourteen years before Bayard Smith embraced these new attitudes—in 1823 she wrote enthusiastically about the “impervious grove of aspens” with “ever quivering leaves” and “aspiring branches” which created a wonderful contrast to the spreading ash and other forest trees at Monticello.
Farther up the mountain, as the visitors climbed closer to the mansion, the forest grew more manicured—this was the “Grove.” Jefferson took his inspiration from the landscape gardens he had seen in England as well as his English garden books, yet he adapted these designs to the American landscape (and climate). In England he had admired sprawling lawns on which small clumps of trees grew, but “under the beaming, constant and almost vertical sun of Virginia” he would need more shade. He cut the undergrowth from the existing forest and trimmed off the branches of the tallest trees “as high as the constitution & form of the tree will bear,” leaving only the top canopy. The impression created was that of an open ground, as fashionable in England, which at the same time provided the
necessary shade.
Instead of shrubberies, Jefferson had decided to introduce thickets of evergreens such as privet and mountain laurel that would thrive in the shade. Sweet-smelling Carolina allspice, with its reddish-black flowers, lilacs, honeysuckle and guelder rose, with its white pompom blossoms, would spread their scent while the white tassels of fringe tree and alabaster blooms of flowering dogwood would light up the scene. Just as Jefferson envisioned when he first sketched his ideas for the Grove, there would be a riot of color under the green roof of ancient oaks, ash and maples—mixing the dark pink blossom of eastern redbud, the flushed white-pinkish rhododendrons and the purple capsules of euonymus.
Closer to the house, on the gentle slope between the Grove and the lawn with the oval flowerbeds, Jefferson created an open area in which the trees were more widely spaced. This linked the densely planted Grove below the first roundabout to the wide expanse of the lawn above it. Jefferson had chosen predominantly native species from across the United States for this open area, a select group that one visitor described as Jefferson’s “pet trees.” He grew southern catalpa for its summer bloom and Kentucky coffee tree, which had been so rare in the early 1790s that William Bartram had asked Jefferson to procure seeds for him through Madison, who had a neighbor who grew them. In spring the pink blossoms of wild crab apple competed with the enormous white flowers of umbrella magnolia, while red buckeye from the southern states paraded upright red blossoms like candles on the branches. Over the years Jefferson had also planted balsam poplar, which he and Madison had admired on their botanical tour in Vermont as well as willow oak, fringe tree and rhododendron. In between these native trees were a few foreign species such as chinaberry, which is today regarded as an invasive.
Riding (or trudging) along the roundabouts toward the house, visitors would then witness the transition from the forest, via the more ornamental Grove, to the flower garden at the front and back of the house—from the wild, rugged and picturesque to the more composed, refined and beautiful. At the same time the useful and practical elements of the landscape also revealed themselves—the scattered fields on the mountain slope. Jefferson had long been planning to implement these, having been inspired during his tour of English gardens with Adams two decades earlier. Yet once again, he would take these ideas and place them in an American context, making them his own.
At The Leasowes and Wooburn Farm in England, Adams and Jefferson had seen how garden owners enclosed grazing sheep, arable land and orchards within their gardens in order to create scenes of rural idylls. These so-called fermes ornées celebrated a paternalistic, if unrealistic, image of laborers happily toiling in fields and of a land that yielded enduring stability, prosperity and contentment (as well as income) for all. Jefferson liked the idea of combining utility with beauty but thought that the English had not taken the idea far enough. Wooburn Farm, he complained, was “merely a highly ornamented walk through and round the divisions of the farm and kitchen garden,” while The Leasowes was “only a grazing farm with a path round it.” Ornamental farms in England emphasized the decorative rather than the agricultural aspects of the landscape.
In the United States, with the embargo banning all trade with Europe, agriculture and home production had become more important than ever before. As if to imprint this onto Monticello’s soil, Jefferson had designed a plan for his mountaintop that included small fields nestled on the slope below the lawn and ornamental garden.6 After his return from Britain in 1789, he had drawn several sketches with bands of fields weaving along the contour of the mountain, but had never executed his designs. In the year before his retirement and in the midst of the embargo crisis, Jefferson informed Bacon that he wanted these agricultural elements disposed “into a ferme ornée by interspersing occasionally the attributes of a garden.” Most certainly he also looked back through his copy of Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening that he had read during the English tour, the guide that also explained how to lay out gardens and such ornamental farms.
Thomas Jefferson’s sketch of fields nestled along the mountain below the second roundabout (Illustration credit 8.1)
Planted with different grasses that he considered for his crop rotation and as animal fodder, the fields were designed as experimental plots. Some lay like a necklace on the northern side of the mountain and others were scattered halfway up amid the dense forest. Closer to the house, just above the second roundabout, further elements of cultivated nature, such as a large orchard and experimental vineyards, were introduced. Over the years Jefferson grew 125 different varieties of fruit trees, but by the time he retired he concentrated only on a few of his favorites—half of which were peach trees. The most exciting additions to the fruit collection were the gooseberries and currants that Lewis and Clark had found near the Great Falls of the Missouri—McMahon had propagated them prodigiously and given Jefferson cuttings.
Above the orchard and below the first roundabout was Jefferson’s 1,000-foot-long vegetable terrace, the experimental hub of the garden. During the last two winters of his presidency, his slaves had moved an amazing 600,000 cubic feet of red clay according to Jefferson’s instructions. He had reminded Bacon again and again how important the completion of the building work was—“Consider the garden as your main business, and push it with all your might.” The vegetable terrace became Jefferson’s favorite retirement project.
Carved out of the southern side of the mountain and buttressed with a massive rock wall that ran up to fifteen feet at its highest point, the terrace was unlike any other kitchen garden in the United States. Not only was it huge, it also offered a spectacular view, a sweeping panorama across the plains of the Virginia Piedmont, stretching south into a seemingly endless horizon. A scientific garden, a laboratory for horticultural experiments, it was a testing ground for potentially useful plants and would allow Jefferson to grow hundreds of varieties of vegetables.
The sheer scale of the vegetable terrace made Jefferson the most extraordinary gardener in the United States. None of his peers collected so many different species and varieties, bringing together vegetables from across the world, uniting horticultural and culinary European and colonial, Native American and slave traditions in the kitchen plots. The geographical labels of the vegetables that Jefferson grew in his first summer of retirement alone proclaimed these merging worlds: “African early pea,” “Windsor beans,” “solid pumpkin from S. America,” “long pumpkin from Malta,” “Lettuces Marsailles,” “Chinese melon,” “Spanish melon,” “Broccoli Roman,” “Kale. Malta,” “Kale. Delaware,” “Salsafia. Columbian,” “Eerie corn,” “Turnip Swedish,” “Peas Prussian blue” and “Lettuce Dutch Brown.”
The location of the terrace, on the southern side of the mountain, made it the ideal place for an experimental laboratory, as few Virginia gardens combined heat, humidity and mild winters as successfully as the one at Monticello. While the valley could be freezing, the rising warm air protected the vegetable terrace, which sat safely above the frost line. In fact, the entire terrace was like one gigantic hotbed, with additional beds below the wall, which retained heat. What made Jefferson a truly revolutionary gardener was the way he harnessed this unique microclimate to grow “hot” vegetables. Most Americans were still concentrating mainly on traditional old-world varieties such as cabbages and root vegetables, which were better suited to the colder and wetter climate in England (where they were still fussing over hotbeds and glass frames in an attempt to protect tender plants), but Jefferson also grew species from hotter climates, such as eggplants, peppers and okra. Looking beyond English gardens, he cultivated lima beans, squashes and endless varieties of kidney beans from the Native Americans’ gardens as well as gherkins, black-eyed peas, sesame and peanuts from slave garden traditions.
Jefferson’s approach to his garden was that of a man of the Enlightenment—observing, experimenting and recording. He categorized and classified his vegetables, dividing his terrace into plots of “Fruits,” “Leaves” and �
��Roots” (vegetables eaten for their fruits, leaves or roots); recorded the dates of sowing, transplanting and harvesting in neat columns in a “Kalendar” that he started in 1809; studied harvest times of vegetables, listing the dates for future reference; and measured the circumference of Lewis’s and Clark’s gooseberries. To organize his large collection of seeds, Jefferson had a new cupboard built for his study in which he stored seeds in labeled glass vials of different sizes (which his grandson had sent from Philadelphia). Everything, as one visitor noted, was “in the neatest order”—it was this fastidiousness that formed the bedrock of Jefferson’s work as an experimental gardener.
Underlying these experiments was Jefferson’s search for the best possible varieties. Unlike other plant collectors, he was not trying to assemble the greatest numbers that he could acquire; instead his endeavor was practical and patriotic. He wanted to find the most useful varieties for the American soil and climate, a continuation of his early attempts to introduce useful plants and crops during his time as an American diplomat in Paris. “One service of this kind rendered to a nation,” Jefferson said, “is worth more to them than all the victories of the most splendid pages of their history.”
Forty sorts of kidney beans were planted over the years before Jefferson finally picked his two favorites. His selection process was so ruthless that even the rare “Ricara bean” that Lewis and Clark had brought back from the Arikara tribe of the northern plains was eventually dismissed from the vegetable plots. One of the reasons for winnowing out the bad from the good and the good from the superior was Jefferson’s innovative stance on selective breeding. “I am curious to select only one or two of the best species or variety of every garden vegetable,” Jefferson said, “and to reject all others from the garden to avoid the dangers of mixture & degeneracy.”