Vegetable Garden

The 1,000-foot vegetable garden at Monticello not only supplied food for the Jefferson family, but also showcased Thomas Jefferson’s love of gardening and botany. The vegetable garden is located just below Mulberry Row on the southern slope of Monticello Mountain.

Audio Overview

Listen as Monticello guide Lou Hatch provides an introduction to the Vegetable Garden.

Enslaved gardeners planted and harvested fruits and vegetables year-round. Wormley Hughes was referred to as the “principal gardener” at Monticello and directed garden work per Jefferson’s designs.
Jefferson recorded over 330 different varieties of vegetables grown at Monticello.
Thomas Jefferson kept diligent records in his Garden Book on the production in the Vegetable Garden.

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Vegetable Growing & Cultivation

Thomas Jefferson, his family, and the many guests who came to visit Monticello dined on produce from the garden. Enslaved gardener Wormley Hughes directed much of the planting, growing, and harvesting. He was often assisted by older enslaved men and women who no longer worked out in the plantation's large agricultural fields.

Listen to more about Wormley Hughes from his descendant, Julius Calvin Jefferson, Sr.

Vegetable Varieties

Look for wooden stakes labelling each plant for more information as you walk through the Vegetable Garden. If you see “TJ” at the top of the label, it means that variety appears in Jefferson's documents. A date indicates when Jefferson first recorded it. If the stake has “L&C” written on the top, it denotes a plant recorded during the Corps of Discovery Expedition led by Lewis and Clark. Occasionally, Jefferson used unusual or archaic names for certain species. These names will appear in quotes.

Garden Pavilion

Thomas Jefferson designed the garden pavilion in the period near the end of his second term as President and the start of his retirement from political life. Like the rest of Monticello's architecture, this small structure shows Jefferson’s admiration for the classical style of the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Jefferson used the garden pavilion as a place to sit and read and observe the beauty of nature. The view from the garden pavilion faces south and overlooks the orchards, which included apple, peach, and cherry trees.

Montalto

"Monticello" means “little mountain.” Jefferson named the taller mountain that can be seen past the west end of the Vegetable Garden "Montalto," meaning “high mountain.” Not part of the original plantation he inherited from his father, Jefferson purchased 483 acres of land on the taller mountain in 1777. In Jefferson’s time, there was no structure on Montalto, though he did draw designs for an observatory tower that was never constructed.

Agricultural Fields

Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Albemarle County covered approximately 5,000 acres of land. Monticello Mountain was considered the “home farm,” but he divided his plantation into three other “quarter farms,” called Tufton, Shadwell, and Lego. Enslaved agricultural laborers worked out in large fields and typically lived in cabins or quarters close to where they worked.

Originally, the plantation cultivated tobacco as the main cash crop. By the 1790s, Jefferson realized more revenue could come from producing grain and flour, and the plantation transitioned from focusing on tobacco to wheat production. Every year, almost all of the enslaved people on the plantation who were of working age, regardless of their normal job, were sent into the fields for the wheat harvest.