While celebrating Thanksgiving this year, I began thinking about our early American ancestors and how most would have had to have at least a simple “kitchen garden” to sustain themselves and their families. (No run to the supermarket for those holiday Brussel Sprouts!) No gardeners of that time were more famous or influential than our founding fathers. George Washington and James Madison come to mind. But Thomas Jefferson is probably the best known among them, planting and cultivating his entire adult life at his beloved Monticello. His interest spanned well beyond that of an avid “kitchen” gardener. He became a research scientist as well as a developer of important cultivation techniques.
As a scientist, Jefferson was an astute observer of the natural world. The daily activities of sowing seeds, manuring asparagus and harvesting peas between 1809 and 1826 are precisely recorded in his “Garden Kalendar”, a part of his famous Garden Book. Unlike the other Founding Father Gardeners,Jefferson was often the detached scientist in his Kalendar and would record with remarkable detail as he noted the sowing dimensions of each row of his Asparagus beans—to be replicated if successful. For Jefferson, the vegetable garden was a kind of laboratory where he could experiment. Being “a man of the world”, he imported many seeds: squashes from Italy, beans collected by the Lewis and Clark expedition, figs from France, and peppers from Mexico He planted a multitude of varieties and eliminated any inferior types. Only the most successful would do for replication from one season to the next.
As a gardener, Jefferson's vegetable garden was essentially the most functional part of the plantation. However, he occasionally considered ornamental features aside from the practical vegetable garden that he created. He planted an arbor of different flowering shades of the scarlet runner bean, arranged adjacent rows of purple white and green sprouting broccoli and even planted alternating white and purple eggplant. And, he bordered his tomato square with sesame or okra, a rather unusual but interesting juxtaposition of plant textures. Cherry trees were planted along the “long, grass walk” of the garden to provide shade.
“I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that…as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.”
Yes, Jefferson was a salad kind of guy and would have made a wonderful Californian! Salads were an important part of his diet. He would note the planting of lettuce and radishes every two weeks through the growing season, grow interesting greens such as corn salad, endive and nasturtiums and yearly plant sesame to manufacture a tasty salad oil. Although the English pea is considered his favorite vegetable, he also loved figs, asparagus, French artichokes and such “new” vegetables as tomatoes, eggplant, broccoli and cauliflower. He also cultivated more common vegetables such as cucumbers, snap beans and cabbages and his prized sea kale, a perennial cabbage-like vegetable whose spring sprouts were blanched in clay pots and prepared like asparagus.
Jefferson's cultivation techniques were influenced by Bernard McMahon, a Philadelphia nurseryman and author of The American Gardener's Calendar, the most complete American work on horticulture in the first half of the nineteenth century. McMahon's book provides directions for manuring the garden, interplanting lettuce and radishes, cultivating unusual vegetables such as tomatoes and sea kale, and planting cucumbers in hogsheads! These practices were duplicated carefully in the garden at Monticello. McMahon also sent Jefferson important vegetable varieties such as Leadman's Dwarf pea, the Egyptian onion, Sugarloaf cabbage, red celery and red globe artichoke
In 1793, Martha Randolph wrote her father from Monticello distressed over the insect damage in the garden. Jefferson's response summarized a basic philosophy of gardening:
“We will try this winter to cover our garden with a heavy coating of manure. When earth is rich it bids defiance to droughts, produces yields in abundance and of the best quality. I suspect that the insects which have harassed you have been encouraged by feebleness of your plants; and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil. We will attack them another year with joint efforts.”
Thomas Jefferson would certainly have made an outstanding Master Gardener!
And now, dear reader, to paraphrase that great American storyteller, Uncle Wiggily (aka Howard R. Garis):
If the pigs don't flip over the wheelbarrow filled with turnips, sending them skittering into a purple flurry onto the walking path--only to be gobbled up by the spared Thanksgiving turkeys, next month I will continue the story of gardener extraordinaire, Thomas Jefferson—his famous 19th century vegetables and what his Monticello garden looks like today.