"A Rich Spot of Earth" - Gardening Granddaughters, Hyacinths, and Tree Clumps

Michael Tricomi: It’s March here at Monticello and the natural world is starting to wake up. Bloodroot, Lenten rose, hyacinths, peach and pear trees are all in bloom. As Jefferson put it, “Spring” makes “a paradise of our country.”

It’s also Women’s History Month and today we’re going to talk about two of Jefferson’s granddaughters who helped him in the garden.

Introduction

Michael Tricomi:

This is “A Rich Spot of Earth,” a podcast about gardening and the natural world. I’m Michael Tricomi, Manager and Curator of Historic Gardens at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Albemarle County, Virginia.

Granddaughters

Michael Tricomi Narration:
When Jefferson was preparing to retire from the presidency in 1809, he was looking forward to two activities in particular: gardening and spending time with his family. As luck would have it, the two were intertwined. Jefferson’s 11 grandchildren spent much of their time at Monticello and two of his granddaughters, Ann Cary Randolph and Ellen Wayles Randolph, shared his love of flowers.

Curator of plants Peggy Cornett sat down with me and flower gardener Debbie Donley to talk about gardening and family.

Peggy Cornett:
Ann Cary Randolph was writing Jefferson quite often during the summer of 1807, when he was sending letters and diagrams of how he wanted the gardens to look when he retired. He wrote from Washington that, "I find that the limited number of our flower beds will too much restrain the variety of flowers in which we might want to indulge," because, to that point, they only had 20 oval flower beds laid out. And so his idea was to expand his garden by incorporating the entire West Lawn with a winding walk. And on the back of this letter that he sent to her, he actually sketched it, and it's one of our most important historical documents from Jefferson's own hand.

Michael Tricomi Narration:
Jefferson explained that the new design will, quote “give us abundant room for a great variety of flowers.”

Ann Cary Randolph also updated Jefferson about what was blooming.

Peggy Cornett:
He would write her letters from Washington and then she would respond, often writing letters from Edgehill, which is where her family home was located, which is near Monticello. And often the state of the flower gardens were reported to her by Monticello's enslaved domestic butler, Burwell Colbert. She said, "The flowers were all coming up very well, particularly the tulips, of which Burwell Colbert counted at least 40 flourishing ones." So she relied on Colbert to give her these updates as well as reports from Wormley Hughes, who was the enslaved gardener at Monticello.

He wrote in 1808. "My dearest Ann, I shall not attempt to get any more flower roots and seeds from Philadelphia this season and must rely entirely on you to preserve those we have by having them planted in the proper time . . . and Mr. Bacon," Bacon was the overseer, "will make Wormley Hughes prepare the beds whenever you let him know so that they may be ready when you go over from Edgehill to set out the roots." So, he really relied upon her.

But then in September of 1808, he began to lose this cherished relationship because she was the eldest grandchild and she married to Charles Lewis Bankhead. And in November of that year of 1808, Ann wrote to her grandfather with assurances that the flowers at Monticello would be taken care of by Ellen. She said, "on coming from Edgehill, I left all the flowers on Ellen's care. However, I shall be with you early enough in March to assist about the border, which, if you mean to plant them there with the wild and bulbous roots, once we have already completely filled the borders."

So it was a real family relationship. And it was, I think, Jefferson's vision for his retirement garden was his ability to spend time with his family and to enjoy the flowers, especially.

Winding Flower Walk Design

Michael Tricomi Narration:
I love that letter from Jefferson to Ann Cary Randolph, where we get the vision for the winding walk. It’s a defining feature of Monticello’s landscape. Its meandering curves reflect a trend Jefferson had admired in England: designers were moving away from rigid, formal gardens, instead creating landscapes that felt more natural and picturesque.

Debbie Donley:
I was just at a talk yesterday about the Japanese garden and how it intentionally meanders instead of going straight, because you have to look down and see where you're going, and it forces you to take it all in as you’re going. And so when you're going around the winding walk, it's the same feeling because you've got to watch where you're going because it's going to curve.

Michael Tricomi:
One of the things that I like about the winding walk is how it's totally surrounded by trees.

Peggy Cornett:
You are right.

Michael Tricomi:
And it's this little this serene garden within the grove and the trees and the woods around Monticello.

Peggy Cornett:
Encloses it a bit.

Michael Tricomi:
Yeah, it gives it that enclosed feeling. And it really creates a special garden space. And just the seasonality of the garden, having things blooming at different times. There's always something to enjoy there.

Peggy Cornett:
And later Jefferson talked about dividing the winding walk into 10-foot beds or compartments so that he could organize the garden more efficiently. Debbie still uses the same numbering system. The beds that are on the inside of the winding walk are the "I" beds and the ones that are on the outside of the winding walk are the "O" beds.

Debbie Donley:
Inner and outer.

Peggy Cornett:
Inner and outer. And then there's north and south. So there's "N" and "S" and then you count the number of beds. That was Jefferson's scheme. It was really ingenious.

Debbie Donley:
You can tell exactly which bed you mean, you can direct somebody to that specific space.

Peggy Cornett:
And Debbie makes out her plans for planting the flowers every year. And she'll send a note out with the gardeners and number it out for them. They can just go down and count it out.

Debbie Donley:
I also like the way he's divided them up into 10-foot sections because, for the most part, we put one species of plant in there like he had done, and you just get a real feel for what that plant looks like, as opposed to a mixed border. And so you really get to see it in all of its glory.

Peggy Cornett:
Yeah. He was getting seeds from different people, and I think he really did want to observe by having it in a compartment basically.

Debbie Donley:
Like a laboratory.

Peggy Cornett:
Exactly. And then that winding, like you're saying, it's very contemplative and it causes your vision to change. You're going from one direction to another as you curve. And so you have different prospects in front of you. Sometimes you're looking out toward the mountains and other times you're looking toward the south, and so it does slow you down, and it's a strolling garden, I think.

Debbie Donley:
I like to picture Jefferson and Madison walking . . .

Peggy Cornett:
And the grandchildren. There's a painting that, that we all reference, the Jane Braddock Petticolas painting, and it was from 1825, and you see the family in the garden. In fact, they had races, right?

Debbie Donley:
Relay races at Christmas.

Peggy Cornett:
When Jefferson would drop the handkerchief and the grandchildren would run around the winding walk.

Debbie Donley:
And they do that today with the guides. When children are visiting school groups, they do relay races where they'll drop a handkerchief and that's their signal to take off.

I particularly like the idea of the family. I know in my family, I'm a gardener. My mother was a gardener, my grandfather was a gardener, and my son gardens. I feel like in many families, it's a time together, it's the companionship, it's the learning. It's just a good feeling to be out in a garden. And that's something Jefferson obviously enjoyed with his family.

Michael Tricomi:
It could be just enjoying the gardens, but also working in the gardens. And planting or weeding or doing anything like that, working alongside other people, it is a bonding experience.

Debbie Donley:
And you're teaching the little ones, that's not a weed, that's a flower.

Hyacinths

Michael Tricomi: Next, we wanted to talk about a fragrant bulb that’s blooming right now: Hyacinth. Jefferson ordered rare, delicate double hyacinths. They can be hard to find even today.

Peggy Cornett: He did have an entire oval bed of Hyacinths in various colors: red, yellow, white, and blue. And they were double, they're expensive and they're hard to obtain. The more petals, the more fragrant, so the double ones would be more fragrant than the single flowers.

Debbie Donley: We put in the Roman Hyacinths, which we think is what he had. They're very long flowering. They start mid-February and they continue on until April.

Peggy Cornett: The Hyacinth will precede the tulips in the garden.

Debbie Donley: And they've become my favorite kind of hyacinth.

Peggy Cornett: They're a dwarf form or a wild form of the big blowsy hyacinths that people grow, those big double ones.

Debbie Donley: But they're still quite tall. And they do spread around a lot. Every year they'll send out another stem. And so, what may start out as two or three Hyacinths, will end up ...

Peggy Cornett: Oh yeah. I think they divide. Yeah.

Debbie Donley: And they just keep coming back every year.

Peggy Cornett: Pink ones and white ones . . .

Debbie Donley: The pink ones are very faint pink. You'd think they're white until you look at the white one beside it.

We have that triangle bed right under Jefferson's bedroom suite, the windows there, and the granddaughters had referenced that it was a "nest of sweets" wafting through the windows. So, I do try to always have a sweet-scented plant in there, one of which is the double Hyacinth. It's a purple.

Michael Tricomi Narration:
Hyacinths are beautiful but a word of warning: wear gloves when you handle the bulbs. You can get a mild allergic reaction touching their papery skin.

Now let's hear from a recent Monticello visitor.

[Visitor Spotlight]

Tree Clumps

Michael Tricomi Narration:
In addition to the winding flower walk, Jefferson’s garden design called for clumps of trees, but we don’t know exactly what he had in mind.

Peggy Cornett:
When he traveled to England in the 1780s he made notes about clumps of trees, but he wasn't real specific. But in one of the same sketches that he sent for the oval flower beds, he wanted to have clumps of trees and shrubs in very close proximity to one another, in the angles of the house, or the corners of the house. It included common trees like the Tulip Poplar and Chokecherry and Redbud. But also Copper Beech.

We've never really been able to document exactly where some of these trees and shrubs were planted, but it would be quite a different look, I think, if we were able to create a clump in those spaces. It included common trees like the Tulip Poplar and Chokecherry and Redbud. But also Copper Beech.

Robert Dowell: It seems like his planting scheme had an interesting mix of both native and exotic European species for the time. Beeches are a very popular tree. You go to old English manor houses and massive beeches, so certainly, that's something Jefferson would've seen on his European travels was very old Beech trees in the landscapes there.

Another interesting one on his list of trees is Sorbus aucuparia, which is the European Mountain Ash. It's a bit of a misnomer because it's not a true ash. It's actually in the rose family and it's not really a species that does well in Virginia, even though there is a native Mountain Ash, Sorbus Americana.

Peggy Cornett:
It makes an interesting fruit, doesn't it?

Robert Dowell:
It does, yeah. It's a very beautiful tree and it's the one tree I wish I could grow at my house, but I just don't have the elevation for it.

Michael Tricomi Narration:
As Robert mentioned, the Virginia climate is too warm for the European Mountain Ash. The American Mountain Ash is native to the Eastern US, but in the south, it grows at higher elevations, where its cooler. It’s about 15-20 feet tall and has a profusion of small white flowers in Spring followed by bright orange-red berries in late summer.

Peggy and Robert also mentioned the European Copper Beech. These trees grow 60 to 80 feet tall. In Spring, their leaves unfurl a tender, copper green color and gradually turn deep purple bronze.  Jefferson called it the "Purple Beech." In 1897, Wormley Hughes, the enslaved gardener at Monticello, planted Copper Beeches in the southwest and northwest angles of the house. One of them survived until the 1970s.

Robert Dowell:
Jefferson was definitely interested in experimenting with these trees in a very peculiar way with these clump patterns. You look at this at first glance and you think those trees are just planted way too close together, but it was the deliberate intention to create a tight clump that Jefferson probably saw in English gardens on his travels in Europe.

Peggy Cornett:
But it's like the way trees in a forest or in nature where they're growing close to each other and they may lean a certain way for the light and that sort of thing. If you walk into the woods, you'll see seedlings coming up and big mature trees and they're all near each other and they duke it out in some ways. And I think some plants like to grow with their roots growing together. There's some benefit to that.

Robert Dowell:
Yeah, root grafting is a real phenomenon.

Peggy Cornett:
If you have things like Redbud, which is a nitrogen fixing tree, and then you'd have other trees that would benefit.

Robert Dowell:
I think certain species could definitely be clumped better than others.

Peggy Cornett:
And so, I think it's an interesting concept, but it's not one that really goes over well today. People want to plant trees out on their own like a beautiful white oak, all by itself is just magnificent.

Robert Dowell:
A specimen tree.

Peggy Cornett:
A specimen tree. That's the word I'm looking for.

Robert Dowell: Yeah, certainly some species you can get away with it more than others. I wouldn't clump oaks together, for instance. But some of the smaller species that he may have used, or trees that are just more inclined to be more columnar in their habit could certainly work better for a clump planting scheme, if anyone wanted to experiment. But I wouldn't recommend a beech or an oak. They should stand alone on their own, I think.

It's an aesthetic choice, basically. They did a lot of funky things with plants in the 18th century. Clumps is just one example. But just in terms of using large tree species in such close proximity together, when you have a planting scheme like that, inevitably you're going to have very strict pruning requirements to keep them healthy, so close together. They're going to shade each other out. These were not Jefferson's primary concerns. He wanted the aesthetic feature of a clump in the landscape.

Peggy Cornett:
I think it can create an instant forest, and Jefferson at one point said he lamented that his house wasn't embowered with shade. And I think if you have all these trees close together, they create an interesting landscape feature that can grow up and create shade and it would be more of like a woodland environment. Especially because another plant he wanted was the robinia hispida, the moss locust, which is a spreading suckering shrub, Which would it be like a ground cover, almost, with beautiful flowers. They're a vivid rose color.

Michael Tricomi:
I saw it as a transition from natural lands to more of a defined garden space having these clumps of trees, you're going from forest to clumps of trees to garden. And he used similar patterns in the grove, he described clumps of shrubs or thicket in the grove as well. And so it could be trees, it could be shrubs just planted relatively close together.

And I don't think that there was any real true system. I think it was very experimental in nature for that time. It seemed that a lot of contemporaries practiced planting in clumps in different ways. And then the shapes of them, the patterns whether they were totally circular or spiral.

Peggy Cornett:
The spiral was what was informing the Poplar Forest clump planting.

Michael Tricomi Narration:
Peggy’s referring to Jefferson’s second home, Poplar Forest, located about 70 miles from Monticello, in Lynchburg, Virginia. Archaeologists there found evidence of tree clumps.

Peggy Cornett:
The archeologists actually were able to find the root stains of the trees and shrubs. And so when they drew it out, it was very unusual spiral shape, which Jefferson was very intrigued by spirals. If you had a drone over top, it would be. . .

Robert Dowell:
It would look like a snail shell.

Peggy Cornett:
Yeah, exactly.

Robert Dowell:
The clump itself is in the arrangement of a spiral, and so the trees are put at points that increase in frequency as you get closer to the center of the spiral.

Peggy Cornett:
Maybe eight to 10 trees in each one. They were different. We haven’t really been able to determine how it might have looked.

Debbie Donley:
I think too when you think about the fact that the mountaintop was leveled off, which means taking down all the trees. So the forest is not right next to the house like it originally, would've been. This is a way of bringing trees back and making these clumps is like an instant little miniature forest.

Peggy Cornett:
And there is there's also documentation that he had trees lining the terraces, and so again, I think it was an attempt to shade, bring shade to the house.

Open House and Wildflower Walks

Michael Tricomi Narration:
Finally, we wanted to mention that guided tours of the garden start in late March. We’ve also got some upcoming special events.

Robert Dowell:
So, on April 27th from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM we will have our first annual spring open house. We'll have a second one in May. And we open our doors to the public and we specialize in native perennials, herbs, trees, and shrubs. And this year I've been told that we will have some Jefferson documented annuals will be on offer.

Peggy Cornett:
We’re going to be doing that more often now. And this is all at Tufton Farm, which is the nursery.

Robert Dowell:
As well as a few heirloom vegetables will be added to what's for sale.

Debbie Donley:
Not only do you open your doors, you open your garden gates.

Robert Dowell:
Yes, exactly. We're not just a production nursery, but we're also a display garden.

Peggy Cornett:
The wildflower walks. We will have four this year, and the first is March 30th. And the others are April 4th, April 18th, and April 20th. They fill up quickly and it's a way to see the wild Monticello. We walk, from the visitor center down to the through the forest along all the way down to the Rivanna River. And it's a nice time to see the spring ephemerals.

Debbie Donley:
They are wonderful. I look forward to it every year.

Michael Tricomi:
And for anyone interested, they offer a rare glimpse of Monticello that otherwise visitors wouldn't be able see.

Peggy Cornett:
They aren't trails that are open to the public. So it has to be a guided tour with staff who know the way and know all the plants because you're going to see a whole progression of spring ephemerals, beginning from blood root to blue bells and may apple and,

Debbie Donley: Showy orchids right in the middle of the trail.

Peggy Cornett:
Yeah. Showy orchid. And the Spice bush in the woods and dwarf crested iris, oh, it's just, it's a delight.

Debbie Donley: It's a delight.

Peggy Cornett:
It's just a delight.

Michael Tricomi: If you’re interested in the wildflower walk, a video on our website offers a preview.

Thanks for listening to a Rich Spot of Earth. Join us next month to hear about the nurseries at Monticello and other Spring topics.