Monticello, a Garden Upon a Hill by jeffreytiverson

MONTICELLO, A GARDEN UPON A HILL Father of the Declaration of Independence and enlightened President, Thomas Jefferson was also a formidable gardener. He collected seeds and plants from across the Earth, cultivated a vineyard, and made of his garden a veritable laboratory of the future. Words by Jeffrey T. Iverson

From Jefferson’s orchards — fig tree.

VIGNETTE

In 1782, with the War of American Independence all but won, FrançoisJean de Chastellux, a member of the Académie française, friend of Voltaire and major-general in the French forces then encamped at Williamsburg, travelled to Virginia’s Southwest Mountains in the hope that he might better know one of the most brilliant, and also most elusive, minds of this rising republic — Thomas Jefferson. In the week he spent with the thirtynine-year-old polymath, apparently it was his home itself, Monticello, as much as their hours of philosophical repartee, which finally illuminated the personage of Jefferson for Chastellux. As he wrote in his 1786 memoir Travels in North America, “It seems indeed as though, ever since his youth, [Jefferson] had placed his mind, like his house, on a lofty height, whence he might contemplate the whole universe.” A thousand leagues from Paris, on a Virginia

mountaintop, Chastellux had encountered a fellow child of the Enlightenment. Today, renowned as a UNESCO World Heritage site, Monticello remains a remarkable window into the mind of Thomas Jefferson. For Peter Hatch, director of gardens and grounds emeritus for the 2,400-acre estate, Monticello can be “described as his autobiography, in the way its architecture and gardens expressed [Jefferson’s] multifaceted intellect”. But for Hatch, the place at Monticello where that enlightened mind saw furthest, and indeed which now offers visitors perhaps the most colourful and complex portrait of the shy Virginian, is not his house but his garden. From 1977 to 2012, Peter Hatch oversaw the renaissance of this eight-acre horticultural paradise, boasting 330 varieties of vegetables, 170 types of fruit, 22 varieties of grapevines and a breathtaking panorama of the rolling Virginia countryside. To explore this bounty is to glimpse facets of Jefferson: the scientist and reader of Rousseau, neatly cataloguing the natural world; the revolutionary patriot, defying conventions to improve his countrymen’s lives; the epicure, impassioned by food and wine; the citizen of the world, in love with France. “One of the more poignant Jefferson memorandums was composed in Paris, a dialogue between the two sides of his personality — ‘the Head and the Heart’,” says Hatch. “And I think there are few topics that tell us more about the head and the heart of Thomas Jefferson than gardening.” As the author of the founding document of the American political tradition, and the president who orchestrated the largest land deal in history (the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the young republic’s size), Thomas Jefferson’s legacy to his nation has been long celebrated, and justly so. And yet,

From Jefferson’s vineyards — Muscat grapes.

MONTICELLO, A GARDEN UPON A HILL

Pages 42—43: Engraving of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence, by Asher B. Durand, after John Trumbull, 1823.

From Jefferson’s flower gardens — semi-double musk rose.

VIGNETTE

to read his letters, it often seemed Jefferson would have given it all away for the chance to sow cabbages. As he wrote in 1811, “If heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.” The most illuminating document of Jefferson’s lifelong gardening passion is his Garden Book, a sixtysix-page diary of horticultural triumph, failure and minutiae spanning fifty-eight years. Starting in 1766 as a young law student just before leaving his parents’ plantation to build his nearby mountaintop home, Jefferson records the day his cucumbers came to table in July 1768, the frost that killed his grapevines and peaches in 1790, and how many strawberries or peas will fill a pint glass (100 and 2000 respectively). “Jefferson’s interest in gardening arose from a genuine, wide-eyed curiosity about the natural world,” says Hatch. As Jefferson once told his daughter Martha, “There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.” This rich record, supported by archaeological digs, permitted Hatch to launch perhaps the largest early American garden restoration ever in 1981, which he recounts in his 2012 book “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Garden at Monticello. Beginning with Jefferson’s “fruitery” (the horseshoeshaped orchard encircling vineyards and berry patches, first planted in 1769), Hatch and his team covered Monticello’s south-east slope with rows of pear, cherry and peach trees, but also quince, pomegranate and Jefferson’s beloved “Albemarle Pippin” — the American apple Queen Victoria so fancied that she exempted it from import taxes. Next, assisted by Gabriele Rausse, a pioneer of the modern Virginia wine industry, the vineyards were re-established

using twenty-two European grape varietals originally planted there in 1807. Finally, overlooking it all, Hatch recreated Jefferson’s 305-metre-long terraced vegetable garden. In all, the restoration required Hatch to track down seeds for some 500 historic varieties of fruits and vegetables. “Jefferson served as a kind of seed missionary, getting unusual plants from around the world and sharing them with friends, neighbours and leading plantsmen,” says Hatch. Jefferson planted a wide array of species then unfamiliar to Virginia gardeners. One Jefferson family recipe, a sort of gumbo, called for pattypan squashes and lima beans (Native American vegetables), tomatoes (from Central America), potatoes (from Northern Europe by way of South America), and okra (from Africa). With Spanish Onions, Mexican Purple Calabash Tomato, Chilean Strawberry, Milan Cabbage, Tuscan Kale, Swiss Chard, French Tarragon, De Meaux Endive, “This garden”, says Hatch, “became an Ellis Island"1 of new and unusual plants from the four corners of the globe.” If this diverse collection was born of Jefferson’s curiosity and epicurean palate, it continued from a sense of patriotic duty. For independence from Great Britain meant losing America’s principal market for products like Virginia tobacco and New England whale oil. To entice new trade partners, Jefferson believed American farmers would need additional and improved cash crops. As Jefferson wrote, “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” With that sentiment at heart, Jefferson embarked for Paris in 1785 to become America’s Minister to France. For Jefferson, growing his young nation’s economy required educating Europeans about his fertile land. In Paris he published his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, introducing American society

1 An island in the bay

of New York once used as an entry point for immigrants to the United States.

MONTICELLO, A GARDEN UPON A HILL

and describing its flora and fauna, and he attended Madame de Tessé’s literary salons, dazzling the French intelligentsia with his erudition while handing out persimmon plants and pecans, sumac seeds and sassafras. Visitors to Jefferson’s ChampsÉlysées mansion toured his garden of American expatriates, such as Cherokee corn, sweet potatoes and giant watermelon. When Jefferson wasn’t vaunting all his country could offer Europe, he researched what Europe could offer America, travelling for three months across France and Italy in 1787. He filled notebooks with sketches of pasta makers, wheelbarrows, bricks and windmills. In Marseille he tasted figs, capers, pistachios and almonds, all of which, he thought, “May succeed [in America] on, or southward of the Chesapeake.” He fell in love with olive trees, writing to the South Carolina Society for Promoting Agriculture that importing this “gift of heaven… should be the object of the Carolina patriot”. He traversed the Alps into Italy to discover the secrets of Lombardy’s prosperous rice producers, intending to send seed samples back to South Carolina rice farmers. Informed that exporting Lombard rice seeds out of Italy was forbidden, the penalty “being death”, Jefferson was undeterred. “I could only bring off as much as my coat and surtout pockets would hold,” he later wrote. Another culture captivated Jefferson — that of wine. In Burgundy he swooned for Montrachet, laid his hands on Clos de Vougeot’s twelfthcentury wine presses and befriended Étienne Parent, a merchant who educated Jefferson on wine commerce in a fraud-rife era (e.g. have your wine shipped in bottles — “rascally boatmen” too easily tap into wooden casks!). He extolled the rich Beaujolais wine country, and savoured a glass of Château Grillet along the Rhône. In Bordeaux he studied viticultural practices, writing: “They never hire labourers by the year.

From Jefferson’s flower gardens – double-flowered English daisy and dwarf nasturtium.

VIGNETTE

The day wages for a man are 30 sous, a woman’s 15 sous, feeding themselves.” Incredibly, this description could apply to the prix-fait labour system still in place across most of Bordeaux. But while Jefferson’s wine adventures provided useful insights into an industry, they also revolutionized his tastes. Whereas his compatriots drank strong fortified wines like Madeira, Jefferson would henceforth stock his cellar with Bordeaux and Bellet, Meursault and Montepulciano, “habit having rendered the light and high flavored wines a necessary of life with me”. In 1818 he would write: “In nothing have the habits of the palate more decisive influence than in our relish of wines.” Returning to America in 1789, Jefferson was no longer just a wealthy Virginian statesman. “After he goes to France his world grows,” says Susan Stein, senior curator of Monticello. Confidants like Lafayette and Madame de Tessé will remain lifelong correspondents. Jefferson becomes “part of an educated, international

View of the West Front of Monticello and Garden, watercolour painted in 1825 by Jane Braddick Peticolas.

MONTICELLO, A GARDEN UPON A HILL

Left: “Arrangement of the Garden”, 1812, from Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book. Ever the child of the Enlightenment, Jefferson ingeniously catalogued the natural world, here organising his garden plants by which part is harvested — Fruits, Roots or Leaves. Right: Thomas Jefferson’s favourite apple variety, the Newtown Pippin, or as he called it, the Albemarle Pippin.

VIGNETTE

community”, and it shows: Monticello is remodelled in French fashion and filled with European artwork and furniture, his kitchen equipped with elaborate cooking implements and copper pots. All of Jefferson’s chefs, at Monticello and the White House, will henceforth be trained in the art of French cooking. As the American statesman Daniel Webster described the Jefferson table in 1824, “Dinner is served in half Virginian, half French style.” Jefferson would win over political adversaries with dinners of Virginia capon with Calvados sauce, truffles, artichokes and chestnut purée, served with bottles of Chambertin, macaroons and meringues, ice-cream-filled puff pastries and champagne. Not content simply to shape America’s politics, Jefferson became part of the vanguard changing America’s palate. The most influential cookbook in the nineteenth-century United States, The Virginia HouseWife, written in 1825 by Jefferson’s second cousin Mary Randolph, which introduced the culinary use of dozens of new vegetables to Americans, appears to have been inspired in part by recipes found today in Jefferson family manuscripts based on unusual Monticello garden varieties. “You have this amalgamation of all these different cultures,” says Peter Hatch, “first in the garden, then in the kitchen, to create this diverse cuisine that came to define who we are as Virginians, southerners and Americans.” That Jefferson was dining on tomatoes (at the time considered poisonous) and eggplant (thought to induce lust and madness) proves his audacity, but the fact that he managed to grow them at all — and sometimes harvest in November — shows his extraordinary ingenuity. The vast terrace he built for his vegetable garden formed a microclimate, maximizing cropripening sunshine. “Not only did Jefferson create a garden that was great for these new warm-season

VIGNETTE

vegetables just arriving in American gardens,” says Hatch, “he also made it possible to grow other things throughout the winter months.” Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Jefferson’s garden — in an era when most Americans depended on gardens to avoid going hungry — was that it wasn’t born of necessity. Jefferson’s orchards, vineyards and vegetable gardens were above all an “experimental laboratory”, says Hatch. And during the garden’s golden years following Jefferson’s retirement in 1809, experiments regularly went awry. The Garden Book is filled with cases of phytocide — frostbitten okra, parasite-riddled Windsor beans… Likewise, from 1771 to 1822 Jefferson replanted one failed vineyard after another. In fact, the first Monticello wine was made in 1985 — one and a half centuries after Jefferson’s most ambitious twenty-four-varietal vineyard planting. Yet he never stopped experimenting. “Jefferson had no interest in making twentyfour different wines, he wanted to see what grows here, to help others,” says Gabriele Rausse, who succeeded Hatch as Monticello’s director of gardens in 2012. “Once again, he wasn’t doing it for himself, but for the future of America.” From the lofty height of his Monticello garden, overlooking what he called “the workhouse of nature”, Jefferson saw far indeed. “Jefferson wrote that ‘in gardening it’s the failure of one thing that is repaired by the success of another’,” says Hatch. “That’s a wonderful mantra, not just about the horticultural world, but all our struggles in life.” And, perhaps, even the secret to a long and enlightened existence. As Jefferson wrote, late in years, “But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.”

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson at age seventy-eight, painted in 1821 by Thomas Sully.

Further reading Thomas Jefferson à Bordeaux et dans quelques autres vignes d’Europe, Seuil, 1996, by Bernard Ginestet.

MONTICELLO, A GARDEN UPON A HILL

Born into a venerable family of Bordeaux wine merchants, whose estate portfolio at one time included Château Palmer, Bernard is the author of several books

on wine, including this engaging account of Thomas Jefferson’s travels through Bordeaux and other wine regions of Europe. monticello.org