JEFFERSON AS A 



HORTICULTURIST. 



T IS WORTHY of note that 

 the two men who had most 

 deeply and permanently in- 

 fluenced the constitution and 

 institutions of this country, 

 Washington and Jefferson, 

 were both farmers, while the 

 latter was even more than a 

 farmer, being a skillful and enthusiastic horticultu- 

 rist. From early boyhood he appears to have a 

 strong inclinaation for agricultural and horticultural 

 pursuits, and celebrated his coming of age in 1804 

 by planting two rows of plane trees, forming an 

 avenue to his birth place, at Shadwell, Albemarle 

 county, Virginia. Early in life he wrote : 



"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people 

 of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts 

 He has made a peculiar deposit for substantial and gen- 

 uine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive the 

 sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face 

 of the earth." Again, he wrote that the people would 

 "remain virtuous as long as agriculture is our principal 

 object, which will be the case while there remain va- 

 cant lands in America. When we get piled upon one 

 another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become 

 corrupt as in Europe." Is the era of public corruption 

 here predicted close at hand ? The public domain is cer- 

 tainly nearly all taken up, and are not our cities too, 

 becoming congested, like those in Europe ? 



Later, in the midst of fierce political turmoil, when 

 his name was known as a statesman and diplomatist in 

 all parts of the world, and he was the recognized leader 

 of the republicans in bitter conflict with the federalists 

 under Hamilton, he wrote to his political rival, Adams : 

 " I have an interest and affection for every bud that 

 opens." At a comparatively early age he was a member 

 of the board of agriculture of London, the agricultural 

 society of Paris, and that of South Carolina — the 

 latter claimed to have been the first established in the 

 United States. 



For 58 years of his life, as we are told by the Honor- 

 able James P. Applegate, he kept a garden book, and 

 his table of the average earliest and latest vegetables 

 in the Washington market is a model in its line. The 

 diagrams of his gardens at his celebrated home, Monti- 

 cello, are as neat as engravings. The numbered rows, 

 dates of planting, sprouting, blooming, ripening and 

 harvesting, as well as the quality of the products, are as 

 accurately recorded by him as they could be by the di- 

 rector of an experiment station. Nor did he forget to 

 record the annual rotation of crops as well as meteor- 



ological observations. While the Declaration of Inde- 

 pence was pending before congress in Philadelphia, in 

 1776, he wrote, with the same pen that had formulated 

 that famous document, about sweet peas and various 

 flowering plants in the Quaker city. And so it was 

 through his eventful life, whether contending against 

 the aristocrats in Virginia or the federalists in congress ; 

 whether acting as American Minister at Paris, or as 

 President of the United States at Washington, he always 

 found time to indulge his deep interest in horticulture. 

 Thus we find in his garden book ; "grafted five French 

 chestnuts into two stocks of common." And again 

 in April 1773: "set out strawberries." And again; 

 "planted 50 vines of the various kinds from the woods; 

 planted 50 Alpine and 22 May strawberries, 44 raspber- 

 ries and several hundred seeds of various kinds of na- 

 tive and European fruit trees." In his notes on the state 

 of Virginia he gives a complete list of the trees, plants, 

 and fruits as well as of the vegetable growth of all 

 kinds, spontaneous and cultivated, in the state. When 

 in 1781 Tarleton's troopers ravaged his estates, what he 

 regretted most keenly was the destruction of a highly 

 prized tree sent to him from Europe. 



While Minister to France, from 1785 to 1789, his ser- 

 vices to American agriculture and horticulture were 

 hardly less valuable than those to American diplomacy. 

 Already master of European horicultural literature, ex- 

 cept that of Germany, his scientific acquirements, ha- 

 bits of observation and close study enabled him to col- 

 lect a store of knowledge of European agriculture. 

 Wherever he went — to the south of France, to England, 

 to Amsterdam — he made accurate observations of the 

 various soils, plants and climates with a view to deter- 

 mining the conditions best adapted to the greatest suc- 

 cess with each form of vegetation, and to the selection 

 of the most valuable that would be likely to thrive when 

 transported to this country. Among a large number of 

 plants and seeds of his introduction there was a superior 

 variety of rice which added thousands of bushels to the 

 product of southern planters. His notes on viticulture 

 would be of value to the vineyardists of to-day. In all 

 his travels, nothing gave him more delight than the 

 beauties of Nature and the abundance of culture. To 

 his friend Lafayette he wrote: "From the first olive 

 fields of Pierrelatte to the orangeries of Hieres has 

 been continued rapture to me." Again he writes : "In 

 the great cities I go to see what travelers think alone 

 worthy of being seen, but I make a job of it and gener- 

 ally gulp it down in a day. On the other hand, I am 

 never satiated with rambling through the field and farms, 

 examining the culture and cultivators with a degree of 

 curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and 

 others to be much wiser than I am." 



