Jefferson as Gardener: “A Rich Spot of Earth”

In 1811, Thomas Jefferson, retired from the Presidency to his home at Monticello, wrote to a friend: “I have often thought that 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.”

©Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, photograph by Leonard Phillips

Jefferson’s Monticello vegetable garden—a thousand-foot-long experimental laboratory—was a Revolutionary American garden, an Ellis Island of plant introductions, culled from virtually every Western culture known at the time. Here the President-turned-gardener planted 330 varieties of 89 species of vegetables and herbs and 170 varieties of fruit.
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add an useful plant to its culture,” Jefferson wrote. He envisioned his garden as a means for transforming society. He distributed seeds of his latest novelty vegetable to neighbors, political allies like George Washington and James Madison, and an international community of plantsmen; he was a missionary of seeds.

Jefferson liked to eat vegetables, which “constitute my principal diet,” and his role in linking the garden with the kitchen into a cuisine defined as “half French, half Virginian” was a pioneering concept in the history of American food. The Monticello kitchen, as well as the table at the President’s House in Washington, expressed a seething broil of new, culinary traditions based on these recent garden introductions: French fries, peanuts, Johnny-cakes, gumbo, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pudding, sesame seed oil, fried eggplant, perhaps such American icons as potato chips, tomato catsup, and pumpkin pie.

In fact, Jefferson so loved the English pea that he held an annual “contest” to see which gardener in the region would have the first harvest of peas. The winner would host a dinner, with peas on the menu.

Culinary historian Karen Hess writes that Jefferson was “our most illustrious epicure, in fact, our only epicurean President,” and his devotion to fresh produce, whether in the President’s House at a state dinner, or at Monticello for the large numbers of celebrity tourists who crowded the retired President’s table, remains a central legacy of Jefferson’s gardening career.

In the years following his retirement from public life (1809-1826), Jefferson constantly experimented, searching for the best of each variety. “But tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener,” he wrote. Certainly he had a young man’s drive. In 1806, Nicholas King, mapmaker for the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, forwarded kitchen garden seed to Jefferson, writing “No person has been more zealous to enrich the United States by the introduction of new and useful vegetables.”

Today, after years of restoration, the Monticello vegetable garden attracts 450,000 visitors annually—a living expression of the genius of Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson by Gilbert Stuart, 1805
© Jointly owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The house and gardens at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, are open to the public every day of the year, except Christmas. See: www.monticello.org for information regarding tickets, tours and special events.

Peter J. Hatch is the director of gardens and grounds at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. The text is adapted from his book ‘A Rich Spot of Earth’: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello. (Yale University Press and Thomas Jefferson Monticello Foundation, 2012).