Botany - 1791 Tho Jefferson (1743-1824) "Botanizing Excursion" with James Madison

Thomas Jefferson by Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko (1746 - 1817) 

"The year was 1791, Jefferson, then Secretary of State under George Washington, was embroiled in various political & personal matters. His ideological vision for America, in conflict with the governmental system espoused by Alexander Hamilton, was causing political relationships to crumble & his already strained friendship with John Adams to deteriorate further. Consequently, Jefferson’s month-long “botanizing excursion” through New England with James Madison in June was the subject of much speculation that summer. 

"Hamilton & other political adversaries were convinced that this lengthy vacation of two Republican Virginians through Federalist strongholds in the North had secret, ulterior motives. It would seem likely that, as Jefferson historian Merrill Peterson surmised, while the 2 future presidents “bounced along in leisurely fashion, their conversation must have turned occasionally to politics.” Yet, apparently the trip was innocent of intrigue & intended exclusively for, in Madison’s words, “health recreation & curiosity.” This goal was successfully achieved, for both Jefferson’s “periodical” migraines & Madison’s “bilious attacks” vanished in the nearly 4 weeks they spent walking over historic battlefields, studying botanical curiosities, wildlife & insects (including “musketoes” & the Hessian fly), recording observations on climate, the seasons & the appearance of birds, & even boating & fishing in Lake George & Lake Champlain. 

"Their journey did, nevertheless, incorporate elements of a working vacation, for Jefferson was seeking ways to advance the new nation through alternative domestic industries. He believed his most recent idea—the addition “to the products of the U. S. of three such articles as oil, sugar, & upland rice”—would lessen America’s reliance on foreign trade, improve the lot of farmers, & ultimately result in the abolition of slavery itself. At that time a Quaker activist & philanthropist Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, himself an ardent opponent of slavery, was seeking ways to convince political leaders & slave owners to create a sugar maple industry in America, convinced it would “lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar, & thus indirectly to destroy negro slavery.” Jefferson took up the cause of Benjamin Rush, becoming a conscientious consumer of maple sugar... In a letter to a friend in England, Jefferson expressed the political & humanitarian benefits of commercial independence when he wrote, “What a blessing to substitute a sugar which requires only the labour of children, for that which it is said renders the slavery of the blacks necessary.” 

What drew this unlikely vacation getaway pair together?  Jefferson & Madison were both born into well-established Virginia families, attended prestigious schools, & earned high marks. They shared an interest in industry & government, & each eventually became President Of The United States. They were energetic & ambitious.  Both Madison & Jefferson were generally respected by their contemporaries in 1791. They both owned slaves, yet each spoke against the concept of slavery.  Madison was realistic & pragmatic. Jefferson was imaginative & creative, he even proposed that the constitution be changed every 19 years.  Madison generally did not give his slaves grueling or tedious tasks, reflecting his practical management approach. Jefferson, on the other hand, micro-managed his slaves to do very specific things such as clean his horse so well there was not a spot of dirt on it.  Jefferson was very serious, while Madison would often tell jokes. And both seemed to find discovering botanical "curiosities" a relaxing project.

Excerpt from this 2004 Twinleaf article by Peggy Cornett, Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants

Research & images & much more are directly available from the Monticello website - to begin exploring, just click the highlighted acknowledgment above. 

Old Garden Tools

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Garden tools fascinate me. They are the gritty, process end of gardening. Historians like this process stuff. We can look at early gardening tools in at drawings of tools by John Evelyn (1620–1706) in his Elysium Britannicum, or The Royal Gardens in Three Books. Here are a few more recent, but not modern by any means, garden tools.
Royal Horticultural Society Harlow Carr Botanical Gardens Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England
Lost Gardens of Heligan, South West, Cornwall, England

The Tool Gate at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Georgia



Royal Horticultural Society Harlow Carr Botanical Gardens Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England
Brighton Flea Market, Brighton, England
Calke Abbey, Ticknall, Derby, Derbyshire, England

The Tool Shed in the Melon Yard at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, South West, Cornwall, England
Royal Horticultural Society Harlow Carr Botanical Gardens Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, England


Yorkshire National Forest, England

Garden to Table - Home-Made Honey & Hops Meads & Wine

 

John Greenwood (American artist, 1727-1792) Sea Captains Carousing, 1758.  Detail

Old-Time Recipes for Home Made Wines Cordials & Liqueurs 1909 by Helen S. Wright

MEAD - HOPS
The following is a good recipe for mead: On five pounds of honey pour five quarts of boiling water; boil, and remove the scum as it rises; add one-quarter ounce of the best hops, and boil for ten minutes. Then pour the liquor into a tub to cool; when all but cold add a little yeast spread upon a slice of toasted bread. Let it stand in a warm room. When fermentation is finished, bung it down, leaving a peg-hole which can afterwards be closed, and in less than a year it will be fit to bottle.

SMALL WHITE MEAD
Take three gallons of spring water, make it hot, and dissolve in it three quarts of honey, and one pound of loaf sugar. Let it boil about one-half hour, and skim it as long as any scum rises. Then pour it out into a tub, and squeeze in the juice of four lemons, put in the rinds but of two. Twenty cloves, two races of ginger, one top of sweet briar, and one top of rosemary. Let it stand in a tub till it is but blood-warm; then make a brown toast, and spread it with two or three spoonfuls of ale yeast. Put it into a vessel fit for it, let it stand four or five days, then bottle it out.

STRONG MEAD
Take of spring water what quantity you please, make it more than blood-warm, and dissolve honey in it until it is strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling; then boil it gently, near an hour, taking off the scum as it rises. Then put to nine or ten gallons seven or eight large blades of mace, three nutmegs quartered, twenty cloves, three or four sticks of cinnamon, two or three roots of ginger, and one-quarter ounce of Jamaica pepper; put these spices into the kettle to the honey and water, a whole lemon, with a sprig of sweet briar, and a sprig of rosemary. Tie the briar and rosemary together, and when they have boiled a little while, take them out and throw them away; but let your liquor stand on the spice in a clear earthen pot till the next day. Then strain it into a vessel that is fit for it, put the spice in a bag, hang it in the vessel, stop it, and at three months draw it into bottles. Be sure that it is fine when it is bottled. After it is bottled six weeks it is fit to drink.

MEAD, METHEGLIN, OR HONEY WINE
Boil honey in water for an hour; the proportion is from three to four pounds to each gallon. Half an ounce of hops will both refine and preserve it, but is not commonly added. Skim carefully, draining the skimmings through a hair sieve, and return what runs through. When of a proper coolness, stir in yeast; one teacupful of solid yeast will serve for nine gallons. Tun it, and let it work over, filling it up till the fermentation subsides. Paste over brown paper and watch it. Rich mead will keep seven years, and afford a brisk, nourishing, and pleasant drink. Some people like to add the thinly shaved rind of a lemon to each gallon while boiling, and put the fruit, free from pith, into the tub. Others flavor it with spices and sweet herbs, and mix it with new beer or sweet wort; it is then called Welsh Braggart.

Old-Time Recipes for Home Made Wines is a cookbook for those who want to make their own wines & liqueurs from available ingredients, including fruits, flowers, vegetables, & shrubs from local gardens, farms, & orchards. It includes ingredients & instructions for making & fermenting spirits, from wine & ale to sherry, brandy, cordials, & even beer. 

Colonial Era Cookbooks

1615, New Booke of Cookerie, John Murrell (London) 

1798, American Cookery, Amelia Simmons (Hartford, CT)

1803, Frugal Housewife, Susannah Carter (New York, NY)

1807, A New System of Domestic Cookery, Maria Eliza Rundell (Boston, MA)

1808, New England Cookery, Lucy Emerson (Montpelier, VT)

Helpful Secondary Sources

America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking/Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Colonial Kitchens, Their Furnishings, and Their Gardens/Frances Phipps Hawthorn; 1972

Early American Beverages/John Hull Brown   Rutland, Vt., C. E. Tuttle Co 1996 

Early American Herb Recipes/Alice Cooke Brown  ABC-CLIO  Westport, United States

Food in Colonial and Federal America/Sandra L. Oliver

Home Life in Colonial Days/Alice Morse Earle (Chapter VII: Meat and Drink) New York : Macmillan Co., ©1926.

A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America/James E. McWilliams New York : Columbia University Press, 2005.

Garden Design - Beehives

A beehive is a receptacle used as a home for bees. Most beehives are built by bees, but some are man-made. 
English woodcut 1658


Honey bees weren't native to North America, and were brought over by the English colonists in the early 17th century.

French Apiary 1560

Honey bees are four-winged insects which need to live together in communities composed of one queen, or perfect female; a small number of males or "drones;" and an indefinite number of undeveloped females or "neuters" (which are the workers). Bees produce wax and honey, pollinating plants as they do.
Dutch woodcut 1488

Honey bees fly from flower to flower collecting the plant's sugary nectar. While doing so, the insects' hairy bodies trap the dusty pollen from the flowers' anthers and then transport that substance to fertilize other flowers. Meanwhile, the bees internally process the watery nectar into dense honey, which they store in their hives as a communal food source in the winter.

Medieval Bestiary Bee Gallery

Worker or neuter bees–which live about five weeks in the summer–make wax from about the 10th day of their lives to the 16th. When workers are about 10 days old, they develop special wax-producing glands in their abdomens.

Virgil on Bees

The young bees then eat honey. The glands convert the sugar in the honey into wax, which seeps through small pores in the bee's body leaving tiny white flakes on its abdomen. Bees then chew the bits of wax, mold it, and add it to the construction of the honeycomb. Bees build the combs for the queen to lay her eggs into and to store honey to fed themselves through winter, when there are no flowers. Honeycombs consist of six-sided tubes, which begin as circles pressed side to side, an efficient form that uses less wax for the volume of honey held than other shapes like triangles or squares.

1772 Honey bees. Encyclopedie, of Dictionaire Raisonne Des Sciences of Denis Diderot.

In 1593, in 2 Henry VI, Shakespeare wrote, "Drones sucke not Eagles blood, but rob Bee-hiues."

Wicker bee hive. (Medieval Italian.)

One of the early English garden books, New Orchard and Garden, written by William Lawson in 1618, stated, "There remaineth one necessary thing...which in my Opinion makes as much for Ornament, as either flowers, or forme, or cleanness...which is Bees, well ordered."

To help his fellow gardeners achieve bees, well ordered, William Lawson wrote The Country Housewives Garden, Containing Rules for Hearbes and Seeds of Common Use...Together With the Husbandry of Bees in 1637. Interest in beekeeping grew, and Lawson's treastise was followed nearly a century later by Joseph Warder's The True Amazons, or the Monarchy of Bees, which was also published in London.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, American gardeners and farmers harvested honey as an alternative to expensive imported sugar and harvested the beeswax from the hives for a number of commercial purposes.

Bees build their own hives in a dark enclosed, dry space like in a tree trunk or wall cavity or under the eves of a roof. For centuries, people have created artificial beehives to house bees, often in the garden, for the purpose of producing honey and wax while encouraging pollination of nearby precious plants. Many gardeners consider these hives as ornamentation in their gardens as well. Often a special section of the property was set aside to keep the bee hives. They were kept together in a bee-garden, a bee-yard, or a bee-fold.

Wenceslas Hollar - The bear and the honey

Gardeners of the period constructed several types of beehives. A beeskep, made of thick coils of grass or straw worked into the shape of a dome, was popular in 18th century England; but in America, boxhives made of wooden frames, often sitting on tall wooden legs, were more common in the 18th and 19th centuries. In its simplest form, there is a single entrance at the bottom of a beeskep with no internal structure, except what the bees build themselves. Bees attach their wax combs to the garden hive's roof and walls, just like they do in wild hives.

Frontispiece woodcut from John Day's PARLIAMENT OF BEES. 1641

In order to learn about the progress of their hives, beekeepers had only one option -- to inspect beeskeps from the bottom. It was nearly impossible to peek into the interior of occupied beeskeps for diseases and pests; and the removal of honey often meant the destruction of the entire hive. When it was time to harvest the honey, beekeepers drove the bees out of the skep, often to a waiting empty skep.

Honey from these hives was typically extracted by crushing the wax honeycomb to squeeze out the honey. This harvest method typically provided more beeswax but far less honey than modern methods. Many American households used beeswax to make candles in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most churches burned beeswax candles.

1772 Honey bees. Encyclopedie, of Dictionaire Raisonne Des Sciences of Denis Diderot.

The boxhives, more popular in America, were simple wooden shelters to house a swarm of bees. In 1797, in Annapolis, Maryland, silvermaker William Faris wrote, A (neighbor) "Made Me a pressent of Hive of Bees." Later he noted that he had "put the frame of the bee house together." After a few years, he declared, drove the Bees out of the Old Hive into a nother and took the honey, the Hive was Rotten and Ready to tumble to peaces."

Richard Parkison, an English visitor to the Chesapeake, reported at the end of the 18th century, "Honey-bees are kept in America with equal success as in England...I never saw a hive made of straw."

New Yorker John Nicholson wrote about housing bees early American beer in The Farmer's Assistant in 1820, "The method practised in this Country is, to have rows of beehives set close together, in a building made for the purpose, which is called the bee-house. The apiary, spoken of by British Writers, seems to be quite different from this; as the hives are recommended to stand 6, some say 12, feet apart; and to be firmly fixed in a stake set into the ground. We have, however, never seen any particular advantage pointed out, by having the hives so far apart; while the expense of the apiary must, in this way, be much greater, as every hive must have its separate roof or covering. We shall therefore speak of the apiary, or beehouse, as we have it in this Country.

1772 Honey bees. Encyclopedie, of Dictionaire Raisonne Des Sciences of Denis Diderot.

"It should be at a suitable distance from any place where cattle are kept, or where Horses are tied; from hogsties, and every other place where filth is collected. It is well to place it in a remote part of the garden, and let some shrubery grow round it for the Bees to light on, if they are so disposed, when they swarm. No trees should be near it. Let it stand leaning forward a little, facing the south, and clear of shade, with the front part of the roof projecting over considerably, to prevent rains from weting the hives. These should be kept clean, dry, and sufficiently warm in Winter; but not so warm as to tempt the Bees abroad in warm Winter-days."

It was also difficult to get honey from these wooden boxhives without damaging or destroying the colony and sending the bees into frenzied stinging. Honey bee stings release pheromones that prompt other nearby bees to attack.

1772 Honey bees. Encyclopedie, of Dictionaire Raisonne Des Sciences of Denis Diderot.

Angry honey bees inserted themselves into several battles in 18th & 19th century America. In North Carolina, Governor William Tryon wrote in 1771, "The Army marched and crossed Abbets Creek, & encamped on Captain Merril's plantation. A Valuabe tract of Land and well cultivated...This Night a false alarm was given by an uncommon Incident. The Horses of the Army, upwards of one Hundred, were at pasture with Bells Round their Necks, in a field near to the Line of Encampment; and in an adjoining Garden were several Bee Hives some Soldiers taking a Fancy for Honey overturned the Hives about Midnight the Bees being thus disturbed & enraged dispersed themselves among the Horses in the Pasture stinging them to such a degree that they broke in one confused Squadron over the fence, and Came on full Gallop & in full Chorus of Bells, up to the Camp. The out Centinels uninformed on the real Cause joined in the Signal of Alarm; and the Cry through the Camp was 'Stand to your Arms' Stand to your Arms."

A book on the Civil War battle at Antietam, Maryland, Unfurl Those Colors quotes Private John D. Hemmingen of the 130th PA: “In our line of advance a number of beehives were over turned, and the little fellows resented the intrusion, and did most unceremoniously charge upon us, accelerating our speed through the orchard toward the entrenched position of the enemy."

Fixed-comb beeskeps and boxhives remained popular in the United States until the 1850's, and yielded about 10-15 pounds of honey per colony a year, as compared to over 100 pounds in modern, manmade beehives.

1772 Honey bees. Encyclopedie, of Dictionaire Raisonne Des Sciences of Denis Diderot.

The beeswax collected from beehives may have been even more important than the honey for the local economy. Peter Force's "Tracts on Virginia" reported in 1650, that honey was sold at 2 shillings a gallon and beeswax at 4 shillings for 100 pounds.

In 1771, Pennsylvania exported 29,261 pounds of beeswax; and by 1773, the total had climbed to 64,546 pounds exported by Philadelphia merchants. That figure only represented the amount shipped to other locations, and not the untold pounds cast into beeswax candles by local professional chandlers, housewives, servants, and slaves.

The Pennsylvania Gazette contained ads that solicited beeswax as a barter exchange for merchandise.

In 1791, the shop of George Meade on Philadelphia's Walnut Street Wharf announced that it had hogsheads of Madeira Wine, Irish Linens, and Pork of prime quality that could be purchased with payments of, among other things, quantities of raw beeswax. And Philadelphia druggist George Hunter noted that his shop offered medicines, paints, brushes and dye stuffs that could be purchased by cash, Jersey State or Pennsylvania, or "bees wax."

Beeswax was used to treat cloth to make it water-resistant, including waxed clothes for shrouds, bedticking, and marine supplies. Beeswax was also used in printer's ink, polishes, sealing wax, cosmetics, ointments, grafting wax, and for decorative ornaments of wax fruits, flowers, and portraits.

1772 Honey bees. Encyclopedie, of Dictionaire Raisonne Des Sciences of Denis Diderot.

In North Carolina, the first record of beekeeping appeared in Albemarle County records in 1697. Court records across the colony show sales & export of beeswax and honey throughout the 18th century. In 1768, Royal Governor William Tryon (1729-1788) allowed the payment of quit rents in beeswax as well as money & other goods.

Elegant beehive

The honey bee was so important in the colonial economy that in 1776, the new state of New Jersey printed its image on its currency. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the beehive became an icon in Freemasonry as a symbol of industry and cooperation.

1772 Honey bees. Encyclopedie, of Dictionaire Raisonne Des Sciences of Denis Diderot.

The beeskep is one of the symbols of the state of Utah; because it was associated with the honey bee, an early symbol of Mormon pioneer industry and resourcefulness.

Garden to Table - Kitchen Garden

The Fuller Garden in the English Village at Plimoth Plantation, in Plymouth, Mass.

Ye Olde Kitchen Garden by Michael Tortorello

New York Times Published: July 6, 2011

Who was Good King Henry?

I first encountered the label in the Fedco Seeds catalog, as a common name for a plant in the genus Chenopodium. It’s an edible perennial with shoots like asparagus and leaves like spinach. But before Good King Henry was a salad green, he was, ostensibly, something nobler: European royalty.

There is no shortage of English Henrys to choose from, though few are remembered as paragons of good government. And did any of them have an appetite for roughage? On this question, history is mostly quiet.

A 1545 French herbal, or primitive botanical guide, mentions a “bon-Henri” (perhaps Henry IV of France), said Kathleen Wall, who cooks and gardens at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Mass. But then Ms. Wall, 53, has also found a “bad Henry,” of German origin: der böse Heinrich.

What if Henry wasn’t a king at all, but an elf? That’s one of the hypotheses the botanical historian Judith Sumner put to me by e-mail.

“Henry (or Heinz or Heinrich) was a typical name for elves,” she wrote. “So the plant name may reflect some presumed magical qualities rather than commemorating an actual king. The ‘good’ part might mean it was safe to ingest.”

The exact namesake for Good King Henry may be lost to time. But then the plant itself, like so many others, has almost vanished as well. In the raised-bed gardens that flank the houses at Plimoth Plantation, Ms. Wall grew Good King Henry for years.

But “I didn’t save the seed,” said Ms. Wall, who bought it every year from catalogs instead. “And then the seed was gone for a long time.”

The mystery of Good King Henry made me wonder about other Colonial-era vegetables that have all but disappeared from our gardens and dinner plates. Gardeners today will routinely raise a dozen varieties of tomato, a plant utterly foreign to early Americans. So why do we neglect common Colonial food plants like burnet, smallage, skirrets, scorzonera, gooseberry and purslane? And how would they taste to us now?

When it comes to Good King Henry, Ms. Wall said, the flavor is easy to describe: bland. “That’s probably why it fell out of favor,” she said. “It wasn’t special. It doesn’t get into the recipe books, so it’s just forgotten.”

In contrast, she said, spinach, a green that “springs up in the English garden scene in the 1580s,” grew stalwartly through the country’s mild summers. And by the 17th century, “suddenly all the recipes called for spinach: salads of spinach, spinach boiled, with added butter and cinnamon and sugar and raisins.”

The story of early American kitchen gardening hides in recipes like these. Another source is herbals — what one modern historian calls “botanical bibles.” Yet botany, as we know it, is just a shadow on these pages. The herbal presents a pre-scientific universe, a realm of astrology and magic.

A “vegetable” could be any plant. An “herb” was a useful one, for the table or the medicine chest.

The colonists relied on popular guides like “The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes” (1597), 1,400 pages of reminiscences, folk medicine and superstition written by John Gerard. Domestic handbooks like Thomas Hill’s “Profitable Arte of Gardening” (1568) were more artful than horticultural.

“A lot of the time when they write about gardening,” Ms. Wall said, referring to authors like Hill, “they’re writing about the ancient Greeks” or Romans — that is, beliefs and ideals that dated back to Pliny the Younger.

Actually growing “herbs” to feed a New England household was anything but a scholarly pursuit. The average kitchen garden was about an acre, the historian James E. McWilliams wrote in a monograph titled “ ‘To Forward Well-Flavored Productions’: The Kitchen Garden in Early New England,” from the March 2004 issue of The New England Quarterly. Hired help was practically nonexistent. Given the abundance of land, settlers had their own acres to harvest. And men were preoccupied with tending livestock and sowing grains.

That meant “this arduous task fell almost entirely to women,” Mr. McWilliams wrote. Then, as now, raised beds were standard. The soil needed to be improved, Mr. McWilliams noted: “stirred,” loosened and loaded with dung. A garden often would include an orchard of fruit trees, like apples, pears, quince and plums. And these required their own pruning and picking.

Ms. Wall has tried this kind of labor for herself in the recreated gardens outside each of the 12 historical dwellings at Plimoth Plantation. “I’m a housewife of perpetual visitation,” she said. “I travel between houses and help people.”

After 30 years at the museum, Ms. Wall is past complaining about the period costumes. But going without glasses, as most 17th-century women did, is an abiding nuisance. “It’s really hard for me to put seed in without having my nose in the ground,” she said. And weeds “have to grow large enough that I can tell them from my plants.”

It doesn’t help matters that many Colonial-era “herbs,” like dandelions or patience dock (Rumex patientia), would now be tarred as weeds. Burnet (Sanguisorba officinalis), one of Ms. Wall’s favorites, can be found growing by the side of the road.

The plant has a tireless quality. The flowers, typically maroon, will bloom all summer if you keep picking them, she said. And the little leaves of salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) can be harvested almost all year.

“Why is this something that doesn’t show up in all these salad mixes?” she said.

Burnet turns up on a list of 59 seeds that John Winthrop Jr., a future governor of the Colony of Connecticut, ordered in 1631 from a London grocer, Robert Hill. And herbals widely recommended burnet, with its cucumber-like flavor, for doctoring wine after long sea voyages. “I dare say a lot of that wine needed help,” Ms. Wall said.

Yet burnet fell out of favor. For all her research, Ms. Wall has yet to answer the question of what makes something fashionable.

A case study, she said, could be smallage (Apium graveolens). The biennial plant grows a stalk like celery, but thicker and taller. And for 300 years — in between “medieval English cookery” and the “18th century,” Ms. Wall said — it displaced celery in cookbooks.

She discovered why after she and the head Plimoth horticulturist conducted a long quest for smallage, and she finally grew out the seeds herself.

“I was making potato salad,” she said, “and I didn’t have any celery. Then I realized, I have smallage. And in potato salad, it was heaven.”

And then there are the historical plants whose disappearance is no cause for mourning. A good riddance goes out to the root crop skirrets (Sium sisarum), said Clarissa Dillon, 77, who practices historical cooking and gardening at the 1696 Thomas Massey House in Marple Township, Pa.

John Winthrop Jr. ordered three ounces of skirret seed for his father’s Massachusetts farmstead. The medicine of the era attributed some colorful qualities to the plant, notes Ann Leighton’s 1970 classic, “Early American Gardens: ‘For Meate or Medicine.’ ”

“ ‘They are something windie, by reason whereof they also provoke lust,’ ” Ms. Leighton wrote, quoting John Gerard’s herbal. “ ‘The women in Susula ... prepare the roots for their husbands, and know full well wherefore and why.’ ” (If ardor persists for more than four hours, call your physician.)

It’s no great challenge coaxing a bunch of skirrets to fill the yard. The horticulturist who started Dr. Dillon on skirrets “did not tell me how enthusiastic the seeds are,” she said. “And I have them everywhere.”

A cook needs an awful lot of plants to yield more than a teaspoon of roasted pulp. The edible root “is supposed to be the size of a man’s thumb,” Dr. Dillon said. But “my skirrets tend to be, as a friend said, the size of her dog’s toenails.”

And these toenails need to be peeled, too. “What’s really awful,” Dr. Dillon added, is the “wire” that runs through another forsaken and fast-spreading root crop, scorzonera (which botanists know as Scorzonera hispanica and civilians call viper’s grass). This core runs through the center of the root and must be removed. Far easier, she said, is to substitute parsnips, which are bigger, sweeter, better.

Gerard had his notions of why a woman would favor skirrets in the kitchen (and the bedroom). But Dr. Dillon wrote her dissertation on women and 18th-century kitchen gardens in eastern Pennsylvania, while she was teaching elementary school and raising a child. The experience helped her formulate a rule about why a taxing plant like skirrets might fall into the compost heap of history.

“Women don’t make work for themselves,” Dr. Dillon said. “They have enough to do.”

Clarissa Dillon at the 1696 Thomas Massey House in Marple Township, Pa.

Growing History

A PACKET of 250 purslane seeds costs about $3.60 from Seeds of Change, (888) 762-7333 or seedsofchange.com. Not a bad price, though it may be 249 purslane seeds too many. Like a lot of the “sallet” greens that the colonists brought with them to the New World, purslane (Portulaca oleracea) can colonize a yard all on its own.

A single specimen can produce a million seeds. Let a purslane patch go, said Clarissa Dillon, a food and garden historian, and “it’s the plant that eats your driveway.”

“It will come up through asphalt,” she said.

You can spray the thick red stem and the sprawling oval leaves with weed killer, Dr. Dillon added, which is what most gardeners do. Or you can pickle the whole plant with “equal parts vinegar and stale beer,” which is what she prefers.

Dr. Dillon recommends blanching the purslane first for a quick three-count. “I don’t want it to be limp,” she said. She learned this preparation from a “receipt” (that is, a recipe) in her 1750 edition of “The Compleat Housewife: Or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion.”

Tricks like these were once common knowledge among kitchen gardeners, said Joel Fry, the curator at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, which dates from 1728. “One of the reasons they’ve disappeared,” he said of some colonial-era food plants, “is we don’t know what to do with them.”

Dr. Dillon learned a method for removing the stringy core from scorzonera. Overbaking the root crop for a few minutes can make the “wire” less unwieldy. There’s only one way to find out if it’s worth it: Fedco Seeds, fedcoseeds.com or (207) 873-7333, lists a 1/8-ounce packet for $1.30. (A trial packet of smallage, available under the name Afina Cutting Celery, is even cheaper at just 90 cents.)

Fedco sold out of skirret seed this spring. But Amishland Heirloom Seeds offers a packet of 20 seeds for $2.50; amishlandseeds.com.

The sallet green Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus) can be found at Fedco as well. And to the long list of aliases for the plant, Fedco adds Lincolnshire spinach and goosefoot.

Like goosefoot (and goose itself), the gooseberry (Ribes hirtellum or uva-crispa) seems to have dropped off the nation’s menu at least a century ago. The cause was no mystery: federal authorities started to quarantine and eradicate the thorny shrub in 1917 to limit the spread of white pine blister rust. In 2003, New York State finally legalized the gooseberry and its close cousin, the red currant. (Sales of gooseberry and various currant shrubs remain restricted in a cluster of Eastern states, including parts of New Jersey.)

Hardy gooseberries were native to the New World. But that didn’t stop the English from importing their own varieties, said Kathleen Wall, a historical culinarian. These plants bore bigger, sweeter fruit. They also died in the warmer climate. Raintree Nursery, raintreenursery.com or (800) 391-8892, sells a dozen cultivars (most for $11.50), including a few American gooseberries that have a resistance to powdery mildew.

The English never lost their taste for gooseberries, Ms. Wall said, but colonial gardeners were typically pragmatic. When a tart called for small, sour fruit, they looked to the yard and started cooking with cranberries..

Tho Jefferson's (1743-1824) Legacy in Gardening & Food

Thomas Jefferson by Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko (1746 - 1817)

 Thomas Jefferson's Legacy in Gardening and Food

Jefferson's Monticello garden was a Revolutionary American garden. One wonders if anyone else had ever before assembled such a collection of vegetable novelties, culled from virtually every western culture known at the time, then disseminated by Jefferson with the persistence of a religious reformer, a seedy evangelist. Here grew the earth's melting pot of immigrant vegetables: an Ellis Island of introductions, the whole world of hardy economic plants: 330 varieties of eighty-nine species of vegetables and herbs, 170 varieties of the finest fruit varieties known at the time. The Jefferson legacy supporting small farmers, vegetable cuisine, and sustainable agriculture is poignantly topical today.

Thomas Jefferson's 1,000-foot-long, terraced vegetable garden is the true American garden: practical, expansive, casual, diverse, wrought from a world of edible immigrants. Although the variable continental climate of Virginia presents unique horticultural challenges, few places on earth combine tropical heat and humidity with mildly temperate winters like those at Monticello. The microclimate, and really the genius, of the south-facing, terraced Monticello garden exaggerates the summer warmth, tempers the winter cold, and captures an abundant wealth of crop-ripening sunshine. To grow so many tropical species like sweet potatoes, peanuts, and lima beans in the same garden as traditional cool-weather crops like cauliflower, endive, and celery, without artificial hot beds, had likely never been done before Thomas Jefferson accomplished this feat at Monticello.

Aside from its diverse population of mostly introduced crops, the Monticello garden was American in its size and scope, experimental character, and expansive visual sweep. 600,000 cubic feet of Piedmont red clay was moved with a cart and mule to create the "hanging garden," and the terrace was supported by a rock wall as tall as fifteen feet and also running 1,000 feet. Below is the six-acre fruit garden that contained 170 varieties of the most celebrated varieties known at the time. As it stretches to the western horizon, seemingly limitlessly against the background of Montalto, Jefferson's "high mountain" to the southwest, or as one looks across the garden terrace to the forty miles of rolling Piedmont, the "sea view," one is struck by the garden's uniquely continental panorama.

Thomas Jefferson liked to eat vegetables, which "constitute my principal diet," and his role in linking the garden with the kitchen into a cuisine defined as "half French, half Virginian" was a pioneering concept in the history of American food. The Monticello kitchen, as well as the table at the President's House in Washington, expressed a seething broil of new, culinary traditions based on these recent garden introductions: French fries, peanuts, Johnny-cakes, gumbo, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pudding, sesame seed oil, fried eggplant, perhaps such American icons as potato chips, tomato catsup, and pumpkin pie. The western traditions of gardening—in England, France, Spain, the Mediterranean—were blended into a dynamic and unique Monticello cookery through the influence of emerging colonial European, native American, slave, Creole and southwestern vegetables.

Jefferson's daughter, Martha, left a recipe for okra soup, in effect, gumbo, a compelling metaphor for the Monticello garden: a rich blend of American native vegetables grown by American Indians like lima beans and cymlins; South and Central American discoveries adapted by both northern (potatoes) and southern (tomatoes) Europeans; and tied together by an African plant, okra, grown by both the French and enslaved blacks in the West Indies, rarely known among white Virginians, and prepared by African-American chefs at Monticello.

Jefferson, according to culinary historian Karen Hess, was "our most illustrious epicure, in fact, our only epicurean President," and his devotion to fresh produce, whether in the President's House at a state dinner, or at Monticello for the large numbers of celebrity tourists who crowded the retired President's table, remains a central legacy of Jefferson's gardening career. Jefferson also promoted commercial market gardening. The remarkable calendar he compiled while President, delineating the first and last appearance of thirty-seven vegetables in the Washington DC farmer's market, is among the most revelatory documents in the history of American food. As well, it was Jefferson himself who obtained new vegetable varieties from foreign consuls, passed them on to Washington market gardeners, and ordered his maitre'd to pay the highest prices for the earliest produce.

In 1792 Jefferson, while serving as Secretary of State in Philadelphia, received a letter from his daughter, Martha, complaining about the insect-riddled plants in the Monticello Vegetable Garden. His response is a stirring anthem to the organic gardening movement. "We will try this winter to cover our garden with a heavy coating of manure. When is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance, and of the best quality. I suspect that the insect which have harassed you have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants; and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil." Jefferson's rallying cry on the remedial value of manure, the horticultural rewards of soil improvement, has inspired gardeners of all kinds. Jefferson not only enjoyed the garden process and relished eating fresh produce, but the garden also functioned as an experimental laboratory, in some ways, as a vehicle for social change. He wrote that, "the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add an useful plant to its culture," and Jefferson ranked the introduction of the olive tree and upland rice into the United States with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. A Johnny Apple seed of the vegetable world, Jefferson passed out seeds of his latest novelty with messiahinistic fervor: not only to friends and neighbors like George Divers and John Hartwell Cocke, his family of daughters, granddaughers, and sons in law, but to fellow politicians—from George Washington to James Madison—and the leading plantsmen of the early nineteenth century like McMahon, William Bartram, William Hamiton of Philadelphia, and Andre Thouin of Paris.  Although few species can be proven as Jefferson introductions into American gardens, the recitation of vegetables grown at Monticello is a meditative chant of rare, unusual, and pioneering species: asparagus bean, sea kale, tomatoes, rutabaga, lima beans, okra, potato pumpkins, winter melons, tree onion, peanuts, "sprout kale," serpentine cucumbers, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussells sprouts, orach, endive, peanuts, chick peas, cayenne pepper, "esculent Rhubarb," black salsify, sesame, eggplant.

Although a modest endeavor, Jefferson's only published horticultural work was "A General Gardening Calendar," a monthly guide to kitchen gardening that appeared in a May 21, 1824 edition of the American Farmer, a Baltimore periodical of progressive agriculture. Here Jefferson authoritatively instructed gardeners to plant a thimble spool of lettuce seed every Monday morning from February 1 to September 1, as if the Monday morning lettuce sowing was a life lesson or discipline akin to dutifully saying your prayers or cleaning one's dinner plate; the rites of Monday morning led to a long life, happiness, and good teeth.

In 2009, White House chef and Coordinator of the White House Food Initiative, Sam Kass, reserved a discrete section of this garden in honor of Thomas Jefferson. In the spring of 2009 it was planted with seeds and plants of Thomas Jefferson's favorite vegetable varieties: Tennis-ball and Brown Dutch lettuce, Prickly-seeded spinach and Marseilles fig. The Jefferson legacy in gardening and food is not a mere historical curiosity, but is a compelling force in the movement toward a more sustainable agricultural future.

Peter J. Hatch, Director Monticello Gardens and Grounds, 2010

Research & images & much more are directly available from the Monticello website - to begin exploring, just click the highlighted title above. 

Tho Jefferson's (1743-1824) Letters mentioning Gardening

 

Thomas Jefferson by Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko (1746 - 1817) 

1786 May 4.  (Jefferson to John Page).  "The gardening in that country [England] is the article in which it surpasses all the earth. I mean their pleasure gardening. This indeed went far beyond my ideas."

John Page (1743–1808) of Rosewell in Gloucester County was a noted amateur astronomer & served in the Virginia legislature & as governor of the state.

1890 Advice on teaching Boys to Garden

The Christian Recorder, August 21, 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Boys and Gardens

"By all means, let the boy have a garden, If it be only a bunch of sunflowers in a six-feet square city back yard, let him have something of his own to plant and watch the growing of.

"But if you live in the country, you can let him have a considerable plot of ground, where he can raise flowers, and also edible vegetables. Nothing will ever taste so good to him as his own lettuce and beets and radishes.

"Don’t imagine for a moment, however, that your boy, unless he be a genius, will know how to take care of these plants of his. No matter how much he loves them, he will require a good many weary hours of careful teaching and training before he is able to do efficiently even his small duty by his garden patch.

"The trouble is that boys love so many things. If they loved their garden only, or their lessons only, or ball-playing only, or stamp-collecting only; but it is with them as it is with the perplexed lover – “how happy could they be with either were t’other dear charmer away!” It is a good deal more trouble to see that the boy keeps his garden well than it would be to keep it yourself; but it is a good deal of trouble to bring up a boy right anyhow, and that is something that a mother might as well understand at the outset. Those who try to do it by easy means generally rue it with anguish of soul in the end.

“I never knew a boy who was fond of a garden,” said a wise man who had brought up many boys , “to go far astray. There seems to be something about working in the soil and loving its products that does the boys good morally as well as physically.”

And honest Jan Ridd says, “The more a man can fling his arms around Nature’s neck, the more he can lie upon her bosom like an infant, the more that man shall earn the trust of his fellow-men.” Again he says, “There is nothing better to take hot tempers out of us than to go gardening boldly in the spring of the year.” And every one who has tried this can testify that it is true.

"A certain little boy , who left a garden at home to take a trip with some friends, wrote home to his mother,” I am having a splendid time, but I wish every morning that I was sitting on my little green cricket in the backyard, watching my plants grow.” This little boy always thought that some time, if he watched closely enough, he should see a flower open, but beyond a few four o’clocks, he has never witnessed this ever-recurring but magically secret phenomenon.

"If possible, supply your own table with your boy’ s produce at ruling market rates, having it well understood beforehand how the money will be expended. Praise whenever you consistently can; offer prizes for the best fruits, flowers and vegetables, if you have several boys at work; and in every way treat the enterprise with consideration and respect. Many a boy who has put his best efforts into his garden loses heart when he hears it sneered at or made light of ” Your garden? Oh dear! I never thought of that! What does that amount to?”

"It cannot be too early impressed upon a boy that whatever he does should be done well. Therefore make his garden seem as important as you can without dwelling unduly upon it; and remember that the physical and moral effects of the garden are not all. The information that a boy gets from it concerning a variety of seed and soil may be invaluable to him later on.".

Interior of 1873 New York Seed & Plant Store

Inside the Store Wood engraving from Vick's Illustrated Floral Guide for 1873

History Blooms at Monticello - Dwarf Crested Iris

Dwarf Crested Iris (Iris cristata)

This charming woodland iris is native to the eastern North American deciduous forest where it often grows on rocky slopes. Peter Collinson, an English patron and regular correspondent of John Custis from Williamsburg and the Bartrams of Philadelphia, grew this plant from roots sent to him during the mid 18th century. 

In 1766 Jefferson began his Garden Book with observations of wildflowers along the Rivanna River, including the “Dwarf flag” flowering May 4th “in our woods.” Dwarf crested iris spreads slowly creating large mats of handsome light green foliage that deer do not find attractive. A white form, Iris cristata ‘Alba’, also occurs in the wild.

For more information & the possible availability for purchase

Contact The Tho Jefferson Center for Historic Plants or The Shop at Monticello 

Women & Gardens - 19C Gardening Manuals from Seed & Plant Dealers entice Women to Garden

When Gardens Replaced Children
Justor Daily By: Livia Gershon May 4, 2018

"Historian Robin Veder explains that the way we associate female nurturing with gardens goes back to the way ideas about gender & work changed in the mid-19C.

"Think about gardening, or tending houseplants, & you most likely think of a woman—perhaps a woman who has plenty of leisure time & loves taking care of living things. Historian Robin Veder explains that the way we associate female nurturing with raising flowers goes back the way ideas about gender & work changed in the mid-19C...

"Gardening manuals of the 19C described flowers taking “the place of children in bereaved homes” or in families where adult children had moved out.  Wealthy households depended on skilled horticultural workers—either hired or enslaved—to care for their flowering plants. But middle-class homeowners were limited to their own amateur efforts. So professional horticulturists, who stood to benefit from new customers at their nurseries & greenhouses, began writing manuals, magazines, & columns.

"Before 1840 or so, Veder writes, most authors of gardening manuals assumed their readers were male. But from the 1850s through 1870s, there was a flurry of books about flower gardening & indoor floral decorations. Women’s magazines including Ladies Home Journal actually grew out of horticultural & agricultural publications’ efforts to reach a female audience.

"Gardening manuals written in this period described flowers taking “the place of children in bereaved homes” or in families where adult children had moved out. 

"Prolific California gardener Mrs. Annie C. Brown explained in Ladies Home Journal in 1887 that her only daughter was now grown “so all my spare time is given to my flowers. They are to me as children…” 

"Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that a successful gardener treats her plants as children: “She loves them; she lives in them; she has in herself a plant-life & a plant-sympathy. She feels for them as if she herself were a plant...”

"In books & articles from this era, to buy a plant was to remove it from the cold world of market forces & transform it into an object of love...Veder writes that 19C gardening manuals drew on a long tradition of sentimental pastoralism—a tradition that “aestheticizes economically significant work by framing it as leisure.” Gardening, like parenting, clearly involves mental & physical labor, & both provide something of value to the household. But books & articles portrayed both activities as a natural extension of women’s being, rather than “work.”

To read about women's changing roles in the 2nd half of the 19th century. see:
Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York:Random House, 1973.
Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.
Cott, Nancy. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
Cott Nancy. History of Women in the United States, Part 6, Working the Land. New York: K. G. Saur, 1992.
Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family from Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Green, Harvey. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Juster, Norton. So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America 1865-1895. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982
Mintz, Stephen and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1988.
Ryan, Mary P. Womanhood in America front he Colonial Times to the Present. New York: F. Watts, 1983.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York Pantheon Books, 1982.
Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions : the American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens : Ohio University Press, 1976.