Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf

Author:Andrea Wulf [Wulf, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, United States, Gardening, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9780307595546
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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