Monticello Live: In the Gardens with Peggy Cornett

hello I'm Peggy cornet curator of plants at Monticello welcome to the gardens long have you been with Monticello tell us ok well I've been in Monticello since 1983 the first few years I was here we were just completing the restoration of this incredible vegetable garden behind me the thousand foot long Terrace was completed along with a massive stone wall supporting it shortly thereafter the garden pavilion they began construction on the restoration of this beautiful garden pavilion that stands at the midpoint of the garden and some of the first things we were doing at that time we were saving seed of the tennis ball lettuce it was our first season to successfully grow this crop and the blue Prussian pea was another crop that I remember saving seed from today of course the gardener's here at Monticello are also growing plants in the same greenhouses where I was working for the gardens they're doing a beautiful job and I've been here for almost 37 years can you give us an overview of the gardens and the grounds the gardens are really the culmination of Jefferson's lifetime of his ideas for this for this little Mountain he first referred to Monticello in his garden book in 1769 and during that year he began grafting and budding fruit trees on this south slope of the mountain he dreamed of developing a beautiful garden around the house as well as to create a landscape that included functional aspects of his farm he certainly growing vegetables on this south-facing slope and in 1808 Ino 6 when he was still president of the United States he was having the flower gardens and the vegetable gardens laid out constructed massive work was being done here in anticipation of his retirement in 1809 so the gardens are really at least 40 50 years of Jefferson's planning and developing them and how about today can you tell us what's in bloom now today the you know the flower gardens of course the the Garden Club of Virginia actually restored the gardens and in the nineteen late 1930s 2:41 and they based their research on Jefferson's garden Diaries his letters his drawings his his overseer messages to his overseers and so we learned a great deal just from the written documentation about the gardens so when they were restored the gardens in the late night in the early 1940s they were able to put back a lot of the same design and plant such Everson grew and nowadays of course we're still searching for the same plants that Jefferson mentions in his documentation it's it's kind of a detective story and we try to seek out these plants from all parts of the world we've just had a beautiful display of tulips in the garden and I even brought a couple of very interesting tulips to show you because Jefferson was cultivating some very unusual tulips in his guard these were the types of tulips people would find very interesting in his day more so than the large single colored types that we grow today and of course we have a wonderful display of flowers coming into bloom now that will be succeeding the tulips the biennials the hardy annuals Sweet William poppies Canterbury bells also some of the perennials like the peonies are starting to flower right now the beautiful european peony and the flags are the iris which are also coming into bloom you mentioned Jefferson's documents can you tell us a little bit more about that right well I mentioned that he he had a garden book and he started writing in this book when he was 28 at 23 years old and he kept this garden diary until two years before his death so it was almost 60 years of his life he was making records about his gardens some of them were very detailed some were brief but he also wrote many letters throughout his lifetime and his correspondence has been of course accumulated over the years and we know a great deal about his guards just from his writings to his his friends to other political figures to seedsman and and other botanists that he was he knew quite well we also know a lot of Jefferson's interest in gardens from the things that he ordered he was ordering plants and seeds from Bernard McMahon one of his primary buyers of flowers and vegetables from Philadelphia and the barred rooms were also a big source of plants for Thomas Jefferson so all of these records have been combined in a very large garden book called Thomas Jefferson's garden book which was edited by Edwin Betts and we still use this today a great deal to help us understand the garden you mentioned you spent some years on a satellite farm tell us about some of the other things that go on here at Monticello and tell us about the Center for historic plan in 1986 we started a program called the Thomas Jefferson Center for historic plants and the headquarters are located at Tufton farm which is one of Jefferson's satellite farms he he owned 5,000 acres here in Albemarle County and at the center first Uruk plants and their mission is to collect and preserve historic plant varieties to propagate them and to educate the public about the importance of preserving historic plants you know a lot of people are interested in maintaining native plants which are very important but but there are also a number of cultivated plants that can be endangered if they're not kept in cultivation so the Center for Stewart plants not only collects vegetable crops but also ornamental plants as well roses and historic plants such as that and that the center has still thriving today they are very active making sure that they're able to keep up with our mail order and they've been shipping out hundreds of packets of seeds this year we're probably going to sell over a hundred thousand packets of seeds from the plants that are grown here over there got a question from the live stream Peggy Carol wants to know if you have a favorite place in the garden Wow well I do love being in the flower gardens that's always a special time for me I love you know walking through the vegetable garden I could do this several times a day and see the crops but I also have a special love for the woodlands here at Monticello and I do spend a good deal of time studying the WHA flowers that grow in the mountain and trying to keep keep track of them because there are the same types of plants that Jefferson talked about in his garden Diaries and Denise wants to know do we know where Jefferson first saw tulips wearing four saw two if so that's a good question he started mentioning tulips you in the at least a 1780s what was possibly earlier you know he lived in Williamsburg and so he might have seen tulips cultivated there he was definitely aware of tulips because they were so popular even going back to the 1630s there was a huge rage for tulips at that time so I'm not sure if he ever really documented the first two up he saw he may have also seen them when he was living in France and sending plants and bulbs back from France that would would have been in the 1780s and Nathalia wants to know if the garden looks the same today as it looked in Jefferson's day well we might keep it a little cleaner but I think a lot of it is pretty accurate we know the flower gardens probably had a little more to them than what we have today the Garden Club of Virginia made some decisions to accommodate our many visitors that come here so they might have left out some shrubbery beds for example and the vegetable garden though is quite spectacular and as you can see we we've restored it to the same grade it's 80 feet wide and as I said a thousand feet long and it's divided into 24 squares so I think the vegetable garden is is quite accurate as far as its location of course all of this is based on the before before we actually restored these gardens we've done extensive archaeological investigation to make sure that they're located in the right place the archaeologists also uncovered of course the locations for the fruit trees in the fruit arried which is below the vegetable garden on this side of the mountain what do you do with the produce grown in the gardens today from Monticello and Tufton we do quite a bit with the produce a lot of it is grown for display of course to show the many varieties Jefferson we've documented at least 330 different varieties of vegetables and herbs in this garden but we also want to preserve these plants for the for the future for our use and also for the public so we grow a lot of vegetables and actually let them go to seed in the garden and so it you know a lettuce plant it's not the prettiest thing when it goes to seed but it's it's very important and this is an educational part of what we do now we also of course use some of these vegetables for our farm table cafe and more and more we're beginning to provide the produce from the gardens for the public consumption and of course Monaco has events in the evenings and so forth that these vegetables are used and then some of us gardeners like to take a few things home with us and eat them when we have a chance a head of lettuce a bunch of kale very nice is there a plant named after her Thomas Jefferson there definitely is I have you know I already finished blooming you it flowers in early spring this year it flowered in March it's a wild flower and so I brought the leaf of this plant so that you can see why it's common name is called twin leaf you can see how it's a two parted leaf looks like butterfly wings but the plant named after Thomas Jefferson is Latin name is Jeffersonian die Phila and I feel a means to parted leaf and Jefferson was quite honored by having a plant named for him botanical namesake in 1792 the botanist Benjamin Smith Barton made a proclamation before the meeting of the American Philosophical Society and Jefferson was a member of this society which promoted the ideals of the Enlightenment for seventeen years and during his statement naming this flower after Jefferson he said it was not for his political contributions to America it was for his knowledge of botany and Natural History which was exceeded by few others in this country so again Jefferson was quite honored very few people had plants named after them and this is one that was named after Thomas Jefferson it's a wild flower Wendy is curious if we know Jefferson's favorite time of year in terms of edible plants did you like spring foods fall foods of course spring was very important in fact he was always so eager to get out and have the peas planted in the spring sometimes his garden diary indicates they were planting peas in February March and he would track when these crops would be harvested and so he had a wonderful column in his garden book saying come to table so this is when it came to table so we know he liked the peas but he also liked just many vegetables especially spring crops cabbages and broccolis and of course the root crops carrots beets and so forth but Jefferson was also growing some very unusual crops in his garden that for his day at least such as tomatoes and crops like sesame he was very interested in in developing an oil crop a domestic oil crop for this country olive oil was very scarce and and difficult to obtain it would be rancid by the time it made it here from from Europe and he tried growing olives and he wasn't successful but he did have some success growing sesame and pressing it for oil and in fact they had a blind taste testing when he was president at the president's house and the sesame was a favorite oil Jacqueline asks if you have any Jeffersonian advice for us novice gardeners well this granddaughter was very concerned about her garden at one point and he said what you know the problem is your soil is too lean and next year we're going to add a lot of well let's say manure to the garden and so that your your vegetables and your flowers can bid defiance to disease and insects and so really his cure for a lot of gardening ills was to really have a good foundation a good soil and we can all believe in that today so enslaved people kept these gardens did they have gardens of their own at Monticello as well absolutely there were many gardener Gardens kept by the enslaved here they had their own plots of land around where they were their dwellings were located and in fact we know that there were many crops cultivated that they were able to sell to the Jefferson household Jefferson's granddaughters were negotiating purchases from many of the enslaved who lived here and of course it was a difficult life for them they labored from sunup to sundown for for Jefferson's gardens and and the farms and so they were actually working in their own gardens after dark lighting them by burning cauldrons of fat or working on Sunday that was their day off so but it was a way to make some money and so they were able to make a some money so that they could own teams for themselves on occasion cabbages cucumbers crops out of season or we're very often sold to the Jefferson household and there were plants that had African origins or Native American origins Gardens the other squashes and we're Native American of course from Africa there are crops like eggplant and the sesame and of course okra and Jefferson had some interesting planting schemes for okra one year they were planted around an entire square of tomatoes and they also have an interesting recipes for an okra stew that's sort of like a gumbo what we would think of as a gumbo today with tomatoes okra potatoes and some other vegetables it sounded delicious actually and Laura is curious if we have Lewis and Clark plants growing it's indeed part of Jefferson's interest in sending the expedition to the west was to bring back plants to to the east and it was very interested in crops and so when Lewis and Clark were spent the winter spent winter with the Mandan and Arikara and Hadassah tribes in the North Dakota they were able to send back some of these crops today we're still growing the Arikara being the Ricker of sunflower and the Mandan corn in the gardens and they also sent back kind of ornamental crops such as the gaillardia the blanket flower and a plant named Lynam louisia which is named after Meriwether Lewis it's a beautiful blue flax they sent back clarkey ax which was named after William Clark very beautiful annual flower and they also sent back the snow berry and this was a very popular plant for the grandchildren especially it has a beautiful white berry it doesn't do very well here in Virginia but it is a very abundant plant on the west coast and in fact when it was sent to England it became naturalized there as well so the snow berry is a very common commonly seen shrub in England as well mark asks did Jefferson bring back plants and seeds from France yes he did he sent back plants as well the Marseilles fig we believe was sent back from France with Jefferson of course if you were that some of the other crops were some vegetables that he had sent back with him we also know that he brought back of course upland rice from Italy when he was travelling there on penalty of death by the way so it was quite a scary thing for him to do but he was trying again to introduce a useful plant to American culture so yeah there are a number of plants that he was certainly interested in when he was in France as well and Karen from Princeton is curious if Jefferson knew about crop rotation or companion planting well yes he did he was in the 1790s Jefferson wrote that he wanted to become an ardent farmer during that decade he really wanted to retire to Monticello he said that he wanted to retire to his family his books and his farms and his affairs and at that time he was also coming up with really kind of very useful crop rotation schemes for his satellite farms up and to that point they were cultivating exclusive tobacco exclusively which was really robbing the soil of nutrients and so when Jefferson came back to Monticello after his time in France he realized that his his lands were very poor and eroded so crop rotation was employed a very elaborate scheme for planting wheat and then legumes to replenish the soil and letting the soil rest corn was also planted so corn soda back was actually rotated out of cultivation here in Albemarle County and we're not sure if he actually knew about a companion planting but he was growing some plants near each other like it more as an ornamental conceit we think Philip is curious if we have a first Pete a table contest as Jefferson did we've done this on occasion not this year but I think we would win it this year because everything went into the ground so early and we've had a very mild spring and we haven't had killing frost since early March so we have done this some insan some years and of course there's a whole program called the Edible Schoolyard something that was inspired by Alice Waters and so a lot of school groups tried to reenact this peak contest many years ago we did it and when we knew the the landscape manager at Farmington Country Club which was where George divers lived and so I think we tried to reenact at that year but that was probably 30 years ago and Lee wants to know if Jefferson kept having tobacco grown not tobacco never stopped being cultivated down in Bedford County where Jefferson had his retreat home at poplar forest tobacco was a very reliable cash crop and Jefferson was also often strapped for for income and so it was very difficult to stop growing it all together but he did want to transition to wheat here in Albemarle County are there any original trees at Monticello from Jefferson's time well we had two original trees near the house two tulip poplars beautiful stately trees Jefferson loved the tulip poplar he said it the tulip poplar and the white oak were the Juno and Jupiter of our groves they were taken down in recent years 2008 was the largest oldest tree taken down and then in 2012 we took down the second one which was near the house and when we had it the rings counted we dated that one to 1808 so we know that was an original tree now there are other trees on the mountain that we speculate might be original and we really won't know until we're able to to verify them scientifically with by dendrology there's a red cedar that is believed to be from Jefferson's day but we still don't know that for sure yeah cardio wants to know if the grass was kept mode then it's different now I think we probably manicure the grass a lot more that now nowadays than in Jefferson's day of course there weren't no there weren't lawn mowers in his day but they would sickle inside the lawn probably two or three times a year he did grow grass and wanted it around the house and he also wanted grass established down in the woodlands where he created a grove he wanted to open up the woodlands he once wrote that under the constant beaming almost vertical Sun of Virginia shade is our Elysium so he wanted to open up the forest and limb up the trees and plant grass beneath them so that you could walk on through this shady metal-like environment but no I think Jefferson's grass and his lawns were probably a little rougher than what we see today and also no did Jefferson bring grapes from Europe to try to make wine here he did import grapes here he was very he he really had some refined taste you might say when it comes to wine and he was trying to grow the European grape here the Vitis vinifera and it is a very delicate grape you might say it's not as vigorous as our native grape and so we know that he never really was successful in making a bottle of wine at Monticello as far as we know there were many attempts to establish his vineyards here but we do we are successful with the native grapes and our restored vineyards today are actually grafted European grapes are grafted on to the very vigorous root stock of our wild grapes here in Virginia and this is done all over the world because there are many diseases that are our domestic rapes are resistant to we hear a lot about bees do we have bees here at Monticello we do we have a beekeeper who is maintaining beehives here at Monticello they're a little bit off site and they're there it's quite wonderful because we're able to have them pollinating our gardens and we're harvesting honey from them and wonderful products are being produced from the honey coming from the beehives the honey of the raw honey is so delicious and one of my favorite things is the the soaps that we're making with with honey in them it's just they smell wonderful so definitely check out some of the things that we're producing from our own beehives here at Monticello and also at Upton farm quite a few bees are kept there as well Calvin wants to know if there were similar gardens at Poplar Forest well Poplar Forest was quite a unique landscape it's even hard to explain it had curtilage --is and rows of mulberries and mounds planted with weeping willows and golden willows and so it was a very unique landscape but he did have a vegetable garden there and I understand today that the archaeologists are are making a good progress in actually determining the location of the site of the vegetable garden and they're also replanting the clumps of trees that have been that were documented by Jefferson and they've been able to figure out that they were in a very unique spiraling configuration so there's a lot of work going on right now to restore the gardens at Poplar Forest and so stay tuned in coming years for a lot of changes that are happening there now they even they also have some original tulip poplars on the landscape there that are just magnificent Thomas wants to know I think recently one of the most important things we're doing is developing the Center for historic plants into more of an innovative farm to demonstrate farming techniques for small-scale farming so they're expanding what is being cultivated there out into the fields beyond just the 3 acre nursery area Tufton I think there's going to be a lot going on in future years to see at that location and we're also providing of course food crops for the farm table cafe which we want to really showcase good eating farm-to-table style eating at our cafe so we're really making a big effort to provide so much of that for our guests who come here all right we have time for one final question if you could just tell us a little bit about what's going on right now with the closure and what's the next couple of steps now we've had us you know if essential staff is maintaining the gardens today and they're doing a beautiful job I don't know if you can see how everything looks so a pristine in the vegetable garden and the flower gardens as well are really looking nice so when the time comes and we can open again we certainly hope people can spend many hours wandering these gardens and and learning more about them we do a lot of course livestream like we're doing today and we have a lot of social media opportunities such as our we hope if you haven't already we hope you'll join our Monticello farm and garden Facebook page Monticello has several opportunities through the different departments to join Facebook pages that archeologists for example and we're also trying to just reach out as much as we can to our many friends out there who may not be able to come here today but we'll soon thank you again for coming you're out

Channel: Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

Views: 4,868

Rating: 4.9266057 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: g4Sc8UptXrc

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020