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| At Monticello, Jefferson’s Methods Endure
| 07/02/2010 | Name: Guest
Comments: CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.
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Gardening the Jeffersonian Way
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Jay Paul for The New York Times
In Jefferson’s day, a bounty of squash would go into okra soup. More Photos »
NEW gardeners smitten with the experience of growing their own food — amazed at the miracle of harvesting figs on a Brooklyn rooftop, horrified by the flea beetles devouring the eggplants — might be both inspired and comforted by the highs and lows recorded by Thomas Jefferson from the sun-baked terraces of his two-acre kitchen garden 200 years ago.
And they could learn a thing or two from the 19th-century techniques still being used at Monticello today.
“He was experimental and had a lot of failures,” Peter Hatch, the director of gardens and grounds, said on a recent afternoon, as we stood under a scorching sun in the terraced garden that took seven slaves three years to cut into the hill. “But Jefferson always believed that ‘the failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.’ ”
After he left the White House in 1809 and moved to Monticello, his Palladian estate here, Jefferson grew 170 varieties of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, until his death in 1826.
As we walked along the geometric beds — many of them planted in an ancient Roman quincunx pattern — I made notes on the beautiful crops I had never grown. Sea kale, with its great, ruffled blue-green leaves, now full of little round seed pods. Egyptian onions, whose tall green stalks bore quirky hats of tiny seeds and wavy green sprouts. A pre-Columbian tomato called Purple Calabash, whose energetic vines would soon be trained up a cedar trellis made of posts cut from the woods.
“Purple Calabash is one of my favorites,” Mr. Hatch said. “It’s an acidic, almost black tomato, with a convoluted, heavily lobed shape.”
Mr. Hatch, who has directed the restoration of the gardens here since 1979, has pored over Jefferson’s garden notes and correspondence. He has distilled that knowledge in “Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden,” to be published by Yale University Press.
This “seed-y missionary,” as Mr. Hatch calls Jefferson, collected seeds and cuttings from around the world and distributed them to others, only to have them die in his own garden.
“Jefferson would kill the thing at Monticello and go back to George Divers and say, ‘What happened to those black-eyed peas I brought back from France in 1789?’ ” Mr. Hatch said, referring to Jefferson’s neighbor, a much better gardener who usually won their pea-growing contest.
Jefferson’s eagerness to give away seeds and plants was “a great lesson about sharing stuff,” Mr. Hatch said, “so that when it dies at your house, you can go to your neighbors for a replacement.” (So, pass cuttings and seeds over the garden fence.)
There are many such deaths — from drought, insects and disease — recorded in Jefferson’s garden book between 1766 and 1824. His meticulous calendar, which documents when each seed was sown, when it sprouted, flowered and came to table or died, serves as a rough guide for Mr. Hatch today.
Yet this same garden book is maddeningly devoid of details on how plants were protected from disease and insects.
Mr. Hatch does recount a plague of insects descending on Monticello while Jefferson was away, as secretary of state, and his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph writing to him in despair.
“Jefferson wrote back and said the problem was the crummy soil,” Mr. Hatch said. “He told his daughter that when he returned, the two of them would cover the entire garden with a heavy coating of dung.”
Mr. Hatch’s book includes the letter, dated July 21, 1793, in which Jefferson writes, “I suspect that the insects which have harassed you have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants, and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil.”
He adds, “When earth is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance and of the best quality.” His words reveal a man of the earth far ahead of his time: the scientific connection between fertile soil and plant health is only now being documented.
At Monticello, the gardeners dig plenty of homemade compost and aged manure into the soil, when they can get it. But allegiance to Jefferson’s methods goes only so far. 1 2 Next Page »
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