"A Rich Spot of Earth" - Peaches, Biennials, and Herbs

Prologue

Michael Tricomi: It's August at Monticello. We’ve been grateful for a bit more rain than last month, but the heat continues to challenge us in the garden. On the bright side, August means it's peach-picking time. Or, as Jefferson once put it, "We abound in the luxury of the peach."

In today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about Jefferson’s quest to grow almost 40 different peach varieties. We’ll also discuss biennial flowers and some of the interesting herbs cultivated at Monticello.

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.

Biennials

Michael Tricomi: Let’s start with biennials. August may seem like a time to just maintain the status quo, but it's also a great time to start biennials so they’re ready to plant in the fall.

Here's Curator of Plants Peggy Cornett and Flower Gardener Debbie Donley to talk about some of their favorites.

Peggy Cornett: This is the time of year when we can actually plant seeds of biennial flowers, flowers that will grow their vegetative growth in the fall and then flower the following spring. That's the definition of a true biennial.

People tend to be afraid to grow biennials. They don't quite understand the whole concept of it. But I think that they're very satisfying, because you'll have a beautiful, lush growth in the garden over the winter months, it's evergreen, and then in the following spring you just get this big, beautiful display of flowers.

Some of our most common ones we grow that we know Jefferson had a lot of in his garden included the Sweet William, which is a type of dianthus, dianthus barbatus. Jefferson documents Sweet William quite early, when he was still at Shadwell. It makes a head of flowers, basically, a number of little flowers, on a stem that's about 12 inches, at the most. They were planted in an entire oval bed at Monticello, and today, Debbie always keeps a bed of Sweet William on the west front at the base of one of the tulip poplars.

Debbie Donley: And the scent of the Sweet William is very sweet, which is how it gets its name.

Peggy Cornett: I didn't think about that.

It can be a very nice cut flower and there's some beautiful forms. There's a well-known form that's a pure white flower with a red eye to it, auricula eye. And this particular one was called "painted lady," which a lot of flowers that have this red eye to them are called “painted lady flowers.”

If you plant it and get it really established in the fall, it can develop a large basal growth, which really gives it a lot of vigor for the following spring when it flowers.

Debbie Donley: If you wait until spring, they're pretty meager plants.

Peggy Cornett: Yeah. It's one of those flowers that you can plant it a little deep, and even bury some of the stem because the stems will root out and make a more vigorous plant.

And sometimes biennials can be a risky choice, because sometimes you'll have a really hard winter and they can freeze out, but usually they make it through the winter. You've had foxglove as well . . .

Debbie Donley: Canterbury bells, hollyhocks. All of those are good to get started so that you have nice big plants to put in the ground in the fall and they can establish their root systems and they're just more vigorous in the spring if you do that.

Michael Tricomi: A word of warning: deer do like Sweet William. And if their roots aren’t well-established, the deer will pull the entire plant out of the ground.

Hollyhocks and Canterbury Bells

Debbie mentioned the Hollyhock. That’s another biennial Jefferson grew.

Peggy Cornett: The hollyhocks are really a wonderful plant that just goes back, they don't even know when it entered into gardens, it's so ancient, but it's probably from China. It was grown in European gardens quite early. Hollyhocks were always considered old fashioned flowers, which is interesting when you read the literature, even a couple hundred years ago, they were talking about the old-fashioned hollyhocks in the garden.

It's one of the flowers that Jefferson included on a calendar of the bloom of flowers in 1782. It was over the summer when his wife had born their sixth child, but her health was continuing to decline over the course of that summer. He was charting the blooming of hollyhocks and other flowers like that.

We have a beautiful single flowered one at Monticello.

Debbie Donley: They do tend to get rust, but it is a beautiful flower, and old and worthy of being in the garden, so that's why I really tried to just continually cut the lower leaves off.

Peggy Cornett: We used to have hollyhocks, they would spread even into the vegetable garden. Many years ago, they were just naturalizing down the vegetable garden bank. But when the rust started to build up, we decided to stop growing them for a while until we were able to control that. But they were beautiful.

Debbie Donley: They are good self-sowers.

Peggy Cornett: Oh, yeah. In a lot of cases, you don't have to worry about starting them in the late summer. They can get seven to eight feet tall.

Debbie Donley: Particularly this time of year when the big storms are rolling in, I'm always thankful that I've done some staking prior to when the plants are quite so tall. I try to be discreet with my staking. I use bamboo stakes, and I put it towards the back. I always trim the stake down so it's not towering over the top of the plant and just use a piece of twine and support it, and that way when the storms do come through you don't wake up to a bed of flat flowers laying on the ground.

Michael Tricomi: Debbie mentioned that Hollyhocks tend to get rust—that’s a fungal disease we’ve talked about before, where the plant’s leaves get covered with rust-colored spots. You can treat the leaves with a fungicide. If you’d rather not do that, you can prune the leaves, but be sure to remove them from the garden, so they don’t infect anything else. And finally, the fungus needs water on the surface of the leaves to grow, so if you water at the base of the plant, that can help.

Another biennial that was popular in early American flower gardens is Canterbury bells. In 1812, Jefferson recorded planting what he called "Bellflower" on both sides of the roundabout flower border.

Debbie Donley: Canterbury bells are a beautiful plant.

Peggy Cornett: It's called Canterbury bells because the flowers are bell-shaped, and beautiful blue and pink and white.

Debbie Donley: Some are double, you can get a double variety, but the bell itself is about two inches, and it's all up and down the stem. And I have found, as with the foxgloves, if when they're finished flowering, if you cut the stem back you get side shoots. It's not as big and impressive as the first group, but they do continue to bloom, because the plant thinks it hasn't made its seed, so it's putting out more flowers to generate more seed.

Peggy Cornett: People can tend to be afraid to grow biennials. They don't quite understand the whole concept of it. But I think that they're very satisfying, because like Debbie said, you'll have a beautiful, lush growth in the garden over the winter months, it's evergreen, and then in the following spring you just get this big, beautiful display of flowers.

Biennial vegetables

Michael Tricomi: There are many biennial vegetables: beets, brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, chard, collards, kale, kohlrabi, leek, onion, parsnip, rutabaga, salsify and turnip.

It’s important to know which vegetables are biennials for seed-saving.

Peggy Cornett: Now's the time to plant seeds of cabbages, isn't it?

Michael Tricomi: Sure, for the fall--July, August is a good time for that. Rutabagas, we've grown in the garden, and brussels sprouts too. Usually it's recommended that you start at this time of year for a fall harvest.

Peggy Cornett: And they can grow well into the winter. You've had cabbages overwinter in that garden.

Michael Tricomi: Yeah, if the deer don't find them, we can overwinter a lot of different brassicas and other crops.

We don't harvest seed from biennials often. In the vegetable garden, usually you want to harvest the vegetable before it flowers and produces seed, but if your goal is to either see a flower or to produce seed and harvest the seed, there are lots of different crops that will do that.

The carrots and the parsley will do that. Alliums too, like leeks, we'll usually leave them be. We planted leeks this year, and they're still very small, and I've usually harvested them the second year, but if you let them go well into that second year, into the summer, they'll also flower and seed.

Debbie Donley: The leeks make a beautiful flower. I use them a lot in the arrangements as a cut flower. I've even used them as a dried flower for arrangements in the winter, and same with the brassicas. I love using them in flower arrangements. At first, they wilt a little bit, but they come out of it and they're very pretty. The brassicas are often yellow, the leeks are like a, think of a white snowball, it's several inches.

Peggy Cornett: It's a head of flowers, basically.

Debbie Donley: It's a ball of flowers.

Peggy Cornett: The brassicas, they're in the family Brassicaceae, but it used to be called the crucifery, which means cross, because it's four petals that are in the shape of a cross, so it would be a single yellow flower.

Herbs

Michael Tricomi: This month, we wanted to touch on some of the herbs that Jefferson grew.

Peggy Cornett: We do get people asking where's the herb garden? They're thinking of colonial revival gardens, really, you might see it in Williamsburg or in New England. But as far as we know, Jefferson just had herbs planted in rows in the garden. We have the 1794 "calendar of objects" for the garden-- that's the largest listing of herbs that we have from his garden book.

Michael Tricomi: There's quite a few here, whether it's for medicinal purposes or for attracting insects or deterring insects, for culinary purposes, everything from sage to marshmallow, tansy, wormwood, a lot of different uses and purposes for them.

Peggy Cornett: There's a funny quote from Jefferson where he says, "my garden is devoid of any herbs except for one sage plant, and it doesn't even have any leaves on it." Apparently, he was having a bad year for his herbs.

Michael Tricomi: Sage was a standard in colonial American kitchen gardens. It’s actually a small shrub, grown since the thirteenth century, and was thought to prolong life.

I also mentioned a plant called marsh mallow. That's Althaea officinalis. "Althaea" is derived from the Greek, "altho," which means to cure. Traditionally, people used the leaves, flowers, and roots to reduce inflammations and to ease coughs and sore throats. The boiled root produces a white, gummy matter that was rubbed on bruises and sprains.

Peggy Cornett: Most of the herbs are perennials, the thyme and. . .

Michael Tricomi: Rosemary . . .

Peggy Cornett: Rosemary, exactly, yeah.

Michael Tricomi: He had, a lot of perennial herbs, but there were annual herbs, basil parsley, there's also a summer savory and a winter savory. They do have a different scent to them, but as far as I understand, you could use them in the same way in the kitchen.

And yeah, it doesn't seem like there was any real design or placement for them. There was a year when I saw French tarragon in the northwest border as well as in a square.

Peggy Cornett: That was his favorite herb, too.

Michael Tricomi: French tarragon, for the salad dressing oil that you could make with it.

Peggy Cornett: That's not an easy herb, in my mind, to grow here because I think the soil is a little heavy and it's a wispy plant, but we've done pretty well growing it.

Michael Tricomi: We have a few plants in the garden that have survived. Usually we lose some from year to year over the winter. We have four or five plants in the garden right now, and they've been there for a few years now. It's a delicate plant. I think they do need maybe some lighter soil, than what they have in their current spot.

Peggy Cornett: What is it, Russian tarragon, which is a very vigorous plant, but this French tarragon is much is much more delicate, let's just say.

Michael Tricomi: French Tarragon is said to have a stimulating effect on the digestive system. The Russian tarragon grows easily but it's less flavorful than the French.

Finally, we touched on an herb that’s not as commonly used today: tansy.

Peggy Cornett: And tansy, you could use it in soups, I understand, but I think it's toxic in a way, isn't it?

Michael Tricomi: It could be, at a certain level, yeah.

Peggy Cornett: It's pretty, though. It has a yellow head of flowers. It's in the carrot family, isn't it? We dry them, actually, every year. They're beautiful.

Michael Tricomi: They hold their color really well, and it has a very, very aromatic scent. I've read that in the past people would fill their beds with tansy leaves to deter bedbugs and other insects.

Peggy Cornett: Similar to the wormwood and the southern wood.

Michael Tricomi: There's an oil in Tansy that can irritate your skin, so use gloves when you're touching it. In Jefferson's time, cooks used its bitter leaves to flavor soups, puddings, and omelets.

Now let's hear from some recent Monticello visitors.

Marina: Hi, Marina and David from Perth, Ontario . . .

David: Canada. We love Virginia.

Marina: Loving this area. It's very beautiful.

David: Little amazed that everything is in full bloom at this time of the year.

Marina: Love the huge trees too. Some of these old ornamental trees are awe inspiring to us because they don't get that big where we are.

David: They don't get that big back in Canada, they were all cut down a long time ago for the ships for England.

Marina: And we have cold winters.

David: And we have cold winters.

 

Peaches

Michael Tricomi: Next, we wanted to talk about peaches. In the colonial period, the peach came to symbolize the natural bounty of the New World. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, peach trees had naturalized so abundantly throughout the southeast and mid-Atlantic, they were said to grow as thick as weeds. They were important at Monticello as well.

Peggy Cornett: They have a long history. They're from Asia originally, but they were probably brought to America in the 1500s or so by either the Spanish or some of the early settlers that were coming here. But they've naturalized here in this country and were so abundant that people thought they were native.

Peaches were so plentiful back in the colonial period that people would just let them fall on the ground as food for their hogs.

Michael Tricomi: Yeah, once they start falling on the ground, then all the animals come. We suspected we had a bear in the orchard, because of all the peaches that were falling and they were getting eaten up and there were some bear sightings.

Michael Tricomi: In 1807, Jefferson wrote, "I am endeavoring to make a collection of the choicest kinds of peaches for Monticello."

Peggy Cornett: I think we've had close to 40 different varieties of peaches in the orchard at one point, in the restored garden, the lemon cling and the freestone peaches.

Michael Tricomi: The apple peach, green nutmeg, heath cling, the Indian blood cling, the Indian blood free, lady's favorite, lemon cling, Maddalena, Magdalene, Malta, Morris's red rare ripe and Morris's white rare ripe, the October, yellow clingstone of October, which could be the same thing, the old mixing cling and the old mixing free, the plum peach, papa de venere, the Portugal, San Jacopo, and then there's a few others that he doesn't name specifically, but he just refers to as soft, or November soft, large white soft.

Michael Tricomi: You may be wondering: What's the difference between a cling peach and a freestone peach?

Robert Dowell: A clingstone is a peach, when you cut it open, the flesh adheres to the center stone, whereas freestone, it pops right out.

Peggy Cornett: Nowadays, the more popular ones are the freestone because they're just cleaner and easier, but I think the cling peaches, or the plum peaches is another term for it, have the best flavor, in my mind.

Michael Tricomi: My two favorite peaches that we grow here are the lemon cling that you mentioned and the white heath cling. I think that one is my favorite.

Peggy Cornett: That white heath, I just love that one.

Michael Tricomi: You don't see that, really, anywhere nowadays. These fruit trees are very rare, and that one is probably the latest blooming peach, I think. It ripens in September, usually, but you could eat it in October or even November, very late. It keeps very well. But it has a really great flavor to it and beautiful white flesh when you open it up.

Peggy Cornett: Indian blood is very good too, and it's a clingstone as well. It's kind of a primitive peach, in many ways, but it's beautiful.

Michael Tricomi: There's one variety that has eluded us.

Peggy Cornett: We were always trying to find this famous peach that Jefferson loved, which was called the breast of Venus peach, and we've never really succeeded in finding that yet. I still want to be sent to Italy to find this peach. We thought we had it. We imported it from Italy. It had to be grown in quarantine in Beltsville, Maryland. They grew it and made sure it didn't have any diseases, and then we were able to get scionwood and grow it on, so it took many years to get a fruiting tree, and when it finally fruited, it really didn't match the description of a breast of Venus peach, so back to the drawing board.

Michael Tricomi: In Colonial times, peaches were used for many different purposes.

Peggy Cornett: They might have been doing a number of things: preserving them, cooking with them, eating them out of hand. And you can also dry peaches as well. You slice them and dry them. They also used to make beverages with them. The peach mobby, they called it, which was a kind of fermented peaches, like a type of cider or something. You could also make peach brandy. I think it was just one of Jefferson's favorite fruits.

Michael Tricomi: I think a lot went to those beverages that you mentioned. The peach brandy was popular.

Peggy Cornett: Mary Randolph's Virginia Housewife contained six recipes for preparing peaches, including ice cream and peach preserves. And peach chips were sliced and boiled with sugar and sun dried. That sounds really good.

Michael Tricomi: That sounds very good.

Peggy Cornett: Jefferson noted in a letter to his daughter, Martha, in 1815, that Kate, one of Monticello's enslaved laborers, is busy drying peaches for you.

Michael Tricomi: Jefferson used peach trees in some unexpected ways as well. In 1792, he suggested to his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, that peach trees could be a good source for firewood. He wrote, "5 acres of peach trees at 21 feet apart will furnish dead wood enough to supply a fireplace through the winter."

The tree's aggressive growth habit and its ornamental qualities make the peach a fine candidate for a living fence.

Peggy Cornett: Jefferson was planning them in his orchards, but he was also having them planted in rows for fencing, They were documented in the late 1700s, I believe, long rows of peaches. You can prune them so that they'll branch heavily, so they'll make an impenetrable barrier. They don't have thorns like an Osage orange, but they would definitely form a hedgerow, basically, I think is the idea.

Robert Dowell: It is a very hard wood. A lot of fruit trees have very dense wood. And peaches are naturally a small tree at mature height, most peaches are 20 to 30 feet, so for a hedge planting, that's a lot more practical.

Peggy Cornett: Keep in some of your livestock. You're also defining your property line. And then they would use the peach branches for staking. That's what we use them for. When we prune the peaches, we use the branching for staking our peas.

Outro

Michael Tricomi: We’re now in the process of replanting our orchards with new apples, pears, peach trees. Stay tuned for progress reports.

That’s it for August. Thanks for joining us today. Until next time, Happy Gardening!