Thomas Jefferson’s Garden
A passionate gardener and food lover, Jefferson was an advocate of healthful eating, and his tastes helped shape those of a new nation
By Domenica Marchetti

Cooking Light
July 2005

The next time you’re at the local farmers’ market perusing the rows of heirloom lettuces or debating whether to buy purple or white eggplant, say a word of thanks to America’s third president.

Thomas Jefferson was many things—statesman, philosopher, inventor, architect, author of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of the University of Virginia. He was also likely America’s first epicure, an experimental gardener, avid recipe collector, and wine aficionado who brought a French-trained chef to the White House and entertained dinner guests nearly every night.

Gardening Pioneer

In the terraced gardens at Monticello, his mountaintop home on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia, Jefferson cultivated 170 varieties of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables, including 40 types of beans, two dozen types of English peas, and 17 varieties of lettuce. He also saw to it that the pantry at Monticello was supplied with imported olives, capers, anchovies, and Parmesan cheese from Italy, and that the cellar stocked with wine from France.

“He was a remarkable promoter of fine cuisine. He loved to feed people, and he loved good food,” says Peter J. Hatch, Monticello’s director of gardens and grounds.

Jefferson is credited with introducing a plethora of now-common vegetables to the American table, among them broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and eggplant. He successfully grew artichokes and figs, and tried repeatedly, with mixed success, to cultivate grapevines for wine and olives for olive oil. Olive oil was one of Jefferson’s favorite ingredients because, as he wrote in 1787 while serving in Paris as minister to France, “there is such an infinitude of vegetables which it renders a proper and comfortable nourishment.”

“He was a pioneer with so many things in the garden,” Hatch says. “Whether he was actually the first person to grow an eggplant or broccoli [in America] is hard to say, and in some cases there are earlier references to some of these vegetables. But he broadcast his favorites to friends, political allies, neighbors, and others. He was a great cheerleader for horticulture.”

Living Laboratory

Jefferson’s gardens were his laboratory, where he experimented with dozens of species and varieties of vegetables and fruits in a perpetual quest for the best—be it the tastiest, the hardiest, or the most prolific. His experimental bent was reflected in the extensive garden and farm journals he kept from 1767 to 1824. They are a remarkable 57-year record of details about which plants were sown, when they sprouted, when they were harvested, and whether they succeeded or failed. Jefferson also kept meticulous records of the produce he purchased from Monticello slaves and from farm markets in Washington when he was president. He was apparently quite fond of parsley, which he purchased no fewer than 79 times one year during his presidency.

“The greatest service which can be rendered by any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,” Jefferson once wrote. He was an early champion of tomatoes, which he called “tomatas.” His daughter, Martha, and her daughters, Virginia and Septimia, left a number of recipes that featured tomatoes, including gumbo soup and green tomato pickles. Although Jefferson did not cook, he liked to collect recipes. Among those in his handwriting that survive are one for vanilla ice cream and another for Savoy cookies.

Restoration Efforts

Over the past 26 years, Hatch and the grounds staff at Monticello have used Jefferson’s garden, farm, and other records to restore the gardens. When possible, they have tracked down the same varieties of vegetables and fruits that Jefferson grew, including the Marseilles fig, Tennis Ball lettuce ( a parent of modern Boston lettuces), and the Arikara Bean, which was brought to Monticello by Lewis and Clark from their cross-country expedition. The search continues. Hatch believes he may be close to finding the Breast of Venus peach, one of Jefferson’s favorite varieties of peach.

Jefferson’s vegetable garden, a two-acre ledge on the southeastern side of the property, looks very much like it did 200 years ago. It is divided into large “squares,” or plots, and organized according to which part of the plat was harvested—“fruit,” “root,” or “leaves.” From early spring into late fall, the garden is a gorgeous, textured carpet of vegetables. Artichokes, beets, broccoli, butter beans, cauliflower, garlic, peanuts, sea kale (a variety of cabbage), and trellised purple mottled scarlet runner beans are just a few of the crops that are cultivated. A brick pavilion with long arched windows, situated at the midpoint of the garden, has been rebuilt in the same spot where the ruins of the original were discovered. It is easy to picture Jefferson sitting there, taking notes or reading as he liked to do in the evenings, with the mist-shrouded Blue Ridge Mountains as his backdrop.

Many visitors who tour Monticello’s gardens are surprised to learn the extent of Jefferson’s passion for food and gardening. But, in fact, Hatch say, the notion makes perfect sense. “The idea of growing 28 varieties of English peas in order to find the best one is a direct result of Jefferson being a child of the Enlightenment.” As a quintessential 18^th century Renaissance man, Jefferson was a keen observer and chronicler of his world.

Healthful Habits

The garden served another purpose for Jefferson; it was a means to sociability. He traded plants and seeds with friends and neighbors, and he often extolled the virtues of one fruit or another in letters to everyone from his daughters to George Washington. He planted flowers with his daughters and granddaughters. And every spring he staged friendly competitions with his neighbors to see who would be the first to harvest peas. The winner hosted a dinner party featuring the winning crop.

Jefferson had an adventurous palate and an approach to healthful eating that was ahead of its time. “I have lived temperately,” he wrote in 1819, “eating little animal food, and that...as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.”

He was particularly fond of salads, often serving mixed greens dressed with oil and tarragon vinegar. In fact, Hatch says, salad oil was a perennial obsession for Jefferson. When his attempts to cultivate olives failed, he turned to the sesame seed, which had been transported to America by African slaves. Jefferson sowed sesame seeds in his garden from 1809 to 1824, and he bought or made several sesame oil presses, calculating that one bushel of seeds yielded three gallons of oil. He deemed it as good as olive oil.

No doubt, Jefferson would be pleased with the variety of gourmet lettuces and oils available at American supermarkets today.